Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

50 Soviets Without Communists

Like a patient having endured a long siege of illness, growing ever weaker, Petrograd was finally dying. It was undeniable. Its death was not surprising, but no less terrible for its prolongation. The factories closed—those giants that had made it through the war, the ones we’d thought were ironclad—Dinamo, Putilov, Ericsson. Gone. Their workers—stranded—struck. The misery in the city had never been so bad. Our rations were cut by a third again, and we poets at the House of Arts existed on the lowest rung, hanging on to our right to a scholar’s pittance by our fingernails. I prayed my classes wouldn’t be cancelled as so many had been—the little donations my students made, an extra chunk of bread or small piece of leathery fish, made the difference between producing new poems or just staring at words moving around on a piece of paper as my stomach digested itself. At the House of Arts, our oldsters stayed in bed all day, living on thin soup and hot water. I saw an elderly woman go mad in front of an abandoned butcher shop on Sadovaya Street. A small crowd gathered to watch her try to claw the pictures of sausages off the shutters, her mouth up against the wood.

I tried to pry her away—“Babushka, please, let it alone”—but she fought me off. “I want that sausage. Don’t you take it from me!” Some of the onlookers jeered, as stupid as oxen, while others squinted with pity, knowing we were all just a few missed scraps of food short of the same condition. We would all be poets eventually, and try to eat the symbol for the thing itself. The distinction between reality and poetry was already terrifyingly blurred, as when the anonymous Browning No. 215,745 mistook our pitiful masquerade for an embassy ball. What a fever dream. Gumilev had captured the unreal feeling of the times perfectly in his poem “The Lost Tram.”

Anything could happen now, clocks might talk, trams leap their rails and whirl off to the Neva or the Nile or the land of the dead. We were all edging closer to the cliff’s precipice.

As hunger rippled through our vision of the city, it grew as weird and distorted as any poem, insubstantial, full of grotesquerie. My hands shook, my legs wobbled. The cold was especially piercing as I trudged through the gloom to my class at Skorokhod, hoping that the women would still be there, that the factory wouldn’t have vanished and in its place, a mountain of imaginary sausages or four-headed hedgehogs singing “Fais Dodo, Colin.” Was this the future? Had we arrived? It was more a lunatic asylum where the keepers had simply abandoned the patients to their fate. I slogged through the uncleared snow past the deserted buildings, the frost furring their facades. The war had ended, Kolchak had fallen, Denikin was gone, Wrangel had sailed off to Paris. All our enemies melted away. Even the blockade had lifted. But the last six years had broken the back of the Future. We were futurists and yet there wasn’t a scrap of future left, not even its bones. We’d eaten them all. What was left—today. This hour, the next meal, the condition of our boots and our coats, the price of oil, the scarcity of firewood. Surrounded by forests, we were tearing up the dead houses with our bare hands.

Every week the House lost another irreplaceable writer to starvation. Each death seemed like one more door to the future slamming shut, the key turning in the lock. Why are writers and scholars more important than any working man? I could hear Varvara say. But to see these ancients fall—what they knew, what they were, could never be recovered, like giant trees that would never grow to that size again. The Bolsheviks couldn’t plaster that over with anonymous Browning poems and Proletcult. Who could create a Blok out of this poverty? In these poets and writers were the seeds—a whole world could be sown anew from their depth of culture, just as Gorky envisioned. Their deaths were the deaths of worlds. Maria Andreeva was taking our Russian art treasures to sell off in the West, but what about our real treasures, starving under their blankets at the House of Arts, just trying to make it through until spring? I couldn’t help thinking of the package of tinned sardines and condensed milk that blessed Clyde Emory had sent from England at Christmastime. That sweet, thick ambrosia, the salty, oily sardines. I gave a can of milk to each of my elderly neighbors, and two to Chukovsky for his children. The tears in his round dark eyes… The rest we drank ourselves, me and Anton and the Squared Circle. I still dreamed of punching a hole in the lid of a can with a nail and drinking that heady, thick sweetness, gulp after gulp. I’d had a hard time stopping, though I knew it would make me sick, which it did. But so glorious. Someday I imagined bathing in condensed milk.

On my way down Moskovsky Prospect toward Skorokhod, I encountered a crowd of unemployed workers protesting before a closed factory. As I grew closer, I read their signs. BOLSHEVIKS—ANSWER BEFORE THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE FOR YOUR CRIMES! and SOVIETS WITHOUT COMMUNISTS!

Soviets Without Communists! I trembled with the boldness of it. After years of hardship, of Red Terror, of incompetence and arrogance and spacemen, Bukharin’s ABCs, Krasnaya Gazeta’s baying for blood, shuttered factories, and dead buildings, a tiny crack of hope bloomed in the crusty snow of the Moskovsky District. My eyes bulged from their sockets. Soviets Without Communists! Proletarians daring to protest the so-called Proletarian Dictatorship. A year ago that would have been unimaginable. It reminded me of that day in March 1917, in Znamenskaya Square, when we’d watched the Volynsky guards arrive on their blooded horses. These brave, desperate workers—they had had enough. They were going to be arrested. They were going to be executed. Yet they stood up with their signs.

Thank God Skorokhod’s ugly brick building was still open. “I didn’t know if you’d still be here,” I said to my students, putting down the books I’d brought for them.

“You should have been here yesterday,” said my young poet, Yeva. “We stopped work. Demanded category one rations, and a pair of boots for every family.”

“Our own kids don’t have boots. I gotta keep ’em home from school,” said outspoken Irina. “We go from one office to the next, begging to get a boot ration for our own kids. For what we make with our own two hands!” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her dye-stained hand. “What Communist have you ever seen without boots?”

“They get a galoshes ration,” agreed Galya. “Every year.”

I wasn’t sure that was precisely true, but the inequality rankled more than the sheer scarcity.

Irina leaned over her poems in the freezing committee room. “They sit up there, faces plastered with makeup, telling you no, your kids aren’t good enough to get boots, get back to work. She closed the counter right in my face!”

“It wasn’t this bad under the emperor,” said Polya, a believer whose poems were about a village called Pocha. “We never starved like this before. The Bolsheviks just want us to go off and die so they don’t have to feed us.”

Her comment weighed on me. Not this bad under the emperor. All that had happened, all our hopes, our hard work, had brought us to this? A starving worker wishing for the return of the tsar. But there was another way: Soviets Without Communists! I once thought that only the Bolsheviks had the will to bring us this far. But now we’d reached the end of that road. The Bolsheviks had revealed themselves for what they were, vicious opportunists who were single-mindedly interested in gathering all power into their own hands. For their own benefit. The greengrocer with our heads on sale. I had the women write poems about their own aching, wise hands.

The Vikzhel club buzzed with angry men. There wasn’t an empty seat in the low-ceilinged rooms. Everyone shouted at once, the air grown unbreathably smoky. An old man, Rodzevich, greeted me. “Welcome to the ‘school for Communism’” he sneered, his teeth splayed in his lined mouth. “Like it?”

“A school for Communism?”

“That’s what they’re calling us in the papers. That’s what they’re saying a union’s for. So we can dust off the chair for some fat Bolshevik to sit down and tell us what to do.”

“It’s Bukharin—you tell a snake by its bite.”

The ABC of Communism. I remembered it well. I would remember it until the day I died.

The men showed me the article in Petrogradskaya Pravda, a piece on the usefulness of unions—to help teach the worker about Communism. That was the official line now. I knew the argument—if the proletarian state was already the true voice of the proletariat, the worker had no need of protection from their own state. It was a clear threat to the independent power of the unions, and Vikzhel, the railway union, was the most prominent, the last one with any real power. Lobachevsky, a fitter and one of the worst poets, a Vikzhel organizer, called out from his chair. “Don’t kid yourself. This isn’t Bukharin. This is coming right from the top. You think Lenin’s not behind every word? Not a goddamn sparrow falls, brother.”

I put my books down on the table at the head of the room. I had a feeling there wouldn’t be much poetry written here tonight. One of the younger men and a sharp rhymester, Markel, put a cup of hot tea into my hands. “Bukharin’s saying the union’s role is to ‘educate the worker, pass along party policy,’ and make goddamn sure he knows his place. The hell with what we want.” He pulled a pamphlet from his jacket pocket and tapped the headline: The Workers’ Opposition, by Alexandra Kollontai. It called for worker control in the factory and in the party. “We’re gearing up for the Tenth Party Congress. We’re going to fight this.”

What the Vikzhel men were so angry about was a new tactic by Trotsky to weaken the unions. He’d called for further labor militarization, the strict discipline of the army transferred into the factories, to revitalize production and restore our broken economy. I’d agree, that things were desperate. Trotsky had brought back discipline in the army, abandoning early principles of soldier democracy and returning to the old model of ranks and capital punishment. It had won us the civil war, why not the economy? But there was infinitely more at stake here than simple efficiency. After all, what was a Soviet government without worker control? Slavery. Without their unions, the workers would have no voice except outright revolt.

“What does Trotsky know about how to run a train, just because he rode on one? How does he know how to run a factory?” Lobachevsky bellowed. “The Bolsheviks got a lot of theories but they can’t run a corner grog shop.”

“They can kiss my Red ass,” said the old man.

I remembered the left opposition, Kommunist, back in the old days. That was Bukharin. Now he was the status quo and Kollontai was forming some kind of worker resistance group. This one the Bolsheviks couldn’t blame on the Whites. The civil war was over, and now the Workers’ Opposition wanted the party to make good on its promises for worker control and Soviet democracy.

Lobachevsky leaned to one side and spit a mouthful of sunflower-seed shells onto the debris-strewn floor. “I’ve been a Bolshevik since ’09, but I’m about ready to tear up my party card. That little dictator’s got something coming if this union has anything to say about it. Wait until that armored train of his ends up on a spur at Gatchina.”

That got a laugh. Everyone remembered when Vikzhel shunted the tsar’s train around the countryside when he’d tried to get back to Petrograd and stop the unfolding revolution. But Trotsky’s train had won the civil war. I couldn’t reconcile my love of the revolution and certain of its leaders with my disgust with what they, and we, had become.

“Ever seen convict labor, Comrade?” said Lobachevsky. “Go into the factories. That’s your so-called militarization of labor. How it works is this: they close down the factory, get rid of the ‘troublemakers’—meaning union men—then they reopen and march the workers in, under guard. Special factory committees, only nobody elected ’em. They watch the benches all day long. Poor bastards too hungry to lift a hammer? They’ll call it a stoppage and shoot ’em.”

I thought of my women at Skorokhod. They’d already had a stoppage. “Nobody got shot at Skorokhod.”

“Guess they haven’t reorganized it yet,” said Markel. “Metal first, electrical. They shot a guy this week at Dinamo.”

Dinamo!

“It’s that little yid,” said Lobachevsky. “He’s gotten so used to running the army, he thinks he can run labor the same way.”

“I’m a Jew,” said Markel.

“I’m not talking about Jews,” said the organizer. “I’m talking about Trotsky.” He threw a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth, crunched on them angrily. “‘If you ain’t got bosses, whaddya need unions for?’ Except we do have bosses. We got the whole goddamn Communist Party sitting on our necks. I’m going to the Tenth Congress, and if they vote against us, I’m going to tear up my party card in their faces.”

The country was turning against the Bolsheviks. Not furtive reactionary fliers in the street, not poems about heads and rutabagas, but workingmen moving into open rebellion. I felt dizzy, excited, and terrified all at once. The Workers’ Opposition had revealed a fundamental flaw in the Communist ABCs. If the party and the advanced proletariat weren’t identical, if the workers were ready to throw the Communist Party overboard from the ship of socialism, then the theory was incorrect. We didn’t need the Bolsheviks to build our socialist state.

But what would the party do? They would never allow the workers to dictate to them. They would do something—demonize the unions, break their backs. Shoot the leaders, and turn the workers into virtual slaves.

Yet—though I wouldn’t say so in this angry hall—I could see the other side of the argument as well. The country was broken. Jesus Christ couldn’t make it run at this point. I could see the dilemma Trotsky found himself in. The Bolsheviks had to get our factories running somehow, and worker control was fractious and time-consuming. It could never be as nakedly efficient as it would be with specialists running it, and soldiers to stand over the worker with rifles. Democracy was never the most efficient way to run things. It took time, and people could be wrong too. But it was just as Mandelstam had said—once you sold your soul to the devil, just try getting it back again.

“Comrade Marina, we want you to help us write a poem,” Lobachevsky declared. “About all this.” He pounded his table and shouted, “Shut up! We’re writing now.”

They got out paper and licked their pencils, and waited. Was this happening to Gumilev in his groups? The Vikzhel men were in revolt, and they were asking me to help them write slogans. What if there were a Cheka agent here? What if Lobachevsky himself was an agent provocateur? I had been in that cell at Gorokhovaya 2. I knew what was waiting for those who opposed the regime.

And yet, if this unrest could turn the revolution back to what it was supposed to be, if it could restore Soviet democracy, it wasn’t counterrevolution, it was the revolution. The one we had fought for. During the civil war, every voice in Russia that didn’t belong to the party—and the upper party at that—had been silenced one by one. These men were entering dangerous territory, and they were asking me to help them.

How Varvara would love to see me back in Cheka hands. Smearing the House of Arts in the process, she would probably win some award. If I were arrested, there would be no one to rescue me. An agitator, daughter of a well-known Kadet executed for treason? Fomenting counterrevolution among the disgruntled workers? She would stamp me out like a lit match. What could the House poets do for me then? Hold a poets’ stoppage? Put their pens down? They didn’t have the massive reach of the railway union. I wished I could talk to Gorky, to Gumilev, but it was too late to ask for advice. The Vikzhel men wanted me now.

How could I refuse? I had to put my trust, not for the first time, in them.

51 Pushkin Days

Pressure was building, not just in the factories but in our refuge, our beleaguered ark. After the poem by Browning No. 215,745 appeared in Krasnaya Gazeta, the newly reorganized Petrograd Narkompros—Commissariat of Enlightenment—threw the hammer at us. It found the House of Arts lacking in public zeal, pointed out what we did not yet have—no music course, no art workshop, only a hundred students actually attending classes out of the three hundred on the books. Never mind the impossible conditions, the brutal weather that might have discouraged participants. They questioned our financial affairs, the art auctions—wasn’t that akin to private trade? I just had to pray no one discovered my collusion with Vikzhel’s defiant rhymesters. As it was, Krasnaya Gazeta made our art sales out to be almost a black market—never mind that we used the money for events and books. Our House manager came under special scrutiny—they recommended the Cheka examine the dealings of our canteen. Luckily for him, the turmoil of the streets delayed action in our direction. Zinoviev evidently had his hands full with industrial havoc and worker demonstrations. Soviets Without Communists!—it felt like it had just before the February Revolution. And it was February again—the significance escaped no one.

Meanwhile, I turned twenty-one, and was touched by a small celebration in the House canteen, hatched by my friends. How could I have forgotten, that day by the river, how many people considered me part of their lives? There was a potato-peel cake and the stub of a candle Sasha had carved into the shape of a cone on a sphere on a cube. He gave me an ink drawing—of me, bent over my desk, writing by lamplight, clutching my hair. Dunya embroidered a handkerchief with a willow tree. Anton even wrote me a poem, full of jokes and inside references. The first initials of the lines spelled out Marina My Madness.

A far more significant occasion was the Pushkin anniversary, February 23, 1921, when literary Petrograd turned out during a snowstorm for its celebration of the anniversary of the poet’s death. It wasn’t a major milestone, the eighty-fourth, but it was a time of anniversaries—the winter was thick with them, like mushrooms in soggy loam. We needed something right now to connect our past with our present, some justification of the continuance of culture.

Pushkin was not a neutral choice. Yes, he was our greatest artist, but more importantly, his name in particular resonated with overtones of freedom of thought and expression. His genius was both our shield and our sword. Most of the institutions took part, seizing the chance to close ranks against the snapping dogs of the Left.

Our House of Arts elders were on the presidium that night: Kuzmin, Sologub, Blok, Gumilev. Even Akhmatova came out of hiding, marking the gravity of the event. She was very erect, gaunt, thin cheeked—she had been starving as much as the rest of us, but she bore it with greater dignity. I saw her speaking with Gumilev—it was uncanny, a moment in history. I wish Solomon Moiseivich had been there to capture it. He took her hand. Although they probably had once fought like wildcats, that night they sat side by side, the very picture of nobility.

There were other speakers, but the only one anyone remembered was Alexander Alexandrovich Blok. The hall at the House of Writers wasn’t large, but it was larger than ours, and packed like a tin of smelts. I stood in the back with Anton and Oksana and Arseny and Tereshenko—we’d been lucky to squeeze in—and could just see Blok’s suffering head and cropped curls as he began his speech, listed in the program as “The Mission of the Poet.” Innocuous enough.

But within the first paragraph, I saw that he was skating right for the patch where the ice was thinnest. Freedom against tyranny, freedom of the artist. He posed the name of Pushkin against all the other names that history preserved—“the somber names of emperors, generals, inventors of instruments of murder, names of torturers and martyrs of life, and together with them, the radiant name Pushkin.”

No one failed to understand the message. I could see people in the audience nodding, or clutching each other’s arms in shock. No one blinked. No one coughed. How far would he go?

He was not an orator of the Mayakovsky type, he was a poet whose foot barely made a print in snow. But his words held thunder enough. He began to explain that it was often painful just thinking about Pushkin, because the poet’s course had been that of an artist whose endeavor, an inward endeavor—culture—“was all too often disrupted by the interference of people for whom a stove pot is more precious than God.”

Even the angels held their breaths. He began speaking about the “rabble.” We knew he was referring to the Pushkin poem “The Poet and the Mob,” but would the Proletcultists know that? Blok was playing a dangerous game. His revolutionary poem “The Twelve” had been misunderstood by readers on the right and on the left—but like Pushkin, Blok had had to keep his inner freedom and pursue his inward task.

He did his best to explain. The rabble didn’t mean the common people, who simply didn’t have the education—that wasn’t what Pushkin was referring to—but those who claimed to serve culture. Critics, censors, boors who believed poetry could be used for some outer purpose, who tried to insert themselves between the poet and his inner freedom.

