Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

58 Pashli

A flower shop opened on Liteiny. A beauty parlor in a courtyard off the Fontanka. Like dandelions pushing their way up between the stones of an empty square. On the Neva, the ice was beginning to break. Too late. It was all too late. Too late, this shop in Gostinny Dvor, filled with ducks and chickens. Where had they come from, these miraculous fowl, when we hadn’t seen meat in years? A bakery appeared on the Moika Embankment—not one of the official ration stations barely able to supply ticket holders with scant ounces of bad bread, no. This one’s tantalizing windows attracted us like clouds of ghosts to peer in at rounds of golden-topped breads, flour-dusted white rolls, rogaliki, and raisin buns. No one could afford even the scent of them, and yet the shop was busy. Who were these people who had such riches in the spring of 1921? We stood on the broken pavement, gaping at women filling bags from the trays.

On Nevsky Prospect, a former emporium unshuttered itself. The display mesmerized us—pâté, glistening hillocks of butter, stacked tins of goods displayed like the treasures of sultans. A young man leaned forward and kissed the glass. A little Former in black wept silently.

Another wailed, “For this we starved? My old man died this winter, and they’ve got caviar. White flour! The prices! Who’s got that kind of money?”

For this, Kronstadt had been crushed. For this, my father was shot by the Cheka. For this, Seryozha had been buried in Moscow. For this bald-faced inequality. Yet like all the others, I couldn’t stop staring. Tins of condensed milk, small bags of real tea. Cones of jaggery. I wanted to plunge my face into that pâté and lick that butter. Bottles of milk. How had they manifested cows from thin air? The world had changed once again, so fast you could break your neck.

A woman with a self-righteous air and a hat à la Monomakh squeezed in past us as the crowd heckled. Guards shoved us back. Guards, protecting a capitalist food emporium in the cradle of the revolution! Even Lewis Carroll could not have imagined this. How many soldiers had fallen in this war—Red, White, Green, and anarchist Black? How many peasants had been shot for fighting grain seizures? How many families torn apart, how many civilians sent to labor camps in the far north, for selling a photo album or a bolt of lace, for bringing in a wheel of cheese or a funt of grain. I would never see my mother again. Maryino was a cinder. And yet there was white bread in the capital of Once-Had-Been.

A moonfaced shopgirl packed a tin of smoked sprats for the customer. I knew those tins. There was a little key in the bottom to roll back the metal lid. My father had eaten them. Now new people would have that same fishy breath my mother had hated. Not proletarians, not Formers, but party officials and businessmen. The New Soviet Bourgeoisie. My stomach growled. I wondered if my mother would object to fish breath now, wherever she’d landed, on a chessboard square in Bukhara or in the mountains of Tibet. Eggs and butter and smoked Riga sprats in olive oil. How many writers and scholars could be saved by those tins, how many workers? Two weeks ago, you could have been shot for any of this. The mind simply couldn’t take it all in.

We had paid for this with four years of cold and darkness, lice and filth and hard bits of vobla and pine-needle tea, bread full of sawdust and rags. Rooms turned into latrines. Apartments ravaged for wood.

The people had allowed themselves to be paid off in lies and flour, leaving Pasha and his comrades to die on the ice of Kronstadt. An entire class of human beings lost, so that Soviet apparatchiks and speculators and criminals could dine on roast chicken and halvah. Like cicadas, crawling forth from burrows in the warming earth.

In Pravda, Lenin admitted that the sailors weren’t really counterrevolutionaries. They simply didn’t want party rule. And so they had had to die.

Genya left for Moscow without returning to the House of Arts. No fanfare, no public evening. Anton the only one who went to the station to see him off. “He said he couldn’t bear to look into your eyes.”

And rightly so. I tore myself from the spectacle of butter and ham and wandered the thawing streets, trying to feel my way into this new world. My poor city. Grass coming up in the middle of Nevsky Prospect—you could graze goats here. Perhaps I could find some goats and become the Goat Girl of Petrograd. They said a man was keeping bees up on Vasilievsky Island. You could buy honey.

On every street, houses had crumbled under their own rotting roofs, eaten away from within, finally collapsing in defeat. Some blocks had only one house left standing, the rest just rubble, as if they had been bombed. One could imagine them succumbing to the weight of centuries, like ancient Rome. And we, like starving barbarians, living rough among the ruins of the noble ancients, without any notion of who had constructed the walls within which we sheltered. But we’d done it ourselves, termites that we were, the wood disappearing into a million tiny stoves.

The flower shop on Liteiny proved as irresistible as white rolls, and here there were no guards to keep me out. The mingled perfumes of lilac and lily, cherry blossoms, hothouse violets, overpowered me. I stood in the middle of the shop and wept like a child, hands hanging at my sides. An old man arranging cherry branches forced into bloom looked up and smiled, an old-fashioned face, an old-fashioned smile, soft and pitying, the way you hoped God would look, among the pink blooms. “Like old days, a little, yes?” I was Former enough to remember florist shops full of forced branches, forsythia, cherry, lilacs… the white lilacs at New Year’s, my mother’s signature. Lily of the valley, drooping their small fragrant bells.

I turned a corner in the shop and almost fainted. A handcart held a raft of blue hyacinths, the smell so strong it drowned out all the others. I had to press my hand to my mouth not to cry out. That smell, filling our apartment on Furshtatskaya…

The old man with the eyeglasses watched me curiously, pretending to clip and arrange lilies. Perhaps he’d known the Archangel. Perhaps he’d lived through these years working in a greenhouse on the Vyborg side, tending plants in their timeless, glass-encased world. “You like hyacinths?”

Ai, ai. Regret, distilled.

They were cheap, but I could not bear it. I bought lilies of the valley with all the money I had. He wrapped the stems in twine and the whole bouquet in an old copy of Pravda.

I walked along the Neva Embankment, the air scented with the fresh wind and the melancholy sweetness of the flowers. Out in the river, newly broken flats of ice traveled west. Na zapad. If the ice had only melted two weeks earlier, the sailors would have held Kronstadt. But it had not, and they had not, and now the revolution was over.

I walked down to the westernmost bridge, the Nikolaevsky, where the water rushed black to the sea. There was still a possibility that Pasha had escaped, I told myself. Out of sixteen thousand Kronstadters, surely there had been survivors. Some must have escaped, fleeing across the ice, that same treasonous ice that had not melted in time. He could have made it to Finland. Some must have escaped, I knew, because of the rigor with which the Cheka searched every night. But I also knew Pasha. I didn’t think flee was even in his vocabulary. He wouldn’t have run if his mates were still fighting.

I stood on the bridge, facing west, smelling the tidal reach of the sea. The Neva ice was moving below me in the center of the river, and the gulls screamed. Legend said that gulls were the souls of dead sailors. West, they screamed.

I unwrapped the bundle from its cloak of Pravda, its headlines all threats and lies, unbound the twine and loosened the stems of the tender white blooms. Picking out a sweet-smelling cluster, I called out his name. “Pavel Vladimirovich Kislov. Vechnaya pamyat’, dearest.” And tossed them into the place where the current showed black. Let the tears roll. Then one for “Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova.” It hit the edge of a floe, but in time, it would find its way to the sea. Eternal memory. “Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov.” I had had no flowers for him that day. “I love you, Papa.” Another bloom, floated, bobbed, sank. “Sergei Dmitrievich Makarov.” Seryozha, four years gone. “Avdokia Fomanovna Malykh, be you alive or gone.” I continued with the roll of my dead. Maxim the Orphan. Solomon Moiseivich Katzev. Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin. The family Podharzhevsky. Krestovsky. Viktoria Karlinskaya, God forgive me. Slava, and all the heroes of Kronstadt. Eternal memory. In the bottom, there was one more bloom—a scrap of blue. The old man had put it there. I held it in my hand and thought of that strange twisted soul, mourned by no one. “Arkady von Princip. May you find peace,” I whispered, and threw the last trembling sprig into the black water.

I stood on the bridge and sent my regrets to the lands of the dead, west with the setting sun.

59 Summon the Ravens

We rose from the winter, from the broken years, as you do when you rise from bed after a grave illness. Shaky, weak, squinting at the sun, glad to be alive, but not yet recovered, not trusting the state of your health. Yet we had lived, and it was spring, and the city managed to find a lilac shawl in her steamer trunk to wrap about her emaciated frame. The light had been well kept under winter’s bed, and was around us once again, glamorous and tender, as only Petersburg could wear it. I walked in the light and touched the stones of the mirage. Overhead, the same gulls wheeled. How empty the city had grown.

Trees budded into May, burst forth in summer green. Iskra would have been walking, saying her first words, Mama, Papa, kitty, doggie. Avdokia said my first word had been Opusti! Put me down! Seryozha had been a silent child, but Iskra was a great chatterer, even at three months. Oh, such stories we would have told…

As the nights grew short, I walked alone in the Summer Garden, the warm breeze ruffling the trees where Genya and I had once embraced under the strict stone eye of Diana and her bow. A young couple walked toward me, in and out of twilight’s glow. How old were they, fifteen? She fit perfectly under his arm, her makeup gaudy. Like any other plant unsure of the future, they grew up fast. Fast to grow, fast to seed. There was no time for great oaks now. No Tolstoys would rise up among us. There was no time for giants. To think, when I was the age of these young lovers, I still wore a pinafore, and curtsied when introduced. As they passed, they glanced at me with no more curiosity than if I’d been a tree. I felt ancient. They would live lives I could not even imagine. I was twenty-one, my youth past, my beauty lost. My time was over. I’d become this somber creature, a survivor, no longer starving, but changed. Lines already formed on my forehead. Looking in a mirror, I would not have been surprised to see gray hair. I sat on a slatted bench, took out my notebook. He holds her hand. / Between the stones sprout daisies…