I clapped my hand to my mouth so I would not cry out. I must not gasp. He was putting his head in the guillotine.

Luckily, he began to elucidate his theories of poetry in a labyrinthine way, which lost many of the journalists, for who besides the poets could follow what Blok meant about chaos and cosmos and sound? They were all waiting for more comments on Pushkin and his relationship to the bureaucrats who censored his work and played such havoc with his life, with the thinly veiled comparison to our own increasing unfreedom.

I could hear the old wall clock tick whenever he paused in that crowded room. No one so much as shifted; though his voice wasn’t loud, no one even exhaled for the twenty minutes during which he spoke. I believed Blok didn’t think he was talking about politics but about vulgarity, and the poet’s inner freedom, which had nothing to do with politics. But he was not a naive man. Be careful where you read that. He had been dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy for years, and had been pummeled by the ignorant reactions on both the right and the left to “The Twelve,” his poem about the Red Guardsmen patrolling the snowy streets of revolutionary Petrograd—with the invisible Christ leading the way.

He looked like Petrograd itself—dying but still mustering the strength to discuss Pushkin’s inner freedom and the stifling effects of the new bureaucracy. Yes, he was saying it right out, that the literary bureaucrats and the hounds of Proletcult were our rabble, no different than in Pushkin’s time, wanting to use poetry for outer ends, rather than allowing the poet the inner freedom he required. They demanded he be useful, that he enlighten the hearts of his fellow men. “As Pushkin simply puts it: they demand the poet sweep garbage off the street.”

You could hear the grumbling from certain sections of the audience.

The rabble didn’t understand the poet’s gift, he explained, and were thus unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor. They demanded that the poet serve the same thing they served—the outside world. In fact, they felt threatened by his inner freedom. Felt that somehow it diminished them. They instinctively sensed that the testing of hearts by poetry had no bearing on the achievement of goals in the outside world.

Were they following his argument? Part of me hoped he’d lost them, but another part wanted to cheer. My heart was beating wildly. I could hardly stand to watch him up on that high wire.

The poet’s job was not to get through to every blockhead, he explained. Poetry would choose, because it called to those who could hear it. And no censorship in the world could stop this election. Elitist, anachronistic… I could see the Proletcultists taking notes, scribbling objections. But great art called to what was great in men.

He argued that the poet had been sapped by all the boorish attempts to use him, to censor him, to make him sweep the streets, so to speak, and the culture was crippled along with it. “Pushkin died not from D’Anthès’s bullet but from suffocation… The poet dies because he is stifled; life has lost its meaning.” Now he was speaking in the present tense—not of Pushkin but of the poet. Him. Us. At this very moment these things were being decided by people also in this room. The poets and the rabble alike—propagandists, cultural bureaucrats, the insensible hand of the state. “Let those bureaucrats who plan to direct poetry through their own channels, violating its secret freedom and hindering it in fulfilling its mysterious mission, beware of an even worse name.” Dictator. Murderer. Assassin. Plague.

The audience applauded a long time. Each one of us applauded in order to recapture our own inner freedom, our own courage. In applauding Blok, we were signing our names to his speech. The silence of the Proletcult faction and the leftists underscored the power of what had just occurred. No one had died, no troops stormed down the aisles of the House of Writers. But a line had been drawn. And the vulgarians found themselves in a tiny minority. Some of them, abashed, even clapped softly. Although I overheard two disapproving leather-clad writers muttering. “The author of ‘The Twelve.’ I’m amazed to see him turn around like this.”

But “The Twelve” was the sound of the revolution, not a political tract. Blok was a poet, not a tool or mouthpiece. He was saying there was no air, that people like these apparatchiks were taking it all. It wasn’t just the workers who were getting tired of the airlessness.

Kuzmin also spoke that night, and Eikhenbaum, but it was hard to think of anything but Blok. Akhmatova seemed to take strength with every word, her transparence becoming corporeal. Perhaps she would come back to us, perhaps she too was finding her inner freedom and would begin to sing again.

Back at the House of Arts, Anton and I lay in bed, huddling for warmth, snow piling up on the windows, going over Blok’s speech point by point, committing it to memory. My face against his dirty neck, I thought about the secret freedom of creation. Not to corral an opinion and express it with subservient words, but just as Anton had once said about my blackbird poem, how the language itself gave birth to it all. I kept wondering whether I could be included in rabble. I had too easily agreed with Gorky, art being for the elevation of the people. Here was the core of the disagreement between Gorky and Blok. Now I understood how dismayed Blok must have been with my description of teaching the workers to write, his kind offer to enroll in my class notwithstanding. But clearly Blok had confessed his own sin, all our sin, against the spirit of poetry’s inner freedom. To think—Anton was closer to Blok than I was. Poetry was a mystery, with its own purpose that had nothing to do with the outside world. You either believed in it or you didn’t.

Following Blok’s astonishing speech, the House of Arts’ new journal, Dom Iskusstv, published an essay by Zamyatin called “I Am Afraid” that was even more direct. Zamyatin, a prose writer, addressed the question of art’s value and the role of cultural establishments in the revolution. He bluntly argued a clear link between the absence of quality literature and the lack of a free press, the difficulties of life and the meddling of the regime. He concluded that the regime’s tendency to orthodoxy was giving birth to a new generation of court poets and toadies, which would stifle the dreamer and heretic who created art. He lamented that writers of genuine literature were being hounded into silence.

The elders were standing up to the firing squad with everything they had: dignity, intellect, the last bit of defiance left in their starving bodies.

Three days later, a cheer ran through the House when we read that Lunacharsky, head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, seeing which way the wind was blowing, had given in on the issue of control in the publishing houses, allowing for a measure of independent action in the press. The government would not be telling us what to publish. Were the independent newspapers going to come back? A crack was growing. We could see daylight.

Oksana was the last to arrive for the morning editorial meeting of our own new journal, Anvil. We ran it like a conventional journal. Perhaps someday, when there was paper again—if there ever was paper again—it would be a printed journal. There was still snow on her coat. She removed her scarf, shook it out, sat down on the bed. Six of us already sat crowded into Anton’s odd-shaped room with its floor-level window: Arseny Grodetsky, bright-eyed, his fair hair still showing the tracks of a comb wielded by his doting mother, with whom he still lived—though he spent so much time in the House of Arts he qualified as an unofficial member. Sasha Orlovsky, representing the visual arts, reviews of shows and upcoming events. Oksana, Nikita Nikulin, Petya. Dmitry Tereshenko, unshaven, rumpled and barely awake, wearing a turtleneck and felt slippers. Shklovsky had volunteered to be on our board, as had Bely, though neither of them came to the meetings.

Oksana’s cheeks were tipped with frost, she rubbed them and they turned fiery red. “There’s a huge protest happening on Vasilievsky Island. I’d say there were a thousand people.”

“Where?” Petya and I both asked.

“I think it’s the docks,” she said.

Everything the Vikzhel men had said came swimming into my mind. A demonstration, a thousand workers! The structure was shaking, listing. Something important was unfolding out there, and we would not read about it in Pravda. I stood, buttoned my sheepskin.

Anton looked up at me, as if huge demonstrations were just another kind of weather. “Where are you going?”

“I need to see what’s going on.”

“This is what’s going on.” He slapped our sheaf of poems with the back of his hand. “This”—he waved the pages at me—“is a fight to the death, for the future of the mind. What was all that about the mission of the poet? The inner freedom you’ve been on about since Blok spoke? The poet who has no interest in the affairs of the world, lya lya fa fa?”

Did it make me rabble? Less than a poet, because I wanted to know what was happening on Vasilievsky? A thousand people were demonstrating. Knowing the severity with which the Cheka could put it down—this could be the beginning of another revolution. The outer world would always exist, and would affect all of us, poets and citizens alike. I wasn’t about to ignore it, even if Blok made a speech. Anton was a man of limitless opinions, but he went rigid whenever he was called upon to interact with concrete reality. Was that inner freedom or just plain cowardice? “I’m going. Anyone wants to come with me, they’re welcome.”

“I’m not getting arrested over rations at the pipe factory.” He held up the sheaf of pages that would be our first Anvil. “This is my revolution.”

Oksana’s gray eyes grew worried, the circles under them were deep charcoal smudges. “There’s going to be trouble, you can just feel it. What are you going to do, give a speech?”

“Petya?” He lived on Vasilievsky. He was in his third year at university.

“I just got here, I didn’t see anything. Anyway I’ve got Chukovsky’s studio after this.”

I looked over at Tereshenko. “How about you?”

He yawned, scratched his head over his ear. “Sorry. Committee meeting over at the Poets’ Guild.”

No one wanted to know what would become of a thousand workers demonstrating against the Bolsheviks? “Well, the hell with all of you.” I wrapped my scarf around my neck and fitted the fox-fur hat to my head.

Arseny piped up. “Hey, I’ll go. I was just a kid in ’17. I missed everything.”

Now Anton scowled, twitched, crossed his legs and recrossed them. Somehow the idea that Arseny Grodetsky would have the nerve to go with me roused his competitive nature. “Oh, all right,” he said angrily. “Damn you both. Somebody’s got to look after you.” He dumped the pages into Tereshenko’s lap and unfolded his long legs. “But I’m warning you, if there’s any shooting, I’m not waiting around to see if we’re among the casualties. Agreed?”

“Ladno,” I said. Agreed.

We struggled against the heavy wind and blowing snow, Anton cursing the whole way, onto the Nikolaevsky Bridge—now known as the Lieutenant Schmidt. I couldn’t resist looking back at the yellow mansion where Kolya and I had made love so long ago. Its yellow walls only a slight creamy blur through the scrim of swirling snow. Here I’d stood that day, watching the Cheka search the house, the diamond stickpin in my coat. It must be a busy time for them now, strikes were unfolding all over town. What would they do with the demonstrators? Who was it who told me An army is at its most dangerous in retreat? I knew we wouldn’t see anything in the papers, except blame laid at the feet of the usual suspects, the SRs and Mensheviks, anarchists, counterrevolutionary agitators.

The half-mile bridge with its icy panels of arched-necked seahorses gave way to the familiar embankment. We walked toward the shabby end of the island, past the Seventeenth Line, where Varvara had lived, and into the factory quarter. Up on Bolshoy Prospect, we saw an enormous gathering, mostly women, protesting in the falling snow. Signs read BREAD AND BOOTS, TROUBETSKOY STRIKE COMMITTEE, DOWN WITH THE BOSSES, LEATHERWORKERS’ UNION, SOVIETS WITHOUT COMMUNISTS, and even ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES, along with a couple of less-progressive notes, like DOWN WITH COMMUNISTS AND JEWS.

“So much for your egalitarians.” Anton’s nose was red with cold. He sniffled, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Is that supposed to excite us about their demands?”

We got closer to hear a speaker, a man in a brimmed hat shouting to the crowd, telling them to hold firm, that this was their country and they had a right to express their demands. On the border of the crowd, I saw a squat figure of a woman among a group of somber workingmen, wrapped in an old fur. Something about her was familiar… Then I recognized—the Flea! I pushed my way over to her—“Comrade Goldman! Comrade Goldman!” I jumped and waved.

She squinted at me from behind her little round glasses, trying to remember who I was. I came closer. “It’s Marina!” I caught myself before I shouted We met at Gorky’s! Who knew who was watching us now. “Aura Sands’s friend, remember?” The steam of my breath clouded my view of her, but I’d seen a face no longer ardent, not the woman I’d met over tea at the Kronverksky apartment. All the fire seemed to have gone out of her. The air around her was dense with worry. She looked ten years older. “Oh yes, the poet.” Now her expression sweetened. Her round glasses were frosting over. She took my gloved hand, patting it as if it were a small dog. “I remember your poem. About bees—honey coming out of the holes in the switchboard. I think of it every time I make a telephone call. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?”

“At least one.” My father’s, to be exact.

I introduced her to Anton and Arseny. Neither of them had any idea who she was, but Anton seemed relieved that this middle-aged woman was here. If she thought it was safe, how dangerous could it be? I didn’t want to tell him that Red Emma, the famous anarchist, was more dangerous than fifty union organizers.

“The Troubetskoy Works is on strike,” she explained under the shouting of the speaker, leaning close. “All they want is an increase in rations and a pair of boots. There was a shipment of shoes in the shops this morning—but for party members only. It was clearly a provocation. The Petro-Soviet refuses to negotiate until they go back to work. Now they’ve got the leather factory out, and the Laferm Cigarette women. It’s getting bigger by the minute.”

I stamped my boots to keep the blood in my feet—even Aura’s good boots could not prevent them from turning to stone. The size of the crowd! A bold assembly of the determined and the desperate, bundled in their ragged black and brown coats and scarves and caps. “Now the Bolsheviks will have to listen.”

“They don’t have to do anything,” Anton said.

“You’re the anarchist.” It was just occurring to Arseny whom we were talking to. “The American. Emma Goldman. Goldman and Berkman.” He glowed with the contact with revolutionary royalty. The revolution he’d missed was giving way to one he was going to witness.

“We just got back from Moscow,” Emma said, her frizzy gray hair sticking out from her oversized tam. “Me and Sasha. The Democratic Center and the Workers’ Opposition have been crushed.”

I felt it like a punch in the gut.

“Lenin’s never going to let the workers dictate to the party.” She sighed, hopeless. So different from the peppery rebel I’d met that day in Gorky’s apartment. “They’ve put themselves in a corner now, bungling everything from top to bottom. So arrogant, they just keep making it worse. We’re trying to help negotiate with the strike committees.” Her comrades were watching us. They looked just as worried as she did. “Trying to keep people from getting hurt. But it’s going from bad to worse and of course the party doesn’t need any help from us.” The anarchists. She indicated the crowd, a sign: ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS, NOT TO POLITICAL PARTIES.

Anton shivered in his old coat and cap. “Seen enough? I’m not going to stand here all day. I have things to do.”

“Are you going to speak?” I asked Goldman. We had to stay for that.

“An American anarchist speaking out against the Bolsheviks?” She snorted, shook her head. “They’d just blame us, say it was us inciting the workers. They wouldn’t even let us print a funeral pamphlet for Peter Kropotkin.”

Kropotkin, the famous Russian anarchist, formerly a prince. “He died? I didn’t hear anything about it.”

“He was like a father to me,” she said. “The kindest man.”

Like a father. Just a phrase people used, but that specific order of ordinary words had the power of a blow. They struck me in the throat, tears welled, only to freeze in my eyes.

“In Moscow, five thousand people came for his funeral. We laid him out in the Trade Union Hall. But they’re terrified of anything becoming a nexus for protest.”

Something was happening in the crowd. People were shouting. We were shoved this way and that. “Here they come!” Arseny said, pointing back to the river.

We turned and saw the companies of gray-uniformed kursanty, Bolshevik cadets, marching up from the bridge, rifles over their shoulders, bayonets attached. Women approached them, trying to speak to them. “Join us, boys. We’re your mothers, your sisters.” “All we want is boots, and bread.” “Join us.”

The boys were on edge, clearly terrified at the size of the crowd. They shouted at people to disperse. Boys seventeen, eighteen years old telling starving workers what to do. Didn’t they know what the revolution had been about? I remembered the soldiers who fired on the workers at Znamenskaya Square—it was starting all over again. “By order of the Petro-Soviet, we command you all to return to work.” Brandishing their rifles. The workers yelled at them to go back to school, blow their noses, run back to Moscow. The demonstrators began to push them, throwing snowballs, then rocks. Women even grabbed for their rifles. The boys fought back, one shot over the heads of the crowd, up into the swirling snow.

“There it is. We’re going,” Anton said, grabbing my arm. Yes, I could not live through Znamenskaya Square again. I saw that dead student on the ground, his blood in the snow. I had no more lives to spare.

Part of me wanted to stay and see the outcome regardless of the danger, but Anton had my arm and was pulling me through the crowd. I took hold of Arseny, who kept turning to watch the boys no older than he in cadets’ uniforms. Shouts of “Disperse!” and “Down with the Communists!” filled the air, and shots. We ran, arm in arm. The people swirled around us like snow.

We reached the embankment on the Vasilievsky side and began moving back in the direction of the bridge as workers pushed the other way, toward the sound of the rifle fire.

“Can’t go that way.” It was Emma, at my elbow, her face red and sweaty from running. She pointed toward the bridge. Soldiers coming across—Red troops with rifles on their shoulders. It was crazy, unthinkable. Red troops coming to put down a workers’ protest. I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. We could hear them, faintly, through the snow, their commissars haranguing them. “Get a good look,” she said. “This isn’t about Communism, or the good of the people. This is a state protecting itself against the people, as it always does. Power protects itself.” We climbed down onto the ice, and began crossing the Neva, passing longshoremen coming toward us from the Admiralty docks.

“Did they shoot anybody?” the men called out.

“Not yet. Over their heads,” she shouted back. “But they’ve got troops coming. Be careful, bratya!”

That day, the Petrograd Soviet declared martial law. Proclamations were posted everywhere, on every wall, every door. No public meetings, strict nightly curfew, the workers ordered back to their factories on pain of losing their rations. They were going to starve the workers into submission. True to form, they placed the blame on anarchist, Menshevik, and SR counterrevolutionary plots. It couldn’t be the actual workers, with actual grievances and a right to voice them. After three years, you’d think they could have found something better.

All night, I kept thinking of my Skorokhod women, keeping Anton awake as I tossed and turned. Would they go back to work? Would they ignore the prikazy? I couldn’t stop thinking about the soldiers crossing the bridge, and the terrified, determined faces of the kursanty, and of my little brother—how panicked he must have felt, facing the Red Guard in ’17. I longed to lie down on Iskra’s small grave. I wanted to talk to her. It was the one thing that would never change. She would always be there, just off Moskovsky Prospect, like a lodestone, my Polaris.

In the morning, I wrapped my scarf up high on my face, squashed the hat down as low as I could, and with just those slits for my eyes, like a bedouin in a sandstorm, I headed out into the wild weather, south, toward the Obvodny Canal and the Novodevichy Convent. In my mind, I could see that big granite four-sided tomb, the side closest to the church where she rested, my redheaded child. I wanted to tuck her in, if only in my mind, to tell her I’m still here.