The time of the poets was passing. We were entering an era of prose. Zoshchenko and Lunts, Nikitin and Slezin, boys from Zamyatin’s studio—they called themselves the Serapions—had won this winter’s House of Writers prize. A triumph for the House of Arts, but all were writing fiction. Gorky was giving them an annual—The Year 1921. The first issue of Dom Iskusstv appeared—but it included no younger poets, only the great ones, Mandelstam and Gumilev, Khodasevich and Kuzmin, essays by Blok and Chukovsky. Akhmatova had a new poem:

Critics bashed the publication, clamoring for new voices, people who could speak for our times. Well, I was alive, writing about our times, as were Tereshenko, Nikita Nikulin, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Irina Odoyevtseva, Anna Radlova, Arseny Grodetsky, and Oksana Linichuk. What about us? But the prose writers had the people’s ear. The night of The Year 1921 reading at the House of Writers, there wasn’t an empty seat. Certainly some came to hear Zamyatin, and old Grin, who had finally finished his novel, Scarlet Sails, and Inna Gants, but for a change it was the young people they wanted to see. How could I fault their success? People wanted stories to help them make sense of the times, not puzzles to challenge their souls. Solid matter had trumped the fiery spirit of verse.

Yet Akhmatova had emerged from literary exile—all was not lost. And the State Publishing House was releasing a volume of verse by Polonskaya, the lone female Serapion brother. But she was a Marxist, a doctor. She’d distributed leaflets for Lenin in 1908. Her poems admitted the struggle but put a hopeful face on the outcome. They didn’t chalk the doors and summon ravens.

I sat very still on the bench in the Summer Garden and kept company with the statues freed from their winter boxes, moldy and crumbling from frost, yet back in the light, pleasing our eyes with their grace. Passersby strolled arm in arm, or trailed children like little ducks, as the statues gazed on benignly. These nymphs and heroes were also survivors; it was no shame.

A black-clad figure came forward. I thought: Summon the ravens. She’d left her Chekist leather at home today, had donned a dark blouse, a skirt. No square-handled Mauser decorated her hip. Instead, she carried a cardboard briefcase. Her black hair was unbrushed and matted. It looked like the coat of a dusty black spaniel. She sat next to me, took a cigarette from her skirt pocket, and struggled to light it. Those hands, I’d know them anywhere, long fingered, with sensitive small tips out of place in the life she’d chosen. She still bit her nails, halfway down the nail bed.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

She squinted against the smoke, examining the hip of young Aphrodite, mottled with age and moss, and rested her head in her hand.

How dare she come here, and sit next to me? I’d never forget the way Father looked dumped in the hall, wrapped in my bloody sheepskin. The vicious last touch when I had come home from burying him to find my room reassigned. “Look, you won. You’ve stuffed my throat with dirt. Can’t you just enjoy your triumph and leave me in peace now?”

People passed us: boys playing with sticks, girls sharing secrets with their arms around each other’s waists, men and women in their patched old clothes, so much more evident in the clear May light than under coats in the winter’s darkness. But every so often a new shirt or summer dress appeared. Already the changes were showing. And how did we seem to them, Varvara and me? Two harmless women, having a quiet conversation in the shade. If only they knew who we really were, what we’d done for the sake of history. “I don’t have to sit with you. You make me sick.” I rose but she put her hand on my arm.

“Wait,” she said. “Please.” Something about the way she clutched her cigarette, as if she was holding on to a stair rail. Did she have some fatal disease?

“What’s wrong? Are you dying?”

She flicked ash into the gravel. “Who isn’t?” Her lips were cracked, her eyes sunken into bluish rings. “The revolution is over. It lies at the bottom of the sea.”

“You should know, you were the ones who sank it. The sailors—”

“The sailors were adventurers. Anybody could have told them they didn’t stand a chance… You could have. Surely you didn’t think they’d succeed?”

“They had enough of a chance that you Bolsheviks changed all your policies.”

The spark in her eyes died. She kicked her heels into the dirt. Chop chop chop. “Don’t you like your dance halls?” she said. “Traders doing business right out in the open, to the tune of the soviet’s applause?”

Was that what was bothering her? Dance halls and bakeries? “You’ve crushed the people’s last hopes to have a say in their own country. Don’t begrudge them a few eggs and dance halls.”

She snorted. “You mean the return of capitalism in Soviet Russia? Haven’t you heard? They’re granting concessions to foreigners, selling off everything that’s not nailed down. You don’t know the half of it.” Her hand trembled so, she had to tuck it under her armpit, bringing her cigarette to her lips with the other. “I thought I could talk to you.”

I leaned over her, keeping my voice down. “After what you’ve done to me? You can talk to that statue. It’ll hear you better than I can.” I began to walk down the gravel path.

“I saved you more than once,” she called out after me. “We both played our hands. Your old man too. You think that was the worst thing I ever did?”

I couldn’t yell what I was thinking across the Summer Garden. This was the world she had created, where people disappeared, later to be dumped in apartment hallways. I marched back, stood over her. If I could have picked up a rock and smashed her skull open, I would have. “No one forced you. You could have been anything, but you chose to be Torquemada. You’re a blot on the sun.”

She looked up at me, hunched over her briefcase, as if she had a terrible cramp. “We were building a new world! And now the whole thing’s kaput.” She raised her cigarette to her lips again, those bleeding nails. “We should have seen it coming. In 1918 when that politician signed the peace with Germany.” Lenin. “Gave in to all their demands. First he sold out the German worker and now he’s sold out revolution for a tin of herring.”

Yes, think what you’ve done. “The Bolsheviks killed the revolution.” I sat back down on the bench so I could speak without being overheard. “You gutted the soviets. You turned workers into units of labor. God forbid that people can buy a tin of herring, a bit of meat. You and your people were the ones trading. You traded the revolution for Bolshevik power. You did it.”

“That tin is the death of the revolution,” she said.

“If he hadn’t changed the policy, Lenin would be ruling over a nation of the dead. But he killed off the voice of the workers. The soviet’s a sham. And you’re complaining because people can buy and sell a handful of flour? Who are you, Varvara?”

She rubbed her forehead hard with the flat of her hand, as though she could wipe something from her memory, or clear away years of soot and cobwebs. When she began again, her tone had changed. Raspy and listless. “I was a human being when this started. Remember? I liked things. Beethoven. Those little sandwiches your mother used to make. Remember when your family took me to see Chaliapin, at the House of the People?” My friend, my mortal enemy, my sister, lover… hunched over like a dirty crow. She took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it away. “I remember sleeping over the first time. You gave me your robe—remember that? We all slept in the bed together, you, me, Mina, and the dog.” She laughed. It sounded like a sob.

“And now you’re sorry, is that what you’re trying to say?”

She hung her head so I couldn’t see her face, only her nose’s sharp outline, her prominent chin, and the dirty hanks of her frizzy black hair. “It’s killing me. I see their faces. I hear them, begging.” She coughed, and then kept coughing. She sounded like Gorky or old Petrovsky. “I can’t go on, Marina. It’s a nightmare. It was all for nothing.” She covered her eyes, shading them from the sun’s accusation. What she had done for her spaceman’s dream. That blood did not wash off. What agony she must be in. I knew she’d thought what she was doing was right—but it couldn’t save her from the guilt. So the spaceman had finally crashed to earth. That she, the most brilliant, our Ivan Karamazov, had not seen the obvious—that the Bolsheviks were not glittering theorists after all but just power-seeking politicians. What a terrible moment when the truth flooded in. They’d lied, they changed course when it suited them. Power was their true north—and ideologues like Varvara, the ones who couldn’t bow and hang on during the sharp turns of state, would fall or be thrown from the ship. Unlike Genya, who was proving himself quite capable of making these transitions, Varvara was dying of shame. She was the worst, but also the best.

“If you were in my shoes, what would you do?” she whispered.

I had never felt further from her in my life. Not angry, or pitying. But as implacable as time itself.

A worker family strolled nearby—mother, father, a little boy about four with the shaved head of summer—taking the air amid the Greek and Roman statues commissioned by emperors. The Summer Garden had only been open to the public since the 1850s, and then just to the well-heeled, the formally dressed—there’d been a strict code. Avdokia had avoided it, preferred taking us to the more relaxed Tauride Gardens. Looking at this family on the gravel path, the woman in her old flowered dress, the man in a Russian shirt, examining the statue of Alexander the Great, I thought, maybe we’d done some good. Perhaps someday, something would remain. The boy rode a stick horse, galloping along the path. He’d probably never seen a live one, though certainly he’d eaten its flesh.

Her hand crept out to hold the fabric of my skirt. “Forgive me, Marina. But there’s no one else I can talk to.”

“What about your Cheka comrades?”

She laughed, painfully. “That boatload of psychotic freaks?”

“Manya?”

“She’s in the Volga, doing famine relief. It’s a disaster out there. Kazan, Ufa, Samara. You have no idea.” She slumped unhappily on the green slatted bench, her long legs stretched before her. “Meanwhile we’re selling off pieces of Russia. You can hear the auctioneer’s gavel from here.” She pinched her nose at the bridge, trying to compose herself. “When I used to think of the future, I could see it as clearly as I can see that statue’s fat ass.” She nodded at Aphrodite’s derriere. “Now all I see is a wall.”

I knew the sensation. I had felt it last autumn as I gazed into the Neva. Pressure, that made death seem like a rational alternative. While all around us, early summer unfurled, hope juicy in the green leaves, the innocent hope of the natural world.