But as I neared the canal, I saw troops stationed on the New Moscow Bridge—the exact spot where we’d built fortifications during the Yudenich advance. They looked cold and unhappy. One of the soldiers, bundled to the eyes, stepped forward as I neared the bridge. He pulled down his scarf. “It’s closed,” he said.

“Has there been trouble?” Had the soldiers forced the workers back to the bench, the way Lobachevsky had described? Or had the workers held out? Then it occurred to me—obviously they’d held out, or the Bolsheviks wouldn’t have sealed off the district. “I’m going to the cemetery. My baby is buried there.”

“You’ll have to visit some other time,” said the soldier, stamping his feet. “We’ve got our orders.”

“Has there been shooting?” I asked.

“Just the usual,” he said. “They go back to the bench and then pop out again, like a bad nail in your shoe. Wah wah, rations and boots, rations and boots. What if everybody did that? I’d like some boots too—who wouldn’t? They need to get back to work so we can all go home.” He replaced his scarf and waved his rifle, indicating I should clear off.

So the workers were fighting regardless of the threat to withhold rations. What a brave thing. It was clear to anyone that the Bolsheviks weren’t listening. The Workers’ Opposition has been crushed. Not exactly. I gazed across the canal and prayed for my Skorokhod ladies, for Dinamo, the railwaymen, all of them. The workers’ government was preparing to starve the workers into submission. I remembered Anton, sitting at the Katzevs’ table all those years ago, saying, Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it. Sitting on a footstool at the end of the table, wedged between Dunya and Shusha, chain-smoking. Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends… Once you have a concentration of power, you’re screwed no matter who’s in charge.

Anton had been more prescient than anyone.

“Would you shoot them, if you were ordered to?” I asked the soldier, his unhappy hard eyes, the frost growing on his scarf from the dampness of his breath.

“You want me to shoot you, just to see if I can? Get out of here before we both find out.”

There was no other choice but to return the way I had come, up empty Moskovsky Prospect, passing the sniper’s nest I’d inhabited those days and nights after Iskra’s death. What if someone had told me back then that this was in our future, that after we’d fought back our enemies, there would be worker protests against the government in the very streets of Petrograd. Strikes and kursanty, sentries on the bridges. Would the mothers of those kursanty someday have to receive the kind of letter my parents had, notifying them that their boys had died in a mistaken cause?

Three years now. I liked to think of Seryozha with Iskra, and Maxim, waiting for me on the other side of a fast, cold river full of ice. I never saw my father with them, though. I only pictured him as he’d been the last time I’d seen him—a corpse, dumped on my doorstep. Or a prisoner in the Troubetskoy Bastion—hungry, beaten. I wanted to remember him in a dinner jacket as he’d been that New Year’s Eve, laughing with his guests, the dimples underneath his beard. Or at home nights in his smoking jacket and Persian cap, pipe clamped between his teeth, consulting his enormous dictionary on its stand, or playing a masters’ chess game out of the paper, studying both sides.

What a dream this life was. Perhaps Blok was right—we should just listen to the sounds, and write what we could still hear, let the world attend to the things of the world. Anton’s fatalism was his bulwark against the chaos. But my poetic spirit rose up against fate. Fatalism was ignoble. Blok wasn’t talking about fatalism—he said the poet must resonate with every sound, whether he liked it or not. He had to be free to hear it, to absorb it and express it. He was talking about freedom, not fate.

It was hard work tramping through the uncleared snow, avoiding the holes in the wooden pavement, and I was so weak. Hunger was a paradox—the lighter I became physically, the heavier I felt. The snow whirled around me like a living being. What had been so clear the day of Blok’s speech now was lost in the swirling snow, like his mysterious Christ—tenderly treading through snow-swirls, / hung with threads of snow-pearls, / crowned with snowflake roses… Was caring about the outer world a waste of my consciousness as a poet? Did I hear the sounds? I stopped in the street and heard—nothing. The wind had stopped. I heard only my breath, coming short, and the pounding of my heart. Would Blok be disappointed in me, that I cared so much about the events taking place in our world?

There had to be something between the rhythms and music of elemental poetry and following my soul’s inner freedom, the hell with stove pots—and being a self-serving careerist, a boor, a fashionable weathervane, to whom a stove pot would always be more important than the divine. I needed both the stove pot and the divine. I was a poet, but I was also a human being who lived the life of her time, a woman who had lost her child, her father, her family. A woman who loved men, who cared about the future of her country, who had to worry about stove pots. I needed both the inner and the outer life. Perhaps it was a muddle, no doubt it was—whereas Blok, the eagle, preferred the purity of the icy heights—but it was an authentic expression of my own being, as elemental to me as fog and mist and clods of dirt. I was my own bargeman-Keats, finding my own way.

52 The Third Revolution

We sat over tea in the House of Arts canteen. Viktor Shklovsky and Anton were talking very animatedly about something said in an Opoiaz meeting—the Society for the Study of Poetic Language—a formalist hotbed. I’d sat in on some of those events, where the newest criticism was being forged. But I couldn’t concentrate when at this very moment the workers in their forbidden districts—Narva, Moskovsky, Vasilievsky, Petrogradsky, Vyborg—were starving. For food, and shoes, and the right to speak for themselves. The ridiculousness of that anonymous Browning poem didn’t seem so ridiculous to me now.

Anton did his best to include me in their conversation, speaking of Anvil and our Living Almanac coming around again, while Shklovsky spread out his amusing anecdotes, what he’d said to Punin at IZO, his agent provocateur role. My attention kept drifting. Power fought for its existence like a living creature, while there was nothing I could do besides control the terrain I had—the continent of a piece of paper, the country of one word after the next.

I saw Anton’s eyes jerk, his face drain of color. “The Baltic Fleet’s in,” he said dryly, and went back to his conversation.

Behind me, a face poked through the canteen doorway. A rugged face with a dimple in its chin, sailor’s cap with a ship’s name on the hatband, eyes the color of the sea. I downed the rest of my tea in two gulps, crammed my uneaten bread into my pocket, and ran into the hall. This was my inner freedom.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Pasha whispered, holding my hands. “Can we go somewhere?”

I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to kiss him, hold his ropelike form against me. I wanted to parade before him like the long line of daughters in the underwater kingdom of Sadko the Bogatyr. He could choose any one of me. I led him down to the Monkey House. My dark room smelled of mold, old paper, and pine needle tea. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

He grinned his goofy little smile. “We sailors get around.”

“Is that why you’re here, to take me sailing?” I wrapped myself around his neck like an Orenburg scarf, as soft as a cloud.

Surprisingly, he gently unwrapped me. “Sit down.” He sat on my bed, and I next to him, and his face was still easy, a smile even behind the serious look he put on. “I don’t know if you heard,” he said. “The workers are rising against the Bolsheviks.”

I told him about the demonstration on Vasilievsky Island, the kursanty, the troops on the bridge. The approach to the Moskovsky District was under guard. No rations until the workers went back to their factories. I told him about the Vikzhel club, and their poem. He reached up under his shirt and pulled out a tin, a wide brush like housepainters use, and a sheaf of papers. No, posters. Handbills.

I took one and began reading, slowly.

It listed fifteen points, each more incendiary than the next. The sailors were demanding new elections by secret ballot, to be held immediately, with freedom to agitate among the workers beforehand. Freedom of assembly for trade unions and peasant organizations. A nonparty conference of workers, soldiers, and sailors to be held no later than March 10. In eight days! My head was swimming. “Can you possibly think they’ll agree to this?”

“Keep going.”

The liberation of political prisoners of socialist parties, and those imprisoned due to labor unrest and peasant resistance. A commission to review the cases of those held in prisons and camps. The abolishment of political departments since no party should be given special privileges in the propagation of its ideas…

I bit my lip. “It’s a third revolution.”

He rose from the bed and perched on my desk. “It’s the rest of the revolution.”

Cultural commissions should be locally elected, financed by the state. It called for the removal of the roadblocks for food arriving into the city, and equal rations for all working people. Abolition of Communist detachments in the army, Communist guards in factories—or if they were found necessary, to be appointed from the ranks and factories at the discretion of the workers.

The sailors had not forgotten the peasants, either. Their resolution demanded freedom of action on the land and the right to keep cattle, as long as the peasants didn’t hire labor.

They requested that all branches of the army as well as cadets endorse their demands. It was signed, Petrichenko, chairman of the squadron meeting, and Perepelkin, secretary.

My eyes went back to the top: In view of the fact that the present Soviets do not express the will of the workers and peasants… “You agreed to this?”

“We all did.”

It was mutiny. “Are you going to present it to the Petro-Soviet?”

He screwed up his face, exasperated that I would even think such a thing. “What, are we schoolboys? It’s already in force.” He sat down next to me, took my hand, pressed it to his chest. “We voted on it two days ago in Anchor Square.” Kronstadt’s central square, where its domed cathedral rose. “Sixteen thousand ayes, three nays, and no abstentions. We’re electing a new soviet.” His smile grew broad, his blue eyes turquoise again.

“Who were the nays?”

“The commissar of the Baltic Fleet, the chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet, and Papa Kalinin of the Central Committee.”

I tried to imagine the scene. The nerve in each of those nays, you had to admire it. The Petropavlovsk Resolution… like the MRC—the Military Revolutionary Committee—in February 1917. It had gone beyond the point of no return.

“The Bolsheviks sent Kalinin up to try to change our minds,” Pavel said. “We let him leave, to carry our demands back to his masters. We put the other two under arrest, by order of the Kronstadt Provisional Revolutionary Committee.”

His blue-green eyes held the question Do you understand? I did. I sat with the handbill in my lap, trying to breathe. They’d arrested the commissar of the Baltic Fleet! And the chairman of their own soviet. Two days ago. This was really happening. And not a word in the papers, not a squeak! How had the government managed to keep something like this quiet? How did we not know?

He smiled, and touched my nose with his rough forefinger. “I too have stolen the golden fleece,” he recited. “And tasted the oxen of the sun.”

Kronstadt had stolen the golden fleece. Sixteen thousand sailors, soldiers, and assorted citizens had voted to free their island from the Bolshevik yoke. The Free Republic of Kronstadt. And now they were inviting the country to join them. They had tasted the oxen of the sun, and now the sun was going to be very, very unhappy. Did the Bolsheviks know about this, I wondered, staring down at the paper. But of course they knew. They would have known when Kalinin returned. What were they doing about it? We hadn’t heard a thing, not from Pravda, not from Krasnaya Gazeta. “Who’s Petrichenko, he’s your leader? An SR?”

“There is no leader. That’s the whole point. He’s just a sailor. We wrote it on the ship, voted on it, brought it to the people of Kronstadt. They approved it. No parties, no leaders.” His eyes were bright, his teeth flashed for a moment in the light from my little lamp, his lean face with its sandy brows. “We sent sailors to investigate what’s been going on here. They were on Vasilievsky Island. They went to the factories. We heard the demands of the people of Petrograd and seconded their motion.”

I gazed at him for a long time. That good brave face. They would call him a traitor. A mutineer. This was how revolutions began. This was not a street protest. The Bolsheviks couldn’t put it down with a few truckloads of kursanty. Watch the soldiers, Kolya had once said. And these weren’t just any soldiers, this was Kronstadt, the pride of the revolution. They had escorted it in on the Aurora. They had been its very first support. They were our heroes—even Maxim had dreamed of becoming a Kronstadt sailor. And now the island had declared Russian independence from the Bolshevik straitjacket. They had raised their own red flag. My hands sweated, softening the paper of the declaration. No wonder the soviet had proclaimed martial law.

“It’s not about us,” Pasha said earnestly. “This is the voice of the people. We’re just putting some teeth in it. The Bolsheviks might be able to ride over the workers, but let them try us.” This list—an end to the grain requisitioning, the thing the peasants had demanded for so long. An end to the roadblocks—preventing workers and peasants from bringing food into the starving cities. The end of Bolshevik privilege, the end of the suppression of speech and the press. “We get letters from our own parents asking why we’re supporting the oppressor. It stops here. The workers have been asking for these things, we’re demanding them. We’re claiming them.”

Taking the revolution back to what it was supposed to be all along. Not to my father’s cronies getting ready to divide Russia up like a slab of beef. I couldn’t think of one thing they had missed. Freedom of parties. Freedom of the press.

I was shaking like a braking tram. For him. For all of us. This had moved beyond factory stoppages and protests over rations and boots. Another revolution was beginning.

Pasha leaned forward, taking my cold hands in his. “I’ve killed good men—better men than me probably—and for what? So Bolsheviks could climb to the top and stay there? We went along with what they said—it was war. But the war’s over. This”—he rested his hand on the page lying on my lap as a father rests his hand on his child’s pretty curls—“is the start of the peace.”

I tried to look brave, but tears spilled down my cheeks. I thought of us at the House of Arts, our terror when Blok had spoken out. And all he had done was argue against bureaucratic vulgarity. Not against the whole Communist regime.

“We’ve fought on ice. In sandals, because there were no boots,” he said, quietly. “I’ve fought on a quarter pound of rye and two moldy potatoes. There won’t be any more boots until the workers believe in their leaders again. Those skinny bastards aren’t going to repair the trains and grow food if they don’t believe. And they don’t. Not anymore.”

He took the sheaf of posters and put them behind him on the chair.

“They’re going to arrest you,” I said. “They’re going to paint you as counterrevolutionaries.” I wondered if Varvara knew—of course she did. They would be preparing their reprisal. And it would be terrifying when it came.

“Who would believe them? No one.” He stroked my hair, letting his fingers linger in the strands. “Who was on the front lines in February 1917? In October? We were. Who won the civil war? We did. Who fought alongside Trotsky’s troops in the very worst days? We did. Nobody’s going to paint us as counterrevolutionaries.”

“And if they refuse your demands?”

He picked up the comb from my desk, flipped it in his hands. “The Bolsheviks are not the revolution. They’ve taken it somewhere and hidden it under a haystack. We’re sick of Bolsheviks. The worker is sick of them. How is this country going to repair itself when the people don’t trust their own government?”

I pressed my cheek to his, drinking in his scent, the salty decks of the rebellious ships. Freedom.

“It’s not just us.” He put his arm around me, spoke into my ear. “It’s everybody. The workers. The peasants. You know the peasants have to turn over more out of this year’s harvest than they planted? It can’t go on. It’s time for them to listen. We’re just making sure they can hear.”

He tried running my comb through my hair, but it snagged in the tangles. I took it away from him and combed his own crinkly blond hair, so cropped it was impossible to snag, and marveled at the daring of Pasha and his men, men and women like him. Not just to join their voices with the millions—that would be easy, it had a momentum of its own. But to be among the few, to let their voices sound out as a collection of individuals, with individual faces, minds, and hearts. He would be so easy to kill, my Argonaut, sitting here holding the black print of the future in his salt-toughened hands. Would they succeed? Could they really do it? I could just as easily see his vulnerable body hanging from the tram wires on the Troitsky Bridge, or crumpled before a firing squad. Or worse. I didn’t want to imagine what they would do to these men.

But who was to say history stopped with us? Who was to say this too would not pass away—the Bolshevik stranglehold on the soviet—as the Provisional Government had, and the tsar. “They’ll have to negotiate with you. How can they not?”

He thumbed my cheek. Rope, seaweed, ice. “They might, they might not. They want the respect of the people. But if they decide not to listen… You know how big a 350 millimeter gun is? The shells weigh a ton apiece. They reload three a minute. We can hit a target thirty kilometers away. Each ship has twelve, and that’s just the ships. Think the Bolsheviks are up for a fight like that? Over open ice, with no cover? Against us? Our Red brothers, whom we’ve defended in battle, who fought alongside us for three long years? They know what we’re made of. Do you think they’d willingly fight us—we, who died for them?” He pressed his forehead to mine, blue-green eyeball to brown. “This is it, Marina. I had to come tell you. I know my poems stink, but this is my poem.”

We clung to each other, foreheads together, as the gravity of the moment sank in. Kronstadt, the flower of the Red Navy, had challenged the Bolsheviks to a high-stakes game. Its price was blood and its prize was Russia. Something banged in the next room, Shafranskaya moving around. She probably heard every word we said. Pasha was in danger here. People had seen him downstairs, they knew he was in my room. Were there informers at the House of Arts? I let my inner eye run over the faces in the canteen, in the halls. None stood out. Anton was jealous, sulky and resentful, but not treacherous. Anyone else? Did I have enemies? I didn’t take as much care as I might… If anyone found these posters at the House, we all could be accused of treason.

Pasha’s hand moved under my coat, inside my dress, sought my breast. He kissed my neck, my mouth. His blue-green gaze grayed in seriousness. “I wish we had more time.”

We kissed, like sea creatures, not needing to breathe, twining our tentacles around one another. Not even time to make love. “I have to go.” He gently extricated himself from my arms, collecting himself before battle. Now I felt the other side of him. That unknown language of him—the man of blood, the fighter. Fist of the revolution.

“Can I help you post the bills?” I was no soldier, only a poet, and I had no 350 millimeter poems. It would mean death to be caught with such papers. I touched his face like a blind girl, memorizing the hard bones. He kissed the palm of my hand. There were worse fates than to die with such a man. Now I understood how a wife could follow a husband to prison or exile. “I could hold them for you. I could keep a lookout.”

He patted my face, roughly, between both his palms, as if catching and releasing me, as a child pats his mother’s cheeks. “I’m not the only one in town. You just keep the lantern lit. Write a poem about me, your heroic Kronstadt sailor. I’ll be back before morning. You can read it to me.”

The light guttered in the lamp, I had the wick turned down as far as I could to save the kerosene, and waited for him to appear out of the black night, my mouth dry with the fear that he wouldn’t. I’d remember his courage, whether he was killed tonight or not. I wished I’d asked him about the joke he told himself about life and kept behind his eyes, the laughter that never went out. I prayed it wouldn’t be tortured from him. I would imagine it living within him until the very end.