“Ever think of leaving?” she asked me.

“Sometimes,” I said. “You?”

She shook her head the way even a good chess player sometimes does when he looks down at the board to discover that in his pursuit of the adversary, he’s closed off every avenue.

Two men walked past, smoking desultorily, looking us over. One said, “Hey, girlies—”

“Keep walking, bratya.” She had no Mauser but her tone commanded respect.

We watched the men’s backs moving away in their frayed shirts, their tattered jackets. “I just came to warn you,” she said. “Your name’s being mentioned in connection with the mutiny.”

I felt the familiar tzing of terror in the center of my chest and up my spine. “What did they say?”

“That you taught at the sailors’ club. That you’d been regularly seen with one of the instigators. Sleeping with him, of course.”

“It’s not a crime.”

“Kislov, Pavel Vladimirovich, of the Petropavlovsk. You are in daily contact with the monarchist Nikolai Gumilev, and your father was shot by the Extraordinary Commission. It’s starting to look like a picture.”

I felt dizzy. My skin prickled in an ugly way. Gumilev never made any secret of his beliefs, and no one had ever bothered him. Who told them about me and Pasha?

She sighed, put her briefcase on the bench between us. “Think about going to Moscow. Hole up with Genya. He’s the best defense you’ve got.”

Diana, moon browed, frowned, raising her bow, notching her arrow. “I can’t stand the sight of him.”

“Better listen to me. I know what I’m talking about.”

I nodded. But I would not take any more favors or advice from Varvara. Not after that delivery, wrapped in sheepskin.

“If anything happens this time, I won’t be around to save you,” she said. She turned to me, her black eyes rimmed with red.

“Where are you going?”

She shook her head and turned away. “Don’t remember me like this.”

We were caught in a great net. I could feel it scooping us up out of the water, like herring. We struggled and flapped as the net drew closed and dumped us on the deck in a vast heap, gasping.

She took my hands. “See you around,” she tried to say, but her voice cracked.

I’d never seen her despair. She gazed into my eyes, hers so familiar, her hair as black as a raven’s wing, and, my God, she had strands of white woven in with the black. “We’ll meet again in Petersburg…” she recited. “Isn’t that how it goes?” Mandelstam’s poem. Varvara, the least poetic soul in Petrograd. “This is for you.” She handed me the cardboard briefcase. “It’ll give you a head start.”

I opened it, withdrew a gray file folder. MAKAROVA, Marina Dmitrievna. Varvara had stolen my Cheka file. It was terrifyingly fat, an inch thick at least. I remembered the files we’d burned on the street when they’d broken into the police station on Liteiny. She’d gone in, while I had stayed outside on the sidewalk, feeding files to the fire. Back when I thought people would be free of such things. My own dossier: my picture, my aliases, addresses, known associates, my number at Gorokhovaya 2. My father. Kolya. Genya. The Krestovskys. Current residence: House of Arts, 59 Moika.

Varvara was not planning to return. Not to Petrograd, not anywhere.

We kissed each other formally, three times. She smiled her crooked smile and left me there by the haunch of Aphrodite, the statue’s hand shielding its face from the light.

60 Famine

In the black-earth belt of central Russia, from Kazan down to the Caspian Sea, the dry hot summer replaced our rye and wheat—our elemental gold—with dust. This wasn’t just hunger, where “somewhere” there was food—a problem of distribution, a problem in the city—but famine. Famine in the Volga, starvation in the Don, drought in the Crimea. Kazan, Samara, Izhevsk, Kambarka. The ravens flew in the cruel cloudless skies over the exhausted land. After last year’s poor harvest came the blow of drought. The rains in Petrograd belied the searing pitiless sun blanching the agricultural lands of the Volga and the Ukraine. Starvation spread out its ghastly rule, tenfold anything we’d experienced in the city. No one in Petrograd complained about his rations now. The Povolzhye, the great basin of the Volga, was down to its last grains. Unthinkable.

Even from here, I could tell how bad it was, the way hunters read the migration of birds. Besprizorniki were pouring into the city, their numbers like locusts emerging from the ground. They arrived by train, thousands each day, begging, mobbing passersby. “Where are you from, sweetheart?” I would ask in the street. Samara, they said. Tambov. Taganrog, Tsaritsyn. Some could only stare. Little children, perhaps they didn’t know themselves. Only that the White One had chalked the crosses on their doors, and summoned the ravens, and the ravens obeyed.

Finally, even our lying government stopped trying to cover it up. Pomogi! Help! cried the old man from the posters in the windows where the ROSTA campaign against the sailors had made its claim just a few months ago. People who had not been seen in public life since the October Revolution came out of the woodwork, stepping forward to raise money for the starving. The All-Russian Famine Relief Committee consisted of an unprecedented cross section of influential Russians—SRs, old generals, even Tolstoy’s daughter—framed by the usual Bolshevik officials. Of course, Gorky led the way. Benefits for the victims were held all summer long—concerts, art auctions, readings, plays. Citizens parted with their money, the little we had.

But everything conspired against the victims—seven years of war, everyone taking the peasants’ grain as they rode through, the Whites and the Reds alike, the food detachments from the city. The Bolshevik policy that everything belonged to the state compounded by the lack of manufactured goods from the cities’ exhausted factories, all caused the peasants to plant less. Why should Ivan work so hard when there was nothing to buy and it would all be taken from him anyway? But Ivan hadn’t planned on last year’s poor harvest, and—fatally—this year’s vicious drought to finish him off. His rebellion had backfired, and now temperatures above 100 degrees baked the land to ceramic.

The propaganda, of course, was that it was all the fault of the Entente and the bourgeoisie. Everything had been forced upon us, the war, the civil war, everything but the weather was bourgeois wrecking, and if the Bolsheviks could have figured out a way to blame the weather on “the capitalists,” they would have. And yet, who was allowing capitalism into Russia?

A note from Lenin in Pravda appealed to the trade unions of the West. He admitted the size of the famine, but blamed it on Russia’s backwardness and the war and the civil war, forced upon the workers and peasants by the landowners and capitalists of all countries. He asked for the help of the oppressed masses in Europe, who should make common cause with us whose lot it was to be the first to undertake the hard but gratifying task of overthrowing capitalism, and then enumerated the ways in which the capitalists of all countries were revenging themselves on the Soviet Republic, preparing new insurgencies and counterrevolution. The hypocrisy took your breath away.

You could see the crosses on every house. The fear was a scent. It smelled dry and parched. It sounded like wind. How terrible the situation must be if the Bolsheviks allowed people like Alexandra Tolstaya; the well-known anti-Bolshevik intellectual Kuskova; Prokopovich, a Kerensky minister; and Dr. Kishkin, also a figure from the Provisional Government, to sit on an independent famine relief committee that had the right to collect money, publish their own newspaper, start projects that would employ people, and so on. The Bolsheviks said things like “Only they and not the government could get help from abroad.” Perhaps it was also intended to show the West that independent voices were still permitted in the Bolshevik state. It was the strangest time, the government grasping at every straw.

I couldn’t sit on my hands at such a time, comparatively well fed and well housed and producing my poems while starvation gnawed the raw bone of the Povolzhye. I didn’t have much to offer, but I contributed what wages I made, and participated in fundraising readings at the House of Writers. But it wasn’t enough. There was something more I could do, and so I did it.

I had never seen Orphanage No. 6 as busy as it was that morning, the first of August. The lobby was as impassable as a train station, the new arrivals baffled and glassy-eyed with hardship from their recent ordeals. Behind the bars of the amber marble front desk, Alla Denisovna shuffled through a mass of files, grown to impossible height. I knocked on the counter. “Any room at this hotel?” I said. “A double, facing the square?”

The shock on her face when she saw me. She laughed, holding her head at the temples with one long hand. “They say there’s a drought, but the Volga’s flooding—right through the doors. Are you coming in to work or just to marvel?”

“Work,” I said. Children clustered around me, gazing up at me with hollow eyes, patting my skirt. Pomogi! I smiled down at them. I didn’t want my horrified face to be their mirror.

“Thank God,” she said. “Start anywhere. The canteen’s a nightmare. Tell Matron you’re here.”

I trailed a flock of tiny starvelings to her office. “Wait here,” I said. Knocked and slipped in.

Matron was speaking to someone on the telephone, from what I could gather tracking down a load of rice. “It’s here, you devils, just bring it—before you find yourself in the fortress.” She lowered the earpiece to the cradle with a smart click, and took in the sight of me. She’d not changed—still a wall against the chaos—calm, heavy, and capable. “Are you back?”

“I want to help. Whatever you need.”

She smiled. “I saw you read, Comrade. At the House of Arts.”

A sun rose inside me. There were few people whose opinion really mattered to me, and hers was one of them. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”

“I didn’t want to disturb you. Sometimes I see you walking. It’s good you’ve come. Not everyone can look at this. Most people turn their heads, and how could they not? A problem without a solution, only grief.”

I started in the canteen. Little food, children in rags, scarce water. They were short on everything—chairs, and adults. So many orphans. All I could do was help them sit down, four to a chair, and keep the old-timers from grabbing their food and terrorizing them. Later, I washed them—Boys 6–9, a lesson in horror. What could keep human beings alive with so little flesh on them, their ribs like birdcages made of bamboo. I smiled and washed them as they stared and stared. Sang them a song, “Fais Dodo, Colin.”

There were few fights now—mostly they were in shock—but keeping them from being preyed on by the old-timers was no easy task. They’d snatch the food on its way to the new ones’ mouths. I put them to bed, told them stories—no sorcerers or magical infants, only funny tales of talking cows and wise ravens and sneaky foxes. They were as hungry for the security of a big person’s care as they were for potatoes and vobla.