I sipped pine-needle tea—it was bitter, but we’d heard that drinking it kept scurvy at bay. Since then we’d all switched to pine needles. The corridor smelled like the forest at Maryino. I imagined Pasha with his resolutions and a glue pot nestled under his shirt to keep it warm, out in the dark and the swirling snow. Finding a wall, somewhere the resolution would be seen but not torn down too quickly—a courtyard, a corner in a workingman’s district, the opening of a passageway. Brushing snow off the stone. As he held the poster up by a forearm, the brush went into the pot and slap slap, up onto the wall. Watching for patrols, and on to the next spot. How diligent would patrols be on a night like this? Normally I’d say not very, but it was martial law—they must know the rebels were in town, or why impose a curfew?

I hadn’t even thought about that. The patrols, the sentries on the bridges, weren’t only to keep the workers in but also the sailors out. If they spotted him, they wouldn’t even wait to see what he was doing. They’d shoot him before he had a chance to run, because he was out, and the night belonged to the Bolsheviks, and also the day. I saw his flawless body facedown in the snow, and the falling flakes erasing him. By morning he’d be buried, along with the secret joke. He said he’d go toward the Admiralty docks and Kolomna—the neighborhood of the sailors’ club, which had been recently closed. Now I knew why. The spot where we were going to launch our sailboat this spring, when all this was over. If he could only live through this night.

I listened as a dog listens, for the smallest sound. All sounds were suspect. Anything at all could mean danger, anything could lead to death. No gunshots, that was good, silence was sweet on a night like this, but snow muffled sounds. Would I hear a shot? No boot steps in the hall or on the stairs—that was important too. No visitors and no shots. Here was where Blok’s sounds had gone.

I thought of Pasha’s smile. How could he still smile like that? I wished I were a sculptor, to capture forever the ropy square shoulders, his chiseled leanness, that grace. How I wanted to see him on the deck of a boat, sailing between islands in an azure sea, leaning into the wind. I knew how he’d squint, take our bearings. He was so straightforward, never really raised his voice—that easy manner, like a man showing open hands to a dog: I’m not making problems. Yet he was a battle-hardened fighter, a killer, and now he and his brothers were out in the night, raising their old red banners against Bolshevik power.

I kept the flame as low as I could, so it would last the night. He must be able to find my window in the dark.

It was almost morning when I heard a stone tossed against my windowpane. I took off my boots and ran—flew—down to the Bolshaya Morskaya courtyard gate, that discreet entry Pashol was accustomed to leaving by so as not to disturb the house. He was hiding in an arch, ran for the door when I opened it. I shut it behind him and locked it. I pointed down to my feet, Take off your boots. He saw and took off his own—cold on the feet but no one must know he was here. It would be dangerous not just for me but for the entire house. Even Gumilev would not have sheltered a Kronstadt sailor now.

In my room, in my tiny bed, we made love as silently as starfishes. You wouldn’t think two such weary, half-starved human beings could find such tenderness. That irrepressible smile, the private joke behind his eyes, the sound of the breakers I could hear in his chest when I pressed my ear to it as if to a shell. He slept deeply, instantly.

Too soon, Petrograd’s weak, despondent dawn smudged the window, and then the inevitable, dangerous day. We shared some tea and a bit of bread and a sausage he’d brought, and when it was safe for him to reappear on the streets, he went. Pashol.

53 A Visit from Moscow

As could have been predicted, the soviet lashed back with accusations and flat-out lies. The Kronstadters had beaten their commissar hostages. The Kronstadt sailors were counterrevolutionary traitors in the pay of foreign powers. They were following a White general. It was absurd, horrific. Could anybody believe this, having read the Kronstadt Declaration? Who could entertain the notion that such loyal sailors were following some White general? I wanted to share what I knew with someone, but didn’t dare speak of it, not even with Anton. My knowledge was too intimately tied to my sailor lover.

Within the beehive of the House of Arts, the buzz was about Dom Iskusstv, not the declaration. They talked about who would be in it, who would be excluded. They worried about attacks on us by the Left at IZO, the House of Arts’ frequent rival. They talked about rations—the bread situation was dire. But most of them hadn’t seen the declaration, and those who had, considered it a symptom of the generalized chaos, just another part of the great storm. Whereas it was all I could think about. What was going on out there, across the ice in the fortress of sea and salt and might?

There was one person I could ask—the man who had placed me at the sailors’ club to begin with. Gumilev had been born on Kronstadt, his father was a naval doctor there. He still had ties to the island. Surely he had some information. I climbed the stairs to where he lived in the Eliseevs’ famous private bathroom and knocked on the door—making sure no one was watching. He answered, wearing a jacket and scarf, felt slippers and a fur hat. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Nikolai Stepanovich. Can I speak to you privately?”

He smiled his little smile. “Of course.”

I’d never been inside the Eliseevs’ personal bathroom, only the big one in the basement where I got a shower every month. This was glorious, tiled with glazed Tiffany fish, three windows and a bathtub, a tiled vanity with a big round mirror. Gumilev’s bed was just a cot, but it was made up with military precision, taut enough to bounce a gold ruble. He’d been writing at a desk that faced Nevsky. The snow drifted past from one window to the next. He took my hand.

“Sit down.” He indicated the cot. “What can I do for you, Marina Dmitrievna?”

God, did he think I was accepting his pass? I perched uncomfortably on the edge, wondered where his wife was. She’d been sent out of the city, somewhere with their child, leaving him to play Don Juan, the scourge of the studio girls. “I wanted to ask if you knew what’s happening out at Kronstadt.”

His friendliness soured like milk. It curdled on his face, you could smell it. “I have no idea,” he said stiffly. “What made you think that I would?”

Now I was confused. “It was you who sent me to the sailors’ club. You have classes out there on the island. You grew up there! Surely you still have contacts—”

His froggy green eyes grew as hard as glass. “I have no contact with them. No one does. They’ve been outlawed, or haven’t you heard.”

“But surely someone must know…” I could feel myself starting to cry, giving in to the strain.

His manner became more and more clipped. “Gorky probably knows something. But I wouldn’t bother him now. There’s nothing to do but wait, and I highly advise you do just that. Go back to work, and for God’s sake keep your concerns to yourself, which is what I’m doing.” Indicating his desk, he was working on a new poem. “And will continue to do. Thank you for coming by. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He led me to the door, opened it for me. “Goodbye, Marina Dmitrievna.” A slight bow.

And so I was dismissed from the presence of Count Gumilev. As if he’d never heard of Kronstadt.

Well, I was certainly not going to sit in the House of Arts and wait for the list of the executed, as Nikolai Gumilev suggested. I buttoned up and walked through the bitter wind to Znamenskaya Square and the Vikzhel club. They would know everything. But when I got to their club, I saw that the door was thickly padlocked. I shook the icy chain. No Skorokhod, and now no Vikzhel. I imagined the same fate had befallen the sailors’ club. No classes, no rations. Life was going to get very tough indeed. But I was not in the danger my union men and women were, not to mention Pasha and the sailors. I only prayed that the Bolsheviks would see sense and give in, that the third revolution would come soon. Four days had brought down the tsar. And October went even faster than that.

I made my way home in the worsening storm. I could barely see through the snow, it was falling so fast. I stumbled upon a group of workers marching ahead of a cadre of soldiers with fixed bayonets. How weak the protesters looked, their heads bowed against the blowing snow, the fight gone out of them. They appeared, then were erased by the swirling snow. Like the Twelve. How would this all turn out? I thought of Mina, just overhead, in her father’s studio, the bay windows on the fifth floor from which we had watched the last revolution take place. If only I had that small camera again, I would take a picture of those strikers. I wished Mina and I were still friends. Those had been good times. We’d had no idea how it would end. We’d believed in the promise of the revolution, believed our time was coming.

I sat at my desk, writing a poem about Pasha and the Kronstadt sailors. Pravda said the government had dropped leaflets on Kronstadt. That they’d arrested the families of the mutineers, were holding them as hostages. They warned that the sailors must either end the rebellion, hand over the ringleaders, and return the commissar and the chairman of their soviet, or the hostages would pay with their lives. The demand came from Trotsky himself: unconditional surrender. These the sailors who had supported him most courageously in 1917, who had cheered him at the Cirque Moderne, had marched to his defense against the Provisional Government, who had closed the Constituent Assembly, and had fought under him to turn the tide of the war. And now this. Unconditional surrender.

The Defense Committee for the Northern Region one-upped Trotsky with its own ultimatum—of course Zinoviev had to have the last word—reminding the Red Fleet of what had happened to Wrangel’s White forces in the Crimea. The Whites that hadn’t already succumbed to Bolshevik arms and Cheka retribution had died by the thousands from hunger and disease. “The same fate awaits the Kronstadt mutineers unless you surrender within twenty-four hours. If you do, you’ll be pardoned. If you resist, you’ll be shot like partridges.”

Shot like partridges. Zinoviev, who fell to pieces any time danger approached. Who did he think he was talking to? Even Trotsky was not so dismissive of the bravest, truest of the Red fighters.

I could only imagine the response on Kronstadt.

I waited for a massive reply from the people, an outpouring of outrage. Demonstrations on Nevsky, clamor, clashes. But there was nothing. The Kronstadt men were risking everything for us—their honor, their arms, their ships, their very lives! Where were the workers? Where were the people, the strikes in support?

I learned the answer the following day in the bread queue at the House of Scholars. Wagonloads of food had been delivered to the workers’ districts, with promises that Bolshevik privilege would be ended, the roadblocks eliminated. All items from Kronstadt’s list of demands were being addressed. The soviet was undercutting the sailors by acquiescing to their demands without acknowledging that that’s what they were doing. The question was, would the Petrograd workers be so easily bought off?

Since Pasha’s brief reappearance, Anton had been nothing but considerate. He saw my fear and refrained from any commentary. He must have guessed what Pasha’s visit meant. “Don’t worry. They’ll agree in the end,” he consoled me. “Right now they’re beating their breasts and spouting ultimatums, but you watch, at the very brink, somebody will come to his senses and they’ll all back down—for the sake of the revolution, lya lya fa fa.”

He never directly referred to Pasha, always to the “situation.” Nevertheless I could tell he was secretly relieved that Pasha was out of the way. That my sailor might end up at the wrong end of a Bolshevik bayonet didn’t trouble him except for my sake. I couldn’t fault him for it. He was doing the best he could with his jealousy, and perhaps there was even a measure of grudging admiration.

I brought my poem to show him. As I turned into his corridor, I could hear laughter and chatter. Anton’s door halfway down the hall lay open. Light spilled out and people stood talking in the hall, Mandelstam chatting with one of Zamyatin’s circle, Alla Tvorcheskaya laughing. Was it a party? Alla stared at me in the strangest way. I reached the door. The room was thick with poets, hazy with smoke. How did so many people cram themselves in there? Someone was telling a story, and I recognized the voice. There, looming in the center of the crowd, a foot taller than anyone else, broad arms extended to emphasize a point—Genya Kuriakin. His tawny hair had grown out—and why not? After all, the war was over. He wore a tweedy suit with a vest. A real grown-up, an important man. He looked well, fleshed out in this time of starvation. Perhaps things really were better in Moscow—at least for some. Curtailing Bolshevik privilege? I thought not. He was talking about someone reading in a café, a fight that had broken out. I tried to back away, but he saw me. He stopped in midgesture.

My heart was leaping around in my chest. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. “Why is it so smoky in here?” I said. The bourgeoika, as usual, was leaking. I pretended that was why I’d come, and picked my way through the people, hardly noticing where I was or who was there, what I was doing. Genya, Anton, and Mandelstam in one room—like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

“Marina!” Genya shouted. “Are you real? What are you doing with this nest of reprobates?”

I struggled for breath. “I live here. Didn’t you know?”

“No one told me.”

We both turned to Anton, sitting on a box next to Shklovsky, his lap full of papers, trying not to catch our eyes. His face was white with guilt. He hadn’t told Genya anything, all these months? Not about my arrival at the House, our love affair, none of it? People were staring. Our fellow members of the House of Arts always had a nose for a good drama brewing, a story that might be shared for days, or years.

“Please. Not now,” I said, under my breath. “Finish your story. We’ll talk later.” I would not cry in front of these people, make a scene. I was already a two-headed calf here. “Please.”

He gave me a wounded look and turned to Anton, who was busying himself stacking pages—sweating and pale, his expression like a cornered fugitive’s. Had he been betting I wouldn’t come see him tonight? That I was too wrapped up with my sailor’s fate to venture out of my room? Or perhaps Genya’s visit had been a surprise to him as well.

“Tell us about Moscow,” I said to Genya as I squatted by the stove, peeling off bits of kindling with my pocketknife. “You look good. It suits you.”

But right now, Genya looked more like a man riding in a cart that had just overturned, leaving him sitting in the road among the rutabagas and cabbages. I opened the door of the belching bourgeoika and started tending to its needs—like old times—while Anton pretended to read the manuscript. I could tell he wasn’t even seeing the pages, his cigarette clamped between his lips. How long did he think he could hide our affair? Pretend he didn’t see me every day, read my verse, make love with me on that very bed?

I poked at the fire. True to form, Anton had thrown an account book in there without wadding it up. We’d found a whole cache of them behind a wall at the far end of the Monkey House. Everyone was writing on them, burning them, wiping themselves—it was quite a treasure trove. I plucked out what I could and began twisting sheets into burnable form, returning them to their little queen, coaxing the flames.

“Mayakovsky was here. He read 150 Million,” Tereshenko told Genya. “What a piece of pompous shit.” Seeing if he could start a fight. He envied Genya, with three collections behind him now, and his boxer’s aggressiveness tended to surface at times like this. “Lenin said it was posturing twaddle.”

“Politicians aren’t the best judges of poetry,” Genya said, standing up, walking to the bed, squeezing himself between Sasha and Dunya, putting his arms around them. “I wouldn’t want Comrade Lenin picking out a girl for me either.” Everyone laughed. What was Genya doing here in the first place? He didn’t even know about Iskra. That she had been born. That she had died.

“You wouldn’t trust Vladimir Ilyich to pick out a nice girl for you?” teased Inna Gants, perching on the edge of the desk, flirting. She was fifty if she was a day, but she knew an attractive man when she saw one.

My husband flexed his eyebrows in a filmic pantomime of surprise. “Yes, I told him, ‘Ilyich, you run the country and let me take care of the poetry. And my girl.’” He glanced at me again.

My lover became very interested in sharpening his pencil with his little penknife.

“He’s actually said as much. He doesn’t like futurism, cubism, rayonism, zaum, or anything that doesn’t have a doily and a vase on it, but thinks the artists should be in charge of the art, no matter his opinion.”

I finished with the stove, brushed my hands on my black stockings, and stood.

“The leadership looks at all modern art the same way,” said Shklovsky, balanced precariously on a three-legged stool. “Exactly the way a horse looks at a piece of sculpture. As something to scratch itself on.” I wondered if he had any idea of the forest fire that was roaring between his two favorite poets, whether he cared. Thank God for theorists. “Or like a housewife—‘Where’s the handle? Which end sweeps?’”

Sasha wiped his face in his hand. As a founding member of Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now, he had been there since I first appeared that horrible night my father had put me out. He and Dunya understood exactly the awfulness of the situation unfolding before them, and did their best to keep the conversational balloon afloat. “I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind designing brooms,” Sasha jumped in. “Popova’s designing textiles, even china. It’s all culture in the end, isn’t it?”

“Or the end of culture,” Mandelstam quipped. His brown eyes taking in our details, sorting. I couldn’t look at him, he’d read me like a theater’s marquee.

Dunya leaned forward across Genya. “I can’t wait to see your broom, Sashenka. A cubo-futurist sweeping machine.” I wondered if Genya recognized her as Mina’s little sister. She’d been just a girl in the days of the Poverty Artel.

“You should give us a poem,” said Inna Gants. “From the Red October. It sounded thrilling.” Did I note a slight edge of sarcasm?

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll hear plenty,” Genya said.

“Chernikov read one when Mayakovsky was here,” she persevered, smelling blood in the water.

I tried to escape. But as I passed, Genya caught my arm. “How long have you been here?”

“Since summer,” I said, trying for a noncommittal voice. Anton stacked the pages one more time and abandoned his place by Shklovsky. “What do you think of Petrograd these days? Have we changed much?” Nonchalantly.

“I don’t know yet. I just got in,” he said. “I’ve had meetings all morning at ROSTA.” The Soviet news agency. “This afternoon, we were up at IZO.” All the avant-gardists collected there, ever looking for an opportunity to undermine the House of Arts, questioning our revolutionary credentials, itching to get control of all the arts institutions, tear down the museums. Shklovsky was part of that group, Sasha worked in their studios with the wonderful artist Petrov-Vodkin. How I wished artists could stop dividing into combatants—couldn’t we have Petrov-Vodkin and Dobuzhinsky? Couldn’t we have Genya and Mandelstam? How we artists loved to define ourselves in opposition to others, separate into camps.

“And how do they find us at IZO?” Inna Gants asked. “Are we hopeless creaky antiques, becalmed in the wake of the great modernist ship?”

Genya began talking about Petrograd and relations with Narkompros, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I couldn’t very well leave now. I found a place to lean against the wall and listened to them talk about the rejection of narrative poetry in Moscow circles, the death of the ballad. I thought of his poem to me as I held my newborn baby, “Funeral for Myself on the Tracks at Kambarka.” Who would have dreamed / I would / drop / my own heart / from the gallows / pull the rope myself.

Anton was fiddling at his desk. He wouldn’t look at either of us. His world was crashing in. Now Genya knew he’d been lying all this time, though my husband still had no idea why. How would Genya react if he knew we were lovers? Had Anton been thinking that if his beloved Genya just stayed in Moscow he could have us both? As long as we didn’t meet. I went to the desk, leaned over to him. “I think that pencil’s sharp enough.” I picked up some of the pages he was pretending to sort. A new manuscript from Gennady Kuriakin.

Anton blew on the pencil, now sharp enough for surgery, tested the point with his thumb. Was he going to jab it into his jugular? Death by graphite? “I didn’t know he was coming until yesterday, I swear,” he whispered. “It was Shklovsky’s idea. I tried to talk him out of it. The curfew… I said that he’d have to sleep on the floor instead of on a swan at the Astoria, but he insisted on coming. Said he wanted to see Gumilev in his dinner jacket.”

But Gumilev had been making himself scarce since the Kronstadt “situation” broke loose. Maybe he’d gone off to wherever he’d stuck his wife. Though martial law meant no one in or out of the city… except for certain Bolshevik poets traveling here from Moscow. Perhaps Genya had been sent. Just being in the room with him exhausted me. So much unsaid, and how could I say it now? My head hurt, my eyes hurt. I edged out into the hall, hoping to make a clean getaway.

“Wait. Marina!” Genya called from the doorway. “Where are you going?”

“A stroll in the moonlight?” I said over my shoulder. “Ah, these balmy Petrograd nights…”

“Wait.” And I waited, my back to the party and all their wondering eyes.

His hand, so gentle, on my sleeve. His shock of hair like rye hanging down in a forelock, his body solid and strong in his new suit. “I’ve been thinking about you for so long. I assumed you were still in the country, or… God, what happened to you? I can’t believe Anton didn’t say anything. Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you let me know you were back in Petrograd?”

I could only stare at him, hoping he could read tragedy in my eyes and leave it at that.

“I’m sorry I had to leave you there.” He was twisting with guilt. “Did you get my poem?”

I nodded. I didn’t dare even speak. I could feel my mouth, trembling.

“Do you blame me?”

I shook my head, bit my lip.

“Where’s the baby? I thought about you so much, thinking you’d died in the village.”

I led him farther down the hallway, away from our audience hanging in the doorway of Anton’s room. “It was a girl. I called her Iskra.”

He sighed, leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. A little laugh, and then a shudder. “We were always going to call our child Iskra.”

I could feel his great body, warm and familiar, and resisted the urge to melt into him. Life was complicated enough. He was waiting for me to tell him the rest. He gazed at me when I told him, his tender face unmasked, then he turned to the wall, laid his forehead against it. “It was that damned baba, wasn’t it? With her Christ and her spells. I should never have let you go with her.”

“That woman saved my life.” What could he know of Praskovia, and his threat to burn her village. “The baby came, and she was so beautiful, Genya.” I clutched his sleeve, laid my cheek against the wool, breathing in his scent, so familiar. My feelings for him trickling back. “She had red hair, and green eyes.” But they were Kolya’s eyes, not his. “I helped bring in the harvest to pay off my debt. It was just as well. All of their men were gone.”

He stared at the ceiling. “I never even thought… How could I have been so stupid?”

Yes, we were quite the pair. What we hadn’t thought would fill an ocean. He’d sent me a poem, but left me without any money. He was in such a hurry to move on, save his train, slip across the Urals through the opening in the fighting.

“They’d wanted to adopt her. But I brought her back. The comrades in Izhevsk helped us.”

He moaned and rolled his head against the wall. “Forgive me, Marina. I didn’t know.”

How much of this to keep in, what to leave out. Certainly the face of the Chekist on the train, that stinking toilet. The besprizorniki helping me get rid of the body. “She was brilliant, Genya. So funny. I never knew a baby could be funny.” I was finding it hard to breathe. Don’t look at me, Genya. Let me finish.

“Do you have a picture of her?”

“No. Just a curl of her hair.” Cut from her head just before I buried her.

“I want to see it.”

“It’ll wait. But I need to tell you, when we got back I found a job in an orphanage, so I could take her to work with me.”

He nodded. How to finish this story. Arkady, the black thread running through my life. “There was a man, a criminal. Someone who felt he owned me. I was taking a chance to come back. He found me.”

He stood facing the wall like a boy being punished in class.

“I was kidnapped… And one of the orphans jumped off the roof with her.”

He winced. “Why would he do a thing like that?”

“He didn’t want her to be an orphan. He didn’t want that life for her. Can you understand that?”

He pounded his big fist on the wall. “I don’t understand anything!” Now he was shouting. I could see people staring from Anton’s doorway. “I’m an idiot and I don’t understand the simplest thing!”

I turned away, so the poets couldn’t see my face. “You don’t have to understand. I understand. Every day, I think of her. Every day, I see something and think, Iskra would love this! I see a redheaded girl and can’t stop staring, thinking, How old would she be now…”

Suddenly Genya’s fury melted and he threw those arms around me. “Come to the Astoria with me,” he said. “There’s decent food, hot water. You could wash up, wash your clothes.”

I didn’t give a damn about my comfort, about my clothes. “I buried her at Novodevichy Cemetery. Next to someone else’s grave.”

“Come with me to Moscow,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Marina.”

I remembered how Anton had wept in my room. I’m moving to Moscow. Anton, who had stayed with me through the terrible nights. Anton, who would not have ridden off on the Red October. “I’m living with Anton now,” I said. I moved away from him. Such a fantasy, to think that we could be together again. We’d been through too much, both of us.

He laughed, once, then realized I wasn’t joking.

I couldn’t leave Anton. I had found a home here. I began to recite:

He leaned against the wall listening, hung his head. “Forgive me.” I put my hand on his shoulder, to say farewell, and left him there, as I disappeared into the labyrinth of the House.

54 Sea Ice

Pung. Pung. The windows shook. The sound rolled through, the echoes lasting until the next shock arrived. A thunder more thunderous than anything I’d heard from Pulkovo Heights that night in the sniper’s nest on Moskovsky Prospect. It sounded like dinosaurs pounding the earth. I kept thinking it would stop, but it kept going. Pung PungpugnpungPUNG.

The battle for Kronstadt had begun. Anton came down to my room, lay next to me on the bed, and we listened, helpless. Trotsky, my Trotsky, our Trotsky, Flame of the Cirque Moderne, Savior of the Revolution, was bringing a message to revolutionary Kronstadt. Unconditional surrender.

And the sailors were answering.

We counted seconds the way Seryozha and I used to count thunderclaps, the seconds between the flash and the rumble. But tonight’s awful black blossoms of sound were too close to count. They overlapped like an evil bouquet and would not stop.

All the night long we lay in bed listening to its dreadful music. How could anyone bear this, the force, the power? I tried to picture the battle as Pasha had painted it for me. Downy-faced boy cadets and Red soldiers marching over the ice, no cover except that of night and the storm. Shells the size of pigs weighing a ton apiece let loose from the Petropavlovsk, crashing into the ice as they crawled across. The deafening barrage, the crack of sea ice. Their terror as the Red soldiers broke through in the dark, the upturning floes delivering them to their deaths in a sea liquid and voracious under its deceptive crust.

And on the island—the Kronstadt sailors. How alone they would be in the dark, firing on men they had fought beside during these long years, who returned their fire with guns dragged onto the ice, or perhaps firing from the shore. The awful loneliness of the ice-locked ships. Only the men and their guns were free, and free to die, as perhaps all of us would. If only spring would come in time, the ships would be free to move about. They could head to sea, and return for battle. The troops could not get close enough to attempt the island. I prayed for warm weather. It had happened before, in February 1917. How long could they hold out like this—alone, with the full force of the Red Army pitted against them? The land forces could resupply, but Kronstadt had what it had.

Red against Red. It sickened me like a boat in heavy seas, pitching and rolling. I could not lie still. Pung. Pung pung Pung. POMpompom. I blew out the lamp. Anton lay curled around me in the small bed. “Are you sleeping?”

“No.”

Between percussions, snow sizzled on the glass. A vicious night. I took his hand, laced my fingers into his. I could hear him breathing.

POMpomPOM.

“What did you say to Genya last night?”

“I said we were together.” I rested my head on his shoulder.

And that was enough for him.

PungPungPungPung.

Around five a.m., I sat up on one elbow. Anton had fallen asleep. He was snoring. Something had changed. I jostled him. “Anton, wake up.”

“What.” He tried to rouse himself, rubbing his eyes.

“Shh. Listen.” It was the sound of no sound. The snoring of Shafranskaya next door was the only thing that let me believe what I was not hearing. We waited. Five minutes. Ten.

I lay on my back and gazed out at the streetlight. The storm still howled, but that was all. What had happened? Had the army retreated? I felt the urge to cross myself, but resisted. It would have alarmed Anton. “Trotsky’s killed them.” I could feel hysteria rise up in me like an uncoiling snake. “Oh God, please let it not be so.” Such bravery, these Saint Georges, slashing at the dragon’s breast with a hero’s short knife, only to be struck by its tail.

Anton held me, tight. “You don’t know. All we know is that the shooting’s stopped,” he whispered into my hair. “They could be reloading. They could be negotiating. Lenin could have radioed in. They might have seen Christ in snowshoes. You just don’t know.”

But what if they’d lost? All the Argonauts. Their bright summer sails. Everything that was good and clean and strong. The pain sat in my chest like a sharp-toothed rat. Around dawn, I fell into an exhausted sleep. Anton never let go of my hand.

We woke at about noon. Now I thought maybe I’d been wrong. These days, I always expected the worst. It was possible it was just as Anton had said. A cease-fire. Negotiations. I got out of bed and rearranged my clothing, my coat, donned my hat. The blizzard raged. “Someone knows what’s happened. Someone’s got to.” I went out into the corridor. “Anybody know what happened? Did they take Kronstadt?”

Slezin shook his head. Grin, the old eccentric who roamed the corridors to escape the cold of his room, didn’t know. Anton appeared, dressed, his hair in every direction, and we went down to the canteen, where the residents looked grim and haggard from the night’s bombardment. Here was Gumilev, alone at a table by the wall. He crossed his legs and went on reading a manuscript, making marks in the margins, avoiding looking at me.

“Does anybody know whether they took Kronstadt?” Anton asked.

Kuzmin regarded me pityingly. “Nothing but threats,” he said. “But wouldn’t there be a parade if the Bolsheviks won? We’d know, I’m sure.”

We sat with our mugs of tea. I took my last bread from my pocket, gnawed on the corner, choking on my tears. I smacked the hard heel on the table, trying to crack it. “Somebody’s got to know.”

Gumilev shot me a warning look.

“We’ll go ask Genya,” Anton volunteered. “He’s got to know something by now.”

Ask Genya whether Kronstadt had held? “Why would he tell us? He’s working for them.”

Anton shrugged. “That’s why he’d know.”

It was true—Genya was working at ROSTA. And he was living at the Astoria, the First House of the Soviet, the very nostrils of the dragon. Across the room, Gumilev turned the pages of his paper, pretending that the fate of the Kronstadters was nothing to him. That strange man.

55 ROSTA

We hurried along Bolshaya Morskaya, steeling ourselves before we were hit by the full force of the blizzard in St. Isaac’s Square. I could barely see the lights from the Astoria glowing through the swirling white, fortified by a new machine-gun outpost manned by grim, no doubt miserable sentries. A picture that illustrated better than anything the isolation of the Bolsheviks from the people of Petrograd. As propaganda, it failed completely.

We leaned into the wind, clutching tightly to each other, heaving ourselves forward, fighting for each step. Only the vaguest outline of St. Isaac’s vast dome impressed itself through the snowstorm. I felt the presence of the besprizorniki, huddled even now on the porch of the cathedral. God help them, or someone. But today I could do nothing but press on.

It was a relief to enter the relative shelter of narrow Pochtamtskaya Street. So much snow fell you couldn’t see the post office arch connecting one building to the next. Here was ROSTA: a three-story stone edifice housing the Bolshevik propaganda machine, the indefatigable supplier of posters that filled the windows of a hundred empty shops with cleverly stenciled figures in folk fashion or futurist boldness, with short chastushki couplets telling us to brush our teeth, or showing how Lenin would sweep the globe of capitalists and imperialists.

Now the windows exhorted,

I could see the delight of starving workers, hurrying to work longer shifts for no extra pay or rations. But I knew the artists who’d screened these posters, week after week, Sasha and his friends. And they did liven up the empty shops, selling revolutionary hopes, though people would have preferred bread. But all the cheerful cartoons in the world wouldn’t stir one starving worker to join a strike group of exemplary labor.

ROSTA: Rossiskoye Telegrafnoye Agentstvo. I was tired of acronyms, which to others seemed the height of modernity. Life was so swift now, no one had time for full words. Narkompros. Sovnarkom. We had ours too—Disk. But I never used it. The House of Arts seemed the last mountain ridge, representing a geological formation underneath it, so different from a rampant weed like ROSTA or a fast-moving train like Proletcult. You didn’t want a sanctuary with an acronym. You didn’t want a lover with a number.

Anton pushed the doors open—outer, inner. The lobby seethed with noise, with purpose, hornets buzzing angrily, the feel of the telephone exchange but even more frenzied, more important, it was half telegraph, half news agency. I could not imagine what it was like in calmer times. But then again, when had there been calmer times? Not since 1914. Typewriters beat out staccato rhythms, telephones jangled, people rushed around with papers in their hands—“people” the way Blok had described them, self-important, impatient, without a moment for humanity, their own or anyone else’s. Soviet young ladies, official-looking Bolsheviks, clerks and more clerks. The glances they cast us would have suited horses or lampposts. While our factories were as empty as tombs, the great machinery still, the furnaces cold, tended by a few silent ghosts, a real skeleton crew, the feverish business of Soviet news hummed like the Ford Motor Company.

All I wanted to know was what were they saying about Kronstadt, and, if I could learn it, what was actually happening on that ice-bound island. I mourned the closure of the Vikzhel club. It made me sick to be here, trespassing into the cavern of the dragon and its treasures. I could smell its stink, its sulfurous breath, but I had to know about the silence of the guns. Had the sailors survived? Had they won? I could not read the faces—they only looked sharp and professional. How could we ever find Genya in a hive like this?

Anton walked to a high counter where a long-chinned woman scanned a newspaper, circling with a blue pencil. “Excuse us,” he said. “We’re looking for the poet Gennady Kuriakin.”

She didn’t even look up.

“He told us to meet him here.”

She glanced at him, reluctantly. Saw him, saw me, and went back to her paper. He bent over the counter like a giraffe over the fence of a zoo. “What do I need to do, send a telegram?” he persevered. Down the counter, two Soviet young ladies giggled, watching him try to engage the newspaper marker. I slid down to my Soviet sisters, one a bleachy blonde, the other a brunette with makeup as thick as a fresco. “You’re not hiding him under the counter are you? Big handsome poet, about twenty-three? Just up from Moscow?”

“Sure.” The brunette pretended to search under the counter. “Come out, handsome. We need you to rearrange the furniture.”

The blonde giggled, hid her mouth. They reminded me of the girls at the telephone exchange. The tragedy of last night seemed not to have touched them. Men fighting for the fate of the revolution were hardly as interesting as the arrival of an attractive man from Moscow. “What floor’s he on?” I asked the brunette. She seemed the leader. “Or wouldn’t you know, stuck down here with the babas?”

Anton was getting nowhere with the supervisor.

The brunette glanced toward the hall on the right. “In the radio room. Tell him to come out when he’s done. Valya wants him to move something for her.”

“Shut up,” said the blonde and they had another giggle.

I linked my arm into Anton’s, pulling him away from his unfulfilling negotiations with the sour-faced woman. “He’s in the radio room.”

“Hey, thanks for the help,” he told the woman, and was treated to a sneer worthy of Anton himself.

We asked a comrade copyboy the way, found the stairs, where we had to watch our step, dodging people coming down—so strange, their feverish energy. I imagined Moscow was like this all the time, like a consulate of the future. We passed a vast room of clattering telegraph operators, finally finding the radio room. It was jammed with men and women, standing, arms crossed, faces grim and straining, listening to a crackling broadcast through a tarnished gramophone horn while a radioist with headphones adjusted dials on a wireless.

A tinny voice emerged from the phonograph bell: “The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement of the human personality. The power of police-gendarme monarchism passed into the hands of usurpers, the Communists, who brought to the laborers, instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chambers of the Cheka…”

It was Kronstadt, radioing the mainland! Haranguing the Bolsheviks. They’d survived! No wonder these apparatchiks were seething. These “people.” Free men were speaking to them in the voice of unconquered Kronstadt! I struggled to keep my face a mask. I wanted to burst out laughing, I wanted to dance a pirouette! They would have torn me to shreds. As it was they shouted taunts and curses at the disembodied voice rising like fragrance from the flower of the bell. “They have done this for the sake of preserving a calm, unsaddened life—for the new bureaucracy of Communist commissars and bureaucrats! With the aid of bureaucratic trade unions, they have tied the workers to their benches, made labor not a joy but a new serfdom. The protests by peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings—”

“Spontaneous, my wrinkled pants,” said a man with cropped gray hair.

“Ask General Kozlovsky, you White swine,” shouted a slender woman, mopping her face with a red handkerchief. Flaunting the symbol of revolution without the thing itself. Sausages painted on wood.

“I can’t listen to this tripe,” said a small bald man. “I need some air.”

He left, and two more clerks pressed in, avid to hear. But I was the only one rejoicing. Free Kronstadt stands firm! I wanted to shout from the roof. Wake up, Petrograd! The moment is now!

Anton glanced about us with barely disguised panic, sweating. We were so much more ragged than the rest of these comrades, surely we would be discovered forthwith. He lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of emergency, indicating the door with his head. But I was savoring every word that emerged from the brass horn of the radio. This was history. I was going to drink it in to the last drop.

I imagined the sailors on their ships, gathered together, writing these words. Pasha and his mates. Laughing, hunching over their papers. I prayed that the people of Petrograd could hear this. Somewhere there must be secret wireless receivers in basements and back rooms. How dangerous it must be for them. If they were caught, the Chekists would say they were transmitting to the Whites, forming a counterrevolutionary cabal inside the city.

“Let’s go,” Anton said under his breath.

But I was not budging. I wouldn’t miss this for a tsar’s ransom. I stood mesmerized by the boldness of the broadcast. We hadn’t heard anyone speak out like this since October 1917. “They pretend to make concessions: in Petrograd Province they remove the antiprofiteer roadblock detachment. Assign ten million in gold for purchase of produce abroad.”

I’d heard this rumor, that the Bolsheviks were making concessions to the workers in exchange for a return to work. But ten million rubles? That could purchase a lot of food. Would starving workers hold out, or could they take it and still stand their ground?

“And how much are you getting from the Entente?” a man with bags under his eyes shouted at the speaker. “From the émigrés?”

I couldn’t look at him, I might scream in his face. How could anyone think the Kronstadt sailors were on the payroll of the Whites? How could they think this was coming from anyone but the beautiful red heart of the Baltic Fleet? Krasniy, krasiviy. Red and beautiful, one and the same. Anton stared at me, his eyes rounded like railway warning lights.