I’d meant to spend only a day or two but ended up staying on through the days and nights, taking up the rhythm of the orphanage, soothing, watching over the children in their sleep, five to a bed, head to tail and more on the floor. Held them when they woke up screaming. What these children had endured to make that journey of thousands of miles—crossing the famine regions on foot, then fleeing by train to the farthest reaches of the country in search of food. I still remembered the children huddled on the carriage’s platform that night I shot the Chekist and shoved the body off the train. These children wanted to hear stories about houses of spun sugar where you could eat the doors and windows, about sheep knee-deep in green grass, and wolves valiantly beaten off by brave children with sticks.

One morning I returned to the House of Arts for my ration cards, to find the residents crowding the downstairs corridor outside the canteen. They stared at me as if I’d intruded from another world, as if I’d grown three heads. Anton pushed through the throng, flung his arms around me as if I’d just been saved from a shipwreck. “Where have you been?”

“At the orphanage,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“They arrested Gumilev,” Shafranskaya chimed in, her white hair twisted into a messy chignon, her crumpled floral dress misbuttoned. “Woke up the porter. Forced him to lead them to his room. And then to yours! They tossed it, took your notes, asked me and Alla if we knew where you were. Of course, we’d never heard of you. We didn’t even speak Russian.”

“Where’s Gumilev’s wife?” I asked. She’d come back from the country just at the wrong time.

“Still up there. She’s in shock.”

They’d arrested Gumilev. He always said they’d never arrest him—they had a gentleman’s agreement, him and the regime. He would teach, serve the Bolshevik state, and stay out of politics, and they would let him have his opinions, his prayers, his antique beliefs, and go on writing. Evidently not. Varvara had told me as much. It’s starting to look like a picture. “Has anyone told Gorky?”

No one knew.

I ran. I flew. Down Nevsky, through the General Staff arch, across Palace Square to the Troitsky Bridge. I caught a tram past the fortress, where Nikolai Stepanovich might now be imprisoned in a cold cell. I had missed the Cheka search by just a few hours. Saved by orphans. It didn’t matter that I’d drowned my dossier in the Neva. They had come for me anyway.

Though it was a hot August morning, I could feel the damp, cold walls of the Troubetskoy Bastion, the weight of the low ceiling. I did not turn my eyes from the east as we trundled past the fortress, staring into the sun glinting on the river until I jumped from the tram at Kronverksky Prospect and ran to Gorky’s house.

Molecule answered the door, her small face pale and drawn. There were dark circles around her eyes.

“I need to talk to Alexei Maximovich. Did he hear about Gumilev?”

She wore a work apron, her dark hair in a knitted beret. “It’s not just Gumilev. It’s all the intelligenty. Professors. Doctors. The relief committee. They even got Ukhtomsky at the Hermitage.” The director of the museum! Bozhe moi.

“Everything’s coming apart,” she said, “while Lenin’s got him writing to everybody in the West for famine aid. He’s even working with the Patriarch, if you can believe it.” Unthinkable. Who hated the church more than Gorky? “He’s just back from Moscow. He finally got permission for Blok to leave.”

Blok? I grabbed her arm. “Is Blok under suspicion?”

“No, he’s just sick. But here’s the thing—they won’t let his wife go, and he can’t go alone.” She wiped her eyes.

It was too much to take in. Gumilev, Blok. In the front parlor, the plants were dying, the furniture was dusty, the house felt uninhabited. “Where is everyone?”

“Gone.” She stuck her hands in her apron pockets. “Moura’s in Estonia. Maria Andreeva’s in Germany. She’s head of the Petrograd Office of Foreign Trade now—art and antiquities. It’s a mass sell-off.”

I followed her down the hall toward the heart of the apartment. No sounds came from any of the rooms, no laughter, no one talking on the telephone. How could Moura leave Gorky at a time like this? Everything was coming to an end. Now I could hear Gorky coughing.

“Lenin wants him to go to Germany to put pressure on them for aid. Is he the only person in Russia who can do anything?” she said under her breath.

“They’ve made sure there isn’t anyone else,” I said.

I knocked gently on the office door and opened it. Gorky sat in the middle of a fug of smoke, writing by hand. When he saw me, he waved me in with two nicotine-stained fingers. He was gray with exhaustion. And he was on his own now. Why had she decided to leave now, without him? Was she preparing the way? Or had she fallen under suspicion herself and decided to slip away when she could?

He reached forward and pressed my hand, gestured to a chair. His hand was hot. He was sweating, though the window was open and it was not hot in the room.

“Any news about Gumilev?” I took a seat in the leather chair where I’d once sobbed out my confession.

“They haven’t charged them yet,” he said. He rubbed his gray face with his large square hand. He was still in his dressing gown. “I never thought they’d arrest him.”