“Who the hell are you?” The man in leather suddenly noticed us. “Do you have permission to be in this room?” He narrowed his piggy eyes. People turned to stare. “I don’t know you.”

Before I could find words, Anton leapt in. “We’re looking for Gennady Kuriakin. Hero of the agit-train Red October. For an interview in the Art of the Commune. The comrades downstairs told us he was here.” He’d always been quick on his feet.

“Moskovsky poet,” said one of the intellectual-looking men, thick glasses, frizzy hair. “The big one.”

“I know, I know,” said the leather-clad man irritably. “But you see him here?”

“He’s in Propaganda, working on a broadcast,” said the bespectacled apparatchik.

Now a different voice came through the radio’s megaphone like a tarnished morning glory, a younger voice, hearty and brash. “Greetings to the International Women of the World!”

It was International Women’s Day! March 8. Four years to the day from when the revolution began. How could I have forgotten? Because there were no parades, no speeches. They didn’t dare, the symbolism was too strong. “We the people of Kronstadt, under the thunder of cannons, under the explosions of shells sent at us by the enemies of the laboring people—” I liked that under the thunder… Poetic. Perhaps it was one of my students, or Gumilev’s. “We send our fraternal greetings to you, working women of the world!”

“Well, the working women say nuts to you, Kronstadt scum!” said a thin woman in a thin sweater.

Kronstadt scum?! It was all I could do not to slap her face. I killed better men than myself and for what? Had these people been completely wiped clean of memory? The Kronstadt sailors were the midwives of the revolution, the soul of it. It made my heart swell with pride to hear: “We send greetings from Red Kronstadt, from the Kingdom of Liberty. We wish you fortune, to all the sooner win freedom from oppression and coercion. Long live the Free Revolutionary Working Woman! Long live the Worldwide Social Revolution!”

For the first time in four years International Women’s Day had not been greeted by celebrations, factory holidays, parades. Kronstadt had shown us what had become of that revolution—their resistance had stripped the skin from the body of the state. Everything but power and the will to survive had been left by the side of the road. Anton was begging me. Let’s go!

“Go back to your mother, you son of a whore,” spat the man in black leather at the grimy brass bell as we slipped toward the door. He turned around just in time to catch us leaving. “Hey! You! Art of the Commune. I want to talk to you.” But we were already gone.

I was walking on air, following Anton down the long noisy hall. I trotted up and grabbed his arm. “I don’t need to find Genya. It’s okay, we can just go.” Glass-paned doors ranged on both sides of us, from which we heard typing, ringing telephones.

“No, we do need to.” He glanced back and I followed his gaze—the man in black leather, like Bely’s brunet spy, was watching from the door of the radio room. A woman carrying a stack of papers passed us. “Comrade, we’re looking for Propaganda.”

She shrugged, her tired eyes sliding from Anton to me in my provincial sheepskin. “This is ROSTA. I guess you’ve found it. Maybe you were looking for Pravda?” Her little joke. Pravda meant truth. “Keep going, you can smell the brimstone.”

I didn’t need to see Genya now, but we required an alibi. I already knew what I wanted to know. Kronstadt had held. Congratulations to the Women Workers of the World—what cheek!

A few more doors down, we heard someone reading in a deep, clear actor’s voice: “There is complete calm today in Petrograd. Even those factories where attacks on Soviet power occurred earlier are quiet. They’ve understood what the agents of the Entente and counterrevolution are pushing them to do—”

Anton opened the door. Cigarette smoke billowed out like steam from a banya. A burst of typewriter clatter, then Genya’s familiar voice: “Add isolated attacks. And make them small factories. Microscopic. Manufacturers of flea underwear and galoshes for mice.” He emerged from the fug like a train arriving in a station. Head tilted back, picturing the words behind his forehead. Six or seven other writers sat at desks or perched on chairs turned wrong way round, smoking and drinking glasses of tea. A regular strike group of exemplary labor.

An unshaven man at a typewriter was reading: “—an eight-thousand-person meeting of Petrograd dockworkers unanimously passed a resolution supporting Soviet power. The Petrograd garrison has not wavered…”

“The Communist Party and the Workers Are One,” Genya said, leaning over an artist who was evidently sketching a poster. “No, bigger. Kronstadt Take Warning! Yes, like that.”

“Demoralization,” said a young man whose sweater was unraveling. “Demoralization grows among the isolated sailors.” He was no older than the kursanty they’d sent against the workers. “The number of those deserting grows by the hour. General Kozlovsky is losing their trust.”

It was as if we’d walked from one world to its mirror opposite. In that other world, the radio broadcasted the triumph of Kronstadt, proof of their survival, their integrity. In this room, they were demoralized and led by some General Kozlovsky, and the party and the workers were one. What was Genya doing here, creating these lies? Safe and warm and sitting around a ROSTA office making up news out of whole cloth, when there were men like Pasha and Slava out defending the revolution with the pledge of their own blood. Men he’d known!

Now he saw us, his eyes dark with purpose. Was he ashamed of being caught at this evil work? Not at all. “Anton! Marina… Sorry but we’ve only got twenty minutes to finish this broadcast. Have a seat if you’d like. Speak up if you’ve got any ideas.”

A plain little woman read aloud from her typewriter carriage. “News from abroad shows that, simultaneous with the events in Kronstadt, the enemies of Soviet Russia are spreading the most fantastic fabrications—saying that there are disorders in Russia—”

“There aren’t disorders in Russia?” I asked Genya.

The woman glared at me.

“That’s enough,” he said sharply.

“They say the Soviet government has supposedly fled to the Crimea. That Moscow is in the hands of the rebels. That blood pours in torrents through the streets of Petrograd. There is no doubt that the actions taking place on the Petropavlovsk are part of a greater plan… to shatter Soviet international standing at the very moment when a new administration is coming in America, and is considering entering into trade relations with Soviet Russia.”

Gospodi bozhe moi. This is what ROSTA was going to say about the rebellion? “You don’t really believe that. This is a joke, right?”

“Who is this, Kuriakin, your anarchist sister?” said the unshaven man at the typewriter. “Get her out of here. We’ve got work to do.”

“Please, Marina,” Genya said. “We have fifteen minutes until the broadcast. We’ll talk later. I’ll explain. Keep going, Raika.”

The woman tugged at the hair on the nape of her neck as she read: “The spread of provocative rumors and rigging of disorders in Kronstadt clearly works toward influencing the new American president, preventing change in American policy relative to Russia.”

“Don’t forget the London Conference,” said the man at the typewriter.

“I’ve got SRs manipulating the stock markets, getting ready to dump tsarist stocks,” said an older man, looking through his notes. He had the rough skin of one who’d had terrible acne as a boy.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe what these people were doing, what Genya was allowing. They could hear with their own ears what was really going on, and in response they were fabricating something so bizarre even Lewis Carroll would hesitate. And my husband, my good Genya, was at the heart of it. This was why he was in Petrograd. He’d come up from Moscow just for this bit of dangerous propaganda, yes, like the kursanty. And he’d wanted me to come to Moscow with him, be part of this?

The artist was sketching Red soldiers and workers clambering onto a battleship, and the sailors—white outlines, the familiar stripes of their jerseys—fleeing out the other side, climbing into boats labeled ENTENTE and FINLAND.

The boy at the typewriter was pounding away. He rolled the sheet up to read: “Before us is the provocation work of Entente stockbrokers, and of agents of counterintelligence agencies working by their orders. In Russia, the main figures carrying out these policies are a tsarist general and former officers, whose activities are supported by Mensheviks.”

“That’s good,” Genya said, “but you’ve said work twice, and agents twice. Just provocation. Also that last sentence, see if you can straighten the syntax. “Just, carrying out their sabotage are the tsarist general Kozlovsky and several former officers, supported by Menshevik…” He frowned, trying to think of a good word.

“Treachery,” said the boy. Genya considered it, weighing it with his mouth.

I could not stay silent one more moment. “No one in the world will believe this. People will see through you like a pane of glass.”

Genya’s face turned to stone. I knew that face. It was the face he’d worn when he’d smashed Avdokia’s Virgin of Tikhvin. “You’d be surprised who’ll believe it,” he said through clenched teeth. “You think this is a joke? This is not a joke. This is a war.”

The unshaven man pressed on. “We’ve got ten minutes. What about those stocks?”

“But it’s a lie,” I said. Didn’t anybody care about that?

Genya squatted down on his haunches. He took my hands. “Marina, this isn’t the House of Arts. This is war, you understand? It’s got to be done.”

“We did agitprop,” I whispered, hard and fast through my knuckled throat. “But we never lied! What’s happened to you? You used to know the difference.”

His face was dark with emotion. Black fury, and what I could only hope was shame. “This is not the time.” He stood. Everyone was watching him. “Your overconcern with the ‘truth’ is petty bourgeois. We don’t have that luxury.” Playing to the room.

I stood up. “Now I put on my costume / GREAT RUS.”

I could see his lips tremble. Or maybe it was just that I knew him.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “We can talk about it then.”

The bile in my mouth, the hot tears in my eyes. I wanted to spit. “I understand everything, petit bourgeois though I am. Don’t come. You can’t justify this.”

And we left him there, with his sulfur and his guilt and the hollow clatter of Bolshevik typewriters.

56 The Kronstadt Card Is Covered!

The bombardment resumed the following day, continued the day after. A weak sun appeared, trying to break through the clouds, trying to melt the ice and free Kronstadt. Without ice, there would be nothing for the Red Army to cross upon. The fortress would be impregnable, and the ice-locked ships would be able to move out. They could come right up the Neva, shell the Astoria, and all the rats would come streaming out.

Meanwhile the streets teemed with new soldiers. I watched them with increasing dread, flooding in from the train stations, coming from all corners of the country. Not just impassioned kursanty from Moscow but provincial soldiers from far-flung regions, Uhlans and Bashkirs, the troops we’d seen in 1919. It was a familiar Bolshevik tactic—to bring in men who’d had little contact with those they were charged to subdue, in this case the fierce fighters of the Baltic Fleet. They were men with no allegiance to Petrograd and little understanding of our revolutionary past, no associations with our workers—all the less likely to be tempted by fraternization.

But they still hadn’t won. People went about their business, jumpy from the sound of the guns’ steady pungPUNGpungPUNG. The sun vanished again, and it began to snow. I headed for a talk at the House of Writers when I passed what had been Levine’s dress shop, empty since 1918. In the window, a ROSTA poster, quite attractive. It depicted a playing card, a black spade, with the simplified rendition of a Cossack soldier, knout over one shoulder. And in reverse, connected at the waist, a Kronstadt sailor with a little curly moustache and striped jersey, holding a small SR flag. Boldly stenciled, top and bottom: THE KRONSTADT CARD IS COVERED! And across it all, an enormous red RSFSR—RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. Canceling the card. I slipped on the icy pavement, falling to my knees and hands. Nobody stopped to help me up. Perhaps afraid they would fall themselves.

I got to my feet and, gasping, breathless, scrambled back toward the House of Arts. I couldn’t bear the lies. And that Genya was part of it. Those letters should have read VRKP—the All-Russian Communist Party. It wasn’t the revolution, nor Soviet Russia, but the Bolshevik prison camp. And that was the point they were making, in bright red letters—that Soviet Russia and the Communist Party were now not only inseparable but identical. No God but God.

If I were a simple proletarian, without any information from any other source, would I believe its message? That the sailors were a new iteration of the tsar’s guards? The terrible thing was, I might. That’s the way it was when public lies were repeated often enough—you crossed to the other side of the looking glass without even knowing it. And there was no other way to know what was happening. What did we have? Either the official channels or the rumor factory of the bread queue. The approaches to the factory districts were still closed. No way for information to spread, even from district to district. No way to know what was happening anywhere.

But until there were official parades down Nevsky Prospect saying the sailors had been defeated, I would not give up hope that Kronstadt could triumph. If they could just hold out until the ice melted—then it would be our parade. The final victory of the revolution.

Watch the soldiers, Kolya had said.

I stood on the curb watching a group of new soldiers being herded up Nevsky. How young they were, how confused. Mutiny, I prayed. You’re fighting against the will of the workers, against the peasant in the field, against your own brothers. I itched to know what the workers were doing. The papers said they were going back to their factories—that meat and flour had been distributed among them. Meat, flour! Didn’t that tell them something—that the Bolsheviks could come up with goods if they wanted to? If they absolutely had to? I missed the newspaper of the breadline, now that I got my rations at the House of Scholars. They knew no more there than I did. Was it working? That’s what I wanted to know. The workers’ political demands were born of desperation, and there were no parties left to fan the flame of revolt. No mass demonstrations, no organization, only the shrinking of the people back into the mist.

Mutiny was Kronstadt’s only hope. If these soldiers refused to fire… if they went over, as had happened in February 1917. Soldiers in the barracks talked. Surely they could make common cause with the strikers and sailors against the Bolsheviks. If only it weren’t Trotsky waging war against them. I knew what an orator he was. I’d read in Pravda that three hundred delegates attending the All-Russian Tenth Party Congress—experienced commissars—had left Moscow for Petrograd to stiffen the troops.

What did they need stiffening for if they weren’t softening? I tried to cheer myself as I watched the soldiers march past. Their faces betrayed a grim and haggard fatalism.

A boy on the street corner hawked the most recent edition of Pravda. I recognized him—the little cardsharp from Orphanage No. 6. So he’d become a biznissman. “Makar, do you remember me?” Either he didn’t or he was too busy selling a paper to a man wearing a woman’s coat, a tragic but not uncommon sight. His wife had died, and her coat was warmer than his.

“Makar, it’s Comrade Marina. Remember me?” The man moved away with his newspaper tucked under his arm. “With the baby?”

He looked at me now, his shiny eyes like black plums. “Sure. I remember.” He glanced away. Guilt. He couldn’t look me in the face. As if he had pushed them off that roof, instead of being one of the children gathered on the sidewalk below.

“It’s good to see you,” I said.

He glanced back at me, unsure. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You look well.” He was a clever boy, quick. I wondered… “Do you ever sell things to the soldiers? Preservativy?” Rubbers. “Marafet? Samogon?”

He brightened. “Sure. Want something? I can get just about anything if you give me ten minutes.” Oh ho, big man!

“What’s their spirit, do you think? The soldiers. Think they’re going to win?”

It felt odd, asking a child such things, but he’d never been a child really, and probably would never be an adult either, not that you’d recognize. He was something in between, a wild little beast. He looked at me cannily, gauging my intent. “Well. Let’s just say they ain’t singing, Lalalala, we get to go fight Kronstadt. Whaddya think—they’re shittin’ in their pants! Trade’s booming. Marafet gets their dicks up.”

“Any signs of mutiny?” Thank God there was no way this kid would run off and tell someone I was asking questions like that.

He wagged his head, ear to shoulder, maybe yes, maybe no. “Between you and me? I hear some of ’ems refusing to fight. There’ve been arrests. Keep your eyes open, you’ll see ’em marchin’ through here.”

Let it be true. “So they’re siding with the sailors?”

“They don’t give a shit about the sailors.” He stood up straighter—clearly having his opinion asked made him feel important indeed. “It’s the ice. They’re scared of the ice. They see their mates go under—the shells break it up, and then it’s like a whole raft turning over. Under they go, in the dark, and no one comes up once they’re down. Pffshht.” He imitated soldiers sliding off the ice into the sea. “Scared off their nuts. That’s what they talk about, how they ain’t going out there and they don’t care who shoots ’em for it. It’s so bad, the Cheka troops gotta follow ’em up with machine guns, so if anybody turns around, pow-pow-pow-POW!”

The terror of those troops. I felt pity for them as well. Scylla or Charybdis. I could see why they would take cocaine, drink, whatever might give them the courage. “What about the strikers?”

He screwed his face up, as if he’d eaten something rotten. “They ain’t got shit. Maybe they take some samogon. Want some? We’re making it in the basement of the orphanage. The janitor’s in on it.”

I could only imagine its contents. “What does Matron think of that?”

“Who’s going to tell her?” Now he was smirking. You?

“I’ll just take a newspaper.” Though the marafet sounded tempting. I folded his Pravda under my arm, broke a bit of bread off my loaf and handed it to him. “Thanks for the insight.”

“Any time.” He ate like a wolf, not even chewing. “Got any chinar?” A butt, tobacco.

“Sorry,” I said. “Listen, you hear anything interesting, any real news, come see me. I’m at the House of Arts. You know where that is?”

“On Moika. All the pinheads.”

I squeezed him softly on the arm, pipe thin under his ragged coat. “Stay well, Makar.” I began walking away.

“Listen!” He called out. “Sorry about the baby. I still think about her. He shouldn’t of done that.”

He wasn’t as hard as he pretended to be. “Let me know if anything happens.”

The canteen at the House of Pinheads was warm and smelled of cabbage soup. When I entered, I saw Genya sitting with Shklovsky and Anton and some of the studio participants at a table by the windows. My stomach lurched. I really thought I would vomit. He saw me, but after I got my soup, I selected a seat as far from him as I could get, as if he were a stinking corpse. How could Anton sit there with him after what we had seen at ROSTA? I took a bench over by the wall where we hung the obituaries, next to Alla Tvorcheskaya, the painter. I took out my bread and spoon and ate, trying to ignore their conspicuously noisy conversation.

“That Kuriakin, where do you ever see men like that anymore?” Alla sighed, her chin in her hand.

“Go to ROSTA,” I said dryly. “Because that’s where he is, writing filthy propaganda.”

“Well, I didn’t say he was an angel, darling, only that he looked like one.” And he did. It was as if a beam of light followed him around, even in this underlit room, even now. “Oh look, Poliatnikov’s on the move.”

I watched as one of the older, lesser poets, a waspish, balding little terrier of a man, the very one who’d showed off his tattered linen for Wells and embarrassed Gorky so badly, rose to his feet and headed to Genya’s table, his face flushed with emotion. Everyone stopped talking to focus on what was sure to be an amusing interlude.

They were not disappointed. “You have a nerve, coming here, showing your face among real poets. We don’t spend our days supporting the rabble. You have gall.” Spraying him with saliva. “Bolshevik lackey.”

I might have told Poliatnikov he’d picked the wrong person to try to embarrass. This wasn’t an Englishman, a foreign dignitary. This was someone who’d spent a year on an agitprop train. Genya grabbed the little provocateur by the collar of his jacket—luckily, as his shirt would have torn—and drew him close. Seated, he was nose to nose with the furious wretch. “Listen, you sniveling shirker,” loud enough that everyone in the place could hear. “Where were you during the war? Sitting here safe, hoping for Kolchak and composing sonnets about the violets of yesteryear! If you believe so much in counterrevolution, why don’t you go do something about it? Find your local branch of the National Center. I’m sure they’re still around.”

The man was writhing in his grip, his face red with fury and the hold around his neck. “You call yourself a poet? You’re nothing but a thug, like your masters. Where’s your rifle? I don’t see it. I see a suit and a well-fed Bolshevik lackey. Rabble,” he spat.

Genya pulled back his fist. Suddenly here was Gumilev, his hand on Genya’s arm. “Let him go, Kuriakin,” he said in his cool, commanding voice. “You’re making a scene.”

Genya let the little poet go, shoving him backward. He fell against the next table, as the poets guarded their soup, and sat down hard on a bench.

God. Don’t let this be happening. I sipped my tea, trying not to watch, but it was impossible not to, like two automobiles colliding in front of you. Genya had risen from his chair, and now it was him and Gumilev, taking one another’s measure. They were the same height, but what two men could be more different? Would my husband actually punch Nikolai Stepanovich, the helmsman of the House of Arts, founder of Acmeism? But when Genya was most in the wrong, that was when he was the most unreasonable, most dangerous. “Well, if it isn’t Mister Africa,” Genya said, his pose softening. “Gone on safari recently?” Referring to Gumilev’s wide travels and his poetry about them. How Genya hated everything Gumilev represented—as a man, as a poet. He despised his class, his erudition, his self-discipline, and his political affiliations.

“Don’t underline your reputation as a fatuous boor,” said Gumilev.

But Genya was not to be intimidated. He hadn’t been by my father, and he wouldn’t be now. “If I’d wanted to do that, Violets of Yesteryear would be picking up pieces of his nose.” He projected in a clear, deep voice that would have made a Shakespearean actor proud. Yes, it was Poliatnikov’s fault, the man was an unbearable gadfly, but Genya should have known where he was and how people would feel about him. “Who called who rabble? I just came in for a quiet conversation with my editor and my wife.” And to make matters worse, he gestured toward me across the room. The Acmeist’s gaze shot to where I sat cringing with Alla Tvorcheskaya, his well-shaven face registering surprise. He hadn’t known this little piece of the puzzle. Alla, too, was taking my measure, as if I’d been holding out on her, hoarding a cache of chocolates or tins of condensed milk.

Genya kept on, not even noticing the ellipsis. “Doesn’t he know what century this is? I’m not going to ask you, of course. You’re still praising the tsar and crossing yourself. Yeah, I know who you are. God knows why you’re still even here.”

“God does know,” Gumilev said and turned on his crisp, monarchist heel.

Anton glowed. There was nothing he loved better than a fight in which he wasn’t directly involved, and Shklovsky beamed at the futurist rough justice. The futurist brats settled back down in their chairs. A cloud of laughter rose from their table. I stared down at my soup and my tea and finished quickly. I didn’t want to be associated with him. I didn’t even know why Genya was here and not with his propagandists and liars back at ROSTA, or feasting on double rations at the Astoria. But I was done. I excused myself and hurried out, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. Genya Kuriakin and catfights in the canteen—I was embarrassed to be associated with him.

I lay in my bed, wrapped in my sheepskin, trying to read a copy of Leaves of Grass that Korney Chukovsky had lent me, while the shell blasts kept up their steady distant percussion. Pung. Pung. Pung. Pung. Pungpung Pung. The barrage had resumed after our visit to ROSTA, it had been going on for seven days around the clock. At night you could see the flashes from Kronstadt. The sailors weren’t getting a second to sleep. I imagined them on their icebound ships, making their brave pronouncements on the wireless, the last bit of unfiltered truth in all of Russia.

I got up, paced, stared into Bolshaya Morskaya Street—empty. Nestled into the jamb, I watched the snow fall, fall, fall. Would it ever be spring? Would it come soon enough?

A knock on the door. Fais dodo. I ignored him.

Again.

“Go away.”

But he opened the unlocked door, and the cold came in with him from the hall. His bulky presence filled the small room. He was still wearing that suit, though with a wool turtleneck and a cap now, an overcoat. Anton was tall but skinny, and Pasha lively but compact, a man who could live in the narrow confines of a ship. But Genya was a fact that you could not get around.

“Marina,” he said, closing the door. “It wasn’t my fault. You saw how he attacked me.”

Always so warm, he raised the temperature in the room just standing there. I remembered what it was to lie next to him, skin to skin. But now that I knew his purpose in coming to Petrograd, he was as appealing as rotting garbage. I could never forgive THE KRONSTADT CARD IS COVERED! These weren’t cartoons, little sailors with curled moustaches and rosy cheeks—they were lives. Pasha with his crinkly blond hair and his quiet hands. Slava, who had pulled me up atop the Red October. The revolutionary sailors, fighting for the future of Russia. I could cut his throat right now. “I’m surprised you’d trouble to announce your association with a petit bourgeois anarchist like me.”

“Don’t be mad about that,” he said, leaning against the door, as if he was going to try to keep me from running out. “What was I supposed to say? You can’t just stand in the middle of ROSTA and shout, Liar, liar, liar.”

“What should I call you, then? Savior of the Revolution?”

He swallowed, came a little closer. “You know what’s going on. It’s how the game is played. You were on the agit-train.”

“But you weren’t a liar then.” I leaned against the window, looking out at the snow, remembering how it fell after I’d seen the note from Seryozha’s commander. “You’ve gone through the looking glass, Genya.” A vicious series of artillery concussions bruised the fading afternoon. “You’re disappearing. You’re not even here. I can see right through you.”

“Don’t be like that. We’re not on opposite sides here.”

The snow changed directions, it began blowing to the west. Was it a sign?

He began sniffing about, examining the pictures, the books, hands behind his back like a man in a museum. How he had changed since 1916. No longer the yearning boy waiting his chance to show Mayakovsky his poems. No longer the hooligan, the dreamer who had given me the rings of Saturn. His awkwardness was gone. He was a statesman now, a politician, a man polished by the approval of others. Looking at him, I could feel how much I’d changed as well. We’d grown up. Layers of experience and beauty and loss had saddened that bright girl I’d once been.

“Remember that boy, who defended the thief in Haymarket Square? That brave boy, unafraid to tell the truth to the mob?” I said. “What would he have thought of the apparatchik wearing his face?”

He picked up the fox-fur hat that sat on my desk, keeping me company as I wrote, like a cat that crouches watching his mistress write a letter. He stroked the soft fur. “I remember this from the train. And that coat. You used to carry a revolver in it. You imagined yourself with crossed bandoliers, riding up on top of the train with the sailors.”

That revolver. How human paths intersected, at random, inexorably changing one another’s fate. If I’d never met this man, I wouldn’t have been so angry at my father, I wouldn’t have agreed to spy for Varvara. Papa might not have been so rash. He might have brought us out of Russia. We might be in England now.

He put my hat on, posed like a fashion model, trying to lighten the mood. “It’s all the rage in Moscow.” It looked like a small animal perched on the roof of a shed.

“Very stylish.” I gazed back at the falling snow. I didn’t want to be so at odds with Genya. But I could never forgive him for feeding his poetic genius into the ROSTA machine like meat into the grinder.

He continued his inspection of my little room—examined the shelf on which my few possessions lay, a comb, a bottle of kerosene, a sliver of soap from the Skorokhod women. My toothbrush, a gift from the sailors. He broke into a grin. “You still have this?” Chronicles of a Misspent Youth. I’d forgotten, I had borrowed it from Anton earlier that summer. The hand-cut wooden letters that Sasha had carved. I could never hate the boy who had written those poems, he was still in there somewhere, drunk with shame, a pillow over his head, knowing what the man was doing with the gift they shared. As Genya opened the yellow covers as if they would crumble to dust in his hands, I saw him again as he still was, under all this Bolshevik bluster. To think, he’d once been my conscience. He flicked through the poems as if playing with his firstborn child. “Pretty good. For a kid.”

“You weren’t a liar then.”

“And you were.” A jab, and it hurt. He’d never gotten over my leaving him for Kolya. He licked the corner of his lower lip, picked up the kettle, sloshed it. “Is this boiled? Can I at least have some tea?”

“All right, but then you have to go.” I waited for him to move away from my desk, took down two glasses, or more accurately, the porcelain cup I bought from an old lady in Kolomna and a tin one I’d stolen from the canteen.

Then he was studying my clothes, my summer dress on the hook, the wool dress from Aura, and her good wool coat—my entire wardrobe. He pressed his nose to my summer dress. Like a man smelling lilacs. “You hurt me more than I could imagine,” he said. “When I found out. About him.”

“Imagine how Russia will feel.”

He dropped the much-washed printed fabric. “What is it about these mutineers that has you so captivated? You were fine with agitprop on the Red October. Those agitkas, that wasn’t exactly the truth.”

I took the can of pine needles, pried open the top. “They were cartoons, but about something true.”

“What isn’t true? That it’s not a mutiny? That these sailors aren’t acting against the soviet, opening the door for the Whites?”

“You know that’s not what they’re doing.” I fought to check the treble of frustration sounding in my voice.

I knew the thrust of that stubborn jaw. “Oh, do I? Money’s pouring in from the émigrés, the Entente, earmarked for Kronstadt.”

“They’d never take White money.”

He slapped himself in the forehead. It sounded like a wet fish hitting a dock. “Wake up, Marina. Where else are they going to get it from? Can they turn seawater into cannon shells and Swedish ham? They’ll need funds, and that’s what’s available to them. And it’ll come with its own agenda. The sailors won’t be able to resist.”

He didn’t know them. “The people will support them. The strikers. A general strike.”

“Oh, really.” Genya went over to the window looking out onto Bolshaya Morskaya, leaned forward, theatrically cupping his hand to his ear as he would have on stage with the Theater of the Future. “What’s that I hear? Is it the sound of marching workers? The clamor of thousands for a general strike?”

The only sound was the pung of the big guns echoing off the building opposite, the shiver of the old glass in the windows, and Shafranskaya moving around in the next room, reciting a poem she was working on.

“Nobody’s coming to save Kronstadt,” he said quietly, approaching me, crouching to look into my eyes. I could smell him, his breath, his scent of hay and new wood, the same as ever. How could such a liar smell like that? His warmth, warmer than the bourgeoika. “Face it. The workers have hung them out to dry. The sailors’ll take the White money, all right. But why this sudden partisanship? Since when do you favor counterrevolutionary mutiny?” He studied me, scratching his underlip where he often found it hard to shave. There was a new opacity in his hazel-green eyes, which used to be as transparent as a sun-shot pool in a forest glade. I didn’t know what he was thinking anymore. He’d spent too long in Moscow.

“It’s not counterrevolution,” I said. “You read the resolution. It’s all the things you and I believe.”

“What we believed four years ago,” he said quietly, steadying himself, his hand on my chair. “That was a dream. Worker control. Soviet democracy. People didn’t even think the revolution would survive this long. But here we are.” He peered into my face with a slight rueful smile. “We’ve won. All we need is a chance to rebuild. And no, it’s not going to be what we’d dreamed. I’m prepared to accept that.”

I wanted to claw my own face. I wanted to howl. “Your bosses are counterrevolutionaries. Not the sailors.”

“It’s the only revolution there is.” He stood, shaking out his legs. “This is where it went. We built it ourselves. You did too. You’re as much a part of it as anybody.”

I struggled against the sense of what he was saying. I felt myself scrambling. I wasn’t a part of it, not anymore. Not since that day on the bridge, when I said no to Varvara. “Just be a poet again. You don’t need to do this.”

He studied me with his new eyes. “Varvara was right about you. You’re no revolutionary. You’re just a bourgeois girl with enthusiasms.”

I didn’t want to hear that name, ever again. “And she’s a Savonarola. Don’t you dare quote her to me.” Pung pung. Pungpungpung. I imagined how loud that was out on the gulf. Men were losing their lives on both sides because of him and her, the spacemen and the liars.

“But why the sailors, Marina? Things are always personal with you.”

“Yes. I know those men. I don’t live at the Astoria, dining with commissars and party dignitaries. I teach poetry to workers. I taught at the sailors’ club on the Admiralty docks. Those men are the very soul of the revolution.”

“The sailors’ club…” he repeated as if licking ice cream off a spoon, and I didn’t like the expression his broad face was wearing now—as if he had me all figured out. “There wouldn’t perhaps be one sailor in particular? Some handsome devil in a striped jersey?”

“That’s none of your business,” I said.

He burst out laughing. “You’re still you, aren’t you? Oh, the angelic saviors of the revolution, noble Kronstadt!” He laughed, ugly and harsh.

“Stop it, Genya.”

He held his hands up in the air, surrender, mocking me. “Oh, they’re not counterrevolutionaries, they’re preparing to die for our sins, they’re Blok’s goddamned Christ. Oh! Oh!” His arms outstretched, they almost reached from wall to wall.

Now there was nothing at all attractive about him. I knew which side I was on. Pasha or no Pasha, I would feel the same. “You know them too. How dare you print those signs, saying they’re the same as Cossacks, saying it’s a White conspiracy. You parrot. You never used to be a mouthpiece.”

“You’re incredible, you really are.” Wiping his eyes. “My God, Marina, is there nothing you wouldn’t do? I thought you were having an affair with Anton.”

I turned my back to him. Steam was rising from the kettle. I took it off the stove and splashed water on the pine needles. The air filled with the smell of forest. “You didn’t think about him when you came up here. How he must be suffering, right now, thinking I’m betraying him with you.”

That took the smile off his face.

“And if you must know, I was with the sailor first. It was Anton who came to me. Said that he’d loved me since the beginning, and he was going to leave if I couldn’t love him back.” Moscow went out of his hazel eyes, as he pictured his best friend back on Grivtsova Alley, when we were living on top of each other.

“You’re making this up. He couldn’t stand you.”

I lingered over the open kettle. The scent of pine would always recall to me that long walk through the snow to Maryino, my night under the snow in a burrow of pine boughs. “I thought so too, but it was just the impossibility of competing with you. It was unbearable to him.” A huge explosion rattled the windows. I thought they might break. The snow changed direction again, hammering at the windowpanes, building up on the sills.

“Loving you is a curse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” His voice had lost its stentorian ring. “I know. I’ve tried to kill it, but I can’t. No matter how many times I mow the field, cornflowers keep coming back up.”

Even now. What a mess, what an unholy mess. I poured the tea into the two mismatched cups. I handed him the tin one.

“Come to Moscow with me. Both of you. We’ll get away from this mausoleum, the Gumilevs and Khodaseviches. This will be over soon, and we’ll be part of Russian literature—we’ll live forever.”

“You won’t be part of it,” I said. “Look what it’s done to you. Come to Petrograd and be a poet again. Stop working for ROSTA before it kills what’s good about you.”

“I can’t,” he said, stroking his hair back. “You think I’m just a mouthpiece? I’ve thought about this long and hard. I believe in what I’m doing.”

Worse yet. “They’ve broken you,” I said. “You’re like a racehorse that’s been put to the plow. You’ll never be able to run again. Your knees are broken. What’s happened to that red horse, the red horse that was you?”

“It doesn’t matter about me,” he said. “I’ll go on. Broken kneed or not.”

“It hurts just to look at you.”

He held the cup and gingerly took a sip. I knew it was biting, sour. He made a face. “What is this?”

“Pine needles. For scurvy. The Bolsheviks take the real tea for themselves.”

He sat on my cot, holding the cup by the rim, and drank, grimacing with every swallow. “Revolutions in the mind are perfect—so long as they stay there. Nobody’s selfish, nobody’s featherbedding. But real ones have a life of their own. They work through real men, with all their warts and bad breath and selfishness. Now that it’s here, we need to see it through.”

His good suit, his handsome face. Who was the naive one? “No, we don’t. The emperor is naked, Genya. Don’t try to convince me about his suit’s sumptuous contours.”

He held the cup with his fingertips, it looked like a piece of a little girl’s tea set in his oversized hand. “Look, say you had a child—”

My eyes watered with the surprising blow.

He blanched. “No, I mean… listen. Say there’s a child. And it’s playing near the stove. And the mother—the father—says, ‘Be careful, you’re going to get burned.’ But the kid doesn’t understand burned. So the father says, ‘There’s a devil in the stove. He’s going to eat you up.’ The kid’s afraid of devils, so he stays away from the stove. That’s what I’m doing here, Marina. Keeping Russia away from the stove. Is that so bad? I could explain that the country’s about to go up in flames. There’s a peasant revolt in Tambov going on right now that’s going to make the Ukraine under Denikin look like Swan Lake. And that’s not the only mess on our hands.”

There was a revolt in Tambov? This was the first I’d heard about it. I studied him, hunched on the edge of my small bed, his forehead knuckled with care, the hot cup on his knee.

“Let’s say you did get your Soviets Without Communists. You know what that’s going to look like? Mealymouthed Mensheviks and speechifying SRs. Anarchist dreamers. They’re going to wring their hands and talk, talk, talk while the country burns down around them. Then in rides a strongman, some general—Kornilov’s still around, Wrangel, maybe Denikin himself. Urah! Someone has to restore order. This time there are no Bolsheviks around to do it. Oh, they’ll whip us back into line. Dissolve the soviets, massacre the socialists, string up the workers. They’ve got to keep the bad Bolsheviks from coming back, don’t they?”

He set the cup on the desk and came to me where I was standing at the window, put his warm hand on the nape of my neck.

“So, no, these sailors aren’t Whites. They’re every bit as noble as you think they are. But they’re opening the door. They’re going to have to take White money, the revolution will be lost, and everything we’ve done will have been for nothing. It will just be an interlude in a history book, like the Paris Commune. The four years of the socialist experiment in Russia.”

No. No, I would not listen. I would put wax in my ears like the sailors on Odysseus’s ship. I turned away, but he held my shoulders, turned me back. He would force me to see his point of view.

“I can’t let that happen, Marina. People get lost in the niceties. So for now there’s got to be a devil in the stove and Whites behind the Kronstadt revolt.”

“Don’t touch me!” I shoved him off. The Genya I knew would never speak of devils in the stove. I remember how he once smashed an old woman’s icon. He hated priests and superstition, anything remotely fabricated. “What happens when your child finds out his father’s lied to him? That it’s all shit?”

Genya’s voice, soft and deep in my ear. “He’ll be grateful that his father kept him safe when he was too young to understand. The grown man will understand why the father did it.”

“No! He’ll wonder what else his father lied to him about.” I took his cup and opened the stove door, threw the remnants of the tea into the fire.

“He’ll have been kept safe, and life will go on.”

He sounded just like an old man. “Is that the son you want? A sheep? A gullible ignoramus? Superstitious, terrified of devils? Don’t you want your son to demand a say in his own life?”

He sighed and sat down on the sagging bed, his long legs taking up much of the floor space, cradling his head in his big hands. “The people don’t care about politics. They just want to eat. They want boots, and fuel. They’ll get concessions too. They’ll be able to go out and bring food in. And, trust me, they’ll say, Ah, the Bolsheviks aren’t so bad after all. You better give up hope for your sailor. The days of anarchist communes are over.”

How had we ended up on opposite sides of this thing? “Even in America they couldn’t get away with this.”

How he hated even the name, America. “You don’t think capitalists have monopoly power in America? You don’t think when the workingman comes up against power in America they don’t crush him like a flea under their fingernails? You and I are living in the first workers’ state on earth. It’s already a miracle.”

“It’s not a workers’ state. When a shipment of boots comes into the shops, it’s set aside for the Bolsheviks. Meat. Butter. Cloth, sugar, all of it. Is this what the civil war was fought for—corruption? Elitism? A new ruling class? They walk around like grand dukes. People hate them. They’re not workers. Do you see them at the lathe? Or gluing shoes?”

He grabbed my hand as I passed, stopping me, pulling me to him. He craned his neck to peer into my face, like a child. Those hazel eyes I once loved. “But think what we do have. Yes, I hate their pushiness, too, and I hate what we have to say about the sailors. I know them too, better than you do. They’re good, brave, loyal—and wrong. They have no plan, they’re not thinking it through. I’m not going to let them play the piper and march the revolution off a cliff.”

I yanked my hands away. “Why won’t the Bolsheviks listen to the people, then? Why are they surrounding themselves with a wall? They fire off pronouncements—Makhno and his anarchist troops, our brothers in the Ukraine! Then, once they’ve served their purpose, it’s Makhno! Traitor! Counterrevolutionary! Why can’t you be for the revolution and question the people at the top? Why can’t there be other voices?” Pung. Pungpung pung.

“Why not free ice cream and puppet shows and carriage rides?” he shouted, picking up my chair and slamming it back down again. “Give me your list. I’ll see what I can do!”

He turned around in my tiny room like a horse in a stall. There was no room to pace. He threw up his hands like an actor on stage, almost burning himself on the stovepipe. “I don’t know, Marina. I’m just a poet. But I’ll tell you one thing—Lenin won’t be forced by the Kronstadt sailors. Or trade unions or the Entente. Or Blok, or you or me. He’s doing what he needs to do to make sure the revolution survives.”

Lenin reminded me of Ukashin. The same mysterious philosophy, which somehow covered every situation. I said, “I’ve seen four years of Lenin, and if you ask me, he’s got no more plan than the sailors. He finds a way to justify everything. But his only program I can see is that he’ll do what’s best for the party, to make sure they come out on top. Just like in 1918 when they left us to the Germans.”

Genya toppled back onto my bed with a groan. I thought the whole thing would collapse under him. “This is giving me a headache. Come, sit with me for a while. Don’t talk. Just rub my forehead. Then I’ll go.”

His silky tawny-colored hair, like rye in the sun.

“The next time we meet, we’ll meet as strangers,” I said.

He turned over and gazed at me, as if he hadn’t heard me all along, as if I had said something completely surprising. “It’s a lost cause. Can’t you accept that?”

“I don’t believe in anything anymore. Not in the revolution, and not in you. It ends now.” It was as great a shock to me as to him. I suppose I thought we’d always be together in some way. He had kept saying, Wake up, and I finally had. Pasha and the sailors, that hope… but I saw that the Bolsheviks had gotten there first. They’d given the people food, but no power. They would never give them power. And the people would be happy with the food. They were starving and beaten down and hypnotized by lies. The people wouldn’t rise to save Kronstadt. The sailors, loyalists, idealists, Victory or Death. They were doomed.

I sat down next to Genya. This monster we’d created, out roaming the streets. We had done this. We had marched for it, we had spoken out for it. I had given up everything, for this. My family, my country. The enormity of it. We sat together, Genya and I, like people after a funeral. We were burying our best dreams, in separate graves. Two little graves. We sat side by side while the snow fell, covering the raw earth in white.

57 The Turn of the Tide

The Squared Circle group huddled in Anton’s room, cold enough to freeze fish, but everyone came, all but Oksana and Petya, who were caught on Vasilievsky Island. I was reading the Eliot to them line by line, translating roughly into Russian, which Anton jotted down for later refinement. He’d decided that Eliot could be extremely important for us. I wasn’t sure if it was that vital, or whether it was his way to distract me from the horrors of the moment. Eliot had no political perspective that I could see, except for a cynical and depressing one, a poetry of aftermath, which suited my mood perfectly.

The door, already ajar, began to move. “Comrade Marina?” The face that appeared in the crack of the door was somewhat lower than expected—the orphan Makar, in his cap and lice-ridden rags, his bright dark eyes. Makar took in the poets, the books, the scissors on the desk, the typewriting machine, with the quickness of a magpie. His boots didn’t match. “You said to come,” he said. “If anything changed.”

Anton lifted his peaked eyebrow like a boomerang. “How’d you get in here?” The presence of the orphan terrified him. He had no contact with the streets anymore, he didn’t know anyone who wasn’t familiar with Khlebnikov or Kruchonykh—meaning all of humanity except for the people in this room.

Makar indicated the door with his head, and I followed him.

“They’re stopping Communism,” he said in the hall. “Come on.”

I pulled my scarf up over my face as I tried to keep up with the poorly clad boy scampering ahead. Let us go then, you and I… The day was sullen, maybe 10 below, the hairs in my nose froze. My words were a cloud of white as I followed him at a half run. “Where are we going?” Once again I said a prayer of thanks to Aura Cady Sands and her sturdy boots.

“Can’t you go any faster?”

I didn’t have the strength. I was fighting for air, huffing like a surfacing whale. He must be taking something, cocaine most likely. He turned around and fairly danced in front of me, trotting backward, his eyes glassy black with excitement. “It’s over. They told the soldiers this morning. It’s Bolsheviks without Communism! You think I’m kidding? They’re letting the markets in. Free trade. No more grain seizures. It’s all going to be out in the open. No arrests.”

I stopped, stooped over, holding my knees like an old woman trying to catch my breath. “Who announced this? Is it in the papers?” Nobody at the House of Arts had heard anything. Free trade in Soviet Russia? What happened to He who trades in the free market, trades the freedom of the people? It was on all our ration tickets. It had to be some kind of Bolshevik trick, more propaganda to disarm the workers and defuse support for Kronstadt.

“It was Lenin said it. Old Egghead himself, swear to God. This morning.” Makar’s skinny bones jerked with excitement, his black cropped orphan’s head under his poor cap. “They’re going to let everybody buy what they need. The peasants can sell. No more Cheka, no more arrests. I’ll be a biznissman. Unless the sailors win. They say the sailors are the only ones holding it back.”

Ice in my lungs, winter’s hand wrapping itself around my chest. How cynical. How brilliant. “But the sailors are supporting the strikers. This is exactly what they called for.”

“The strikers are against them now. They want the market. They want the food. The soldiers aren’t scared anymore. They’re ready to die for the good of the people. You said to watch them. They’re leaving. Let’s go!”

I followed him in and out the small lanes and snow-filled courtyards. He knew every back way, past Haymarket Square, so huge and bare it could have been a field. Would there be a market here again? If Communism was over, there was no sign of it. Only soldiers marching, a new firmness on their faces. Oh God.

Makar led on, crossing the Fontanka at Moskovsky. We were heading into the soldiers’ district, the old Ismailovsky barracks. The garrison of Petrograd.

It was huge, monstrous, ugly, a world unto itself—street after street of long old buildings, stone and brick, a whole quarter boiling with soldiers. Soldiers called after me, laughter followed. “Hey, sweetheart, let’s have a quick one.” “Hey, Katya, over here!” That one clasping his crotch. Laugh all you want now, bratya. You won’t be laughing when you cross the ice.

Makar disappeared into the courtyard of an old brick barracks with shutters on the windows like a stable. I held my breath and entered. In the yard, soldiers lounged, assembling bundles, checking rifles, stowing grenades and ammunition, sharpening bayonets, smearing boots with something out of a big bucket. Couldn’t be lard, they would have eaten that. Wax? The boots had seen many miles of marching, but their clothes looked warm enough. Soldiers, everywhere you looked. Some knelt in prayer. My God, how many thousands had been assembled in Petrograd for this assault. Twenty? Forty?

I kept close to my young guide, who led me up to a group of soldiers packing provisions into knapsacks. Preparing for battle. Money was exchanged for small packets, marafet no doubt, each man scanning the yard with quick eyes. They pulled out tin cups and the boy furtively filled them from an old canteen he had tucked under his coat. The men drank it off in single swallows, coughed, laughed. I could smell the fruity alcohol of the samogon. Their accents recalled those I had heard in Izhevsk. They’d brought these troops in from the Urals.

“How much for her, bratik?” a reedy-necked redheaded soldier asked, his cheeks flushed with the samogon.

“This is my aunt. She’s a teacher. She wants to know about the proclamation,” said Makar. “The new one, about the peasants.”

“A teacher, eh?” said a sturdy man sitting on a crate. “How would this little criminal know you, then?” He held out his cup for another drink.

“He said they’re ending the grain seizures. Is that true?” I didn’t want to get involved with a lot of chitchat down here.

“You know, little teacher,” said the reedy soldier, breathing out a great scroll of white vapor. “I could use a quick fuck. A hand job. I’ve got five hundred rubles—”

“Shut up,” said the sturdy man, a wide face like a wall, with clever small eyes. “She’s a teacher. Have respect.”

“He says there’s going to be a return of capitalism, that Communism is over,” I said.

“He said that? Stupid runt,” said the soldier, sticking out his foot to try to trip Makar, who was pouring out samogon. “The soviet’s giving ’em what they been askin’ for is all. Lettin’ city folk bring in food if they want, a tax in kind for us peasants. I’m a peasant myself. From Okhansk.” Name, region, district, profession. “We pay the tax, we do what we want with the rest. And the workers can stay home and do something useful instead of crawling all over the countryside stealing our food. I’m happy to sell ’em what they want, if I can set the price. Better they get back to work and make us some boots, eh? Then we’ll have real Communism. We just gotta stop these Kronstadt bastards from wrecking it. They want to start the war all over again.”

This was wrong in so many ways. “But that’s exactly what the sailors want!” I said, trying not to cry. “They made just those demands. The end to the requisitioning, tax in kind, bringing in food, all of it.” Lenin was acceding to the sailors’ terms. So why was he sending all these men out to crush them? “It’s the Petropavlovsk Resolution—didn’t you see it?”

He screwed his eyes narrower. His affable demeanor melted away. “What are you, some kind of agitator?”

Why hadn’t Pasha given me some copies? I could hand them out, show them. “No. I just—”

Makar quickly interrupted me, taking my arm. “She’s just trying to understand. We oughta move on, Auntie. They got their work to do.”

“Sailors,” said another soldier, and spit on the ground. “Sit around on their lazy asses dreaming all day, polishing brass. Fishing. Got too much time on their hands, nothing better to do than hatch up conspiracies and pal around with foreigners.”

The others laughed and nodded.

The first soldier’s wide face still held its rage. “We ain’t gonna let sailors take away everything we fought for. Four years, now they want to piss all over it.”

It was terrible, terrible. How could I convince them? But even if I had a copy of the resolution, would they read it? Would they believe me? “They only listened to the strikers. They’re trying to support the people. The same thing as you.”

The way they were all looking at me now, uneasy. Their leader spoke again. “Hey, we listen to our commissars, not some anarchist school lady who’s about this close to getting her ass kicked.” He puffed away like a stove. His cheeks were very pink. “Hey, get her out of here. And bring us some real women. Maybe we’ll leave a few brats behind before we head out for the ice.” He held out his cup one more time, and the other men followed suit. “Get her out of here before I hand her around to the boys.”

“How about a kiss, Teach?” the reedy-necked one asked, his face hovering next to mine. “One kiss? I don’t want to die without having kissed my last woman.”

“You mean your first woman,” said a soldier with a beard, who got a round of laughter.

The redhead shrugged, ducked his head, but his eyes pleaded. His politics mattered to him, the approval of his comrades, but his longing mattered more. He might kill Pasha tonight, but he looked so sad, his freckled face, eyes the sludge green of the Volga. All soldiers were the same in the end. They killed, they died. They fought for things they believed, or that others believed, gave their spark to an idea, a flag, a movement, brotherhood, a notion of justice, a leader. Never knowing which board they were being played upon. Maybe I was an anarchist after all. So I kissed him. The taste of the samogon, of sour breath, of fear.

Makar tugged at my coat. An official-looking man was striding forcefully toward us in a long greatcoat. We slipped away and ran, through another courtyard, skidding on the ice, into a second yard, all the way back across the Fontanka.

A ferocious battle began that night, like nothing we had heard yet. The rattling of the windows was fierce, even in Anton’s room facing Nevsky. Dust filtered down from the bookshelf over my head. I lay on the bed watching reflected flashes of light in the odd floor-level window. I felt sick. I should have stayed in Kambarka. Anything to be away from this. I was going to lose my mind. Everything I had believed, everything beautiful and heroic, was fighting for its life out there on the ice.

Anton brought me a bowl of soup and held it for me while I drank. Sweet Anton—who would have guessed? They’ll never make it. I kept pushing the thought away, as if my thoughts would make it come true, though I knew my mind had no such powers, or my daughter would still be alive. I was powerless to keep anything from happening. There were too many soldiers, and again they believed, convinced they were riding the magical red steed into the golden dawn—not an iron train to an icy destination.

I rolled and sweated and shook. I couldn’t help remembering what Genya had said. I heard his words in my head, like bullets fired in a stone room. Kronstadt too was its own red steed. The sailors would end up taking money from somewhere, or lead a peasant revolt of the bloodiest kind, and civil war would begin again.

History was a ravaged plain, no hill, no tree, no hiding place. No quiet forest glade or rocky cove in which you could build a refuge.

A book fell off the shelf, loosened by the continuous thunder of 350 millimeter artillery. Those soldiers, fortified by marafet and delusions of the future of Russia, were marching on Kronstadt as the ice cracked beneath them. I wish I’d bought some of that marafet myself, or a canteen full of samogon, so I could stop imagining those boys from the Urals and men from Astrakhan, converging on the island and the helpless icebound ships. Every blast and shudder told of their fates and that of the sailors. We shall not hear those bells again…

Anton lay down with me and recited Apollinaire’s Alcools, and Khlebnikov’s “Rus’ You Are but a Kiss in the Frost,” and “The Presidents of Planet Earth,” while I shivered and moaned, my head on his shoulder.

At ten in the morning, March 18, the rumbling of the guns ceased. I waited for it to begin again, but—nothing. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty. Anton made tea, brought me soup, fed it to me, as I could not hold a spoon, I was shaking so badly. Finally I sent him out into the street to see if he could find out what had happened. He returned two hours later with a Petrogradskaya Pravda full of the news of the Tenth Party Congress, the abolition of restrictions on trade, the tax in kind, and more lies about SR manipulation of the world stock markets, framing Kronstadt as a blind.

So the new policies were true, or true enough that the spacemen were willing to put them in black and white, willing to be held to them—at least until the next sharp turn, when we’d all have to hang on to the tram for dear life. I remembered what Varvara had said about Lenin, back when they signed the peace with Germany: Lenin used to be a revolutionary. But now he’s just plugging the dikes like the little Dutch boy. Just another politician.

The silence continued. I listened until my ears hurt. I listened like an old woman in a darkened house, waiting for footsteps.

It wasn’t until eight that night in the crackling frost that we heard the first troops returning. Oh God, they were singing “The Internationale.” I opened the big window, not caring I was letting the heat out, and shouted down into the street as the soldiers marched by, their chins high, their step sure. “What is the fate of Kronstadt?”

A soldier heard me. “Taken,” he shouted back.

The revolution was over. On March 18, 1921, it was pronounced dead. All I heard was the hollowness of “The Internationale,” with its bold promises. I could hear the devil laughing. How many Kronstadt dead? I couldn’t exactly shout that out the window. I closed it, noticing a new crack from the force of the bombardment. I thought of sixteen thousand sailors—would the army have accepted their surrender? Would the sailors have offered it?

Watching the soldiers head back into their districts, squadron after squadron, bursting with their triumph, I felt like a citizen of a defeated nation, watching the victors roll in. I imagined Pasha in a long row, his hands tied behind him. They would have dragged him up out of the hold onto the deck. Lined him and his comrades along the rail. Pasha wouldn’t look away. He would try to talk reason to them—they’d make him turn around. Then the signal given, a stream of machine-gun fire like the stitches of a sewing machine. And down they would go, wheat before the scythe. The limp bodies thrown overboard, but first, the soldiers would search them, confiscating weapons, souvenirs, money, boots… They fought on ice, in sandals…

I had not given Pasha anything of mine to die with.

Never, never to sail, racing on the blue, wind cooling our bronzed faces, our work-toughened hands. His Aegean eyes, his calloused feet in the rigging, his head in the sky.

The world was a net, a noose, a cell with a judas hole in the door. Nothing would escape it—not a beam of light, not a chime, not a whisper. The door of the world clanged shut that night. I heard the key turn in the lock.