“They’re looking for me too,” I said. “They searched my room.” I hated to burden him with my problems, but he knew things, knew how a person should act. I would try to be brave, but my instincts were poor. If I was alive with any of my soul still intact, it was this man’s doing. In a way, he was my father, the father I never lied to. “I should tell you, I was seeing a Kronstadt sailor. They know that.”

When I saw the painful expression on his face, I wished I had kept that to myself. How tired he looked in that worn dressing gown, his seamed face, his hollowed-out chest. He turned his head to cough. He really needed to get out of Russia, every bit as much as Blok did. The phone rang, a relief. God knew from what hidden reserves he summoned the energy to keep his hand in all our lives. I tried not to eavesdrop, but how could I not. It was about Ukhtomsky, the roundup over at the Hermitage. Though it was perfectly calm in the room, I felt the storm raging outside—huge trunks cracking, branches flying in the wind. Would this be the final storm? I could almost hear the house groan.

“You need help,” I said after he’d hung up. “Why did Moura go?”

“I wanted her to,” he said. “I wanted to get her out of this before it gets any worse.” He screwed a cigarette into his black holder, lit it. “So what were you doing with a Kronstadt sailor?”

“A lover.”

He nodded. “And how did you meet him?”

“I was teaching at their club on the Admiralty docks. Gumilev gave me the class.”

He winced. “And people knew—about the sailor?”

I thought of the eyes watching us as I brought him through the House of Arts. The way he would sit in the canteen with Kuzmin, waiting for me. “It wasn’t a secret. But he was from the Petropavlovsk. On their committee.”

He closed his eyes, massaged his broad forehead with his fingers, along the ridge of his brow. “Luck has not been your friend,” he said. “Is there anywhere safe you can go? A school friend in the suburbs? Cousin in the country?”

Cousin in the country.

It’s starting to look like a picture.

The air left the room as I realized with a sickening jolt that I could not return to the House of Arts. I was done there. Done as a poet, a member of that blessed fraternity. Just when I’d finally joined their world. Blok knew my name, but Blok was dying. Now it was over. Just like that. I’d had everything, and then it was taken away. What had I thought? That I would tell Gorky about Gumilev and go back to the House, clean up my room, set the furniture to rights, pick up where I’d left off? What a fool.

“Will you be all right?”

I struggling to breathe, to see, bumped my leg on the chair in my hurry to get away, to keen and sob somewhere private. “I’ll be fine.”

“Marina?”

I stood at the door, my hand on the knob. I rested my forehead against the wood, the intricate grain of the oak.

“I’m sorry. I’d invite you to stay here—we’ve got nothing but rooms—but it’s impossible now. You have some idea of the situation…But come back if you can’t find anything. I’ll think of something.”

His kind face. We never did lie to each other, Alexei Maximovich and I. “Don’t worry about me.” I tried to smile. “Good luck with Gumilev.”

He reached out his big square hand and I shook it. “I wish I could do more for you.” He let me go, took out his wallet from the desk drawer, and handed me five hundred rubles. A month’s wages for a workingman, or used to be. The sight of it only emphasized the danger he felt me to be in. I waved it away, but he took my hand, pressed the money into my palm. “It won’t help much, but for my sake, take it.”

I put it in my pocket. I could hardly see for the tears in my eyes. I would never see him again either? It was all ending.

“Who would have guessed we’d have to be so brave in this life, eh? I thought I could just get rich and take it easy.” He laughed and started coughing. “Be well, Marina Dmitrievna.”

“And you, Alexei Maximovich.”

I slipped out of the apartment, down the back stairs, and out into the courtyard, and through the little alleys and the park, the long way home. Home to Orphanage No. 6, where they knew me only as Comrade Marina. With Matron’s connivance, I could stay hidden among the children. I had paid my passage on this ship well ahead.

61 The Poet, Blok

I cut off all contact with the House of Arts. I only hoped Anton would think to go to my room, get my clothes, the things I’d need this winter, and keep them safe—and for Christ’s sake not come looking for me. Orphanage No. 6 was only two blocks away, but it might as well be Irkutsk, and had to be. I set the distance in my mind, already a parallel dimension, unreachable. The House of Arts simply did not exist. Here at the orphanage, my petty literary ambitions were nothing compared to the desperate needs of these starved children, hands as light as paper, eyes so wounded it was hard to return their gaze. What was I compared to this? Longings, friendship, community—dreams.

When I thought the situation could not be more depressing, the last blow arrived. Taking a break in the summer dusk in Arts Square, I glimpsed Makar selling Pravda and God knew what else, with a group of older… you couldn’t call them orphans. At fifteen or sixteen they were men of the city, biznissmen. I went over to buy a paper, hoping for news of Gumilev. On the front page, lower right corner, a box edged in black held a simple notice:

I felt as if a giant guillotine had sliced me in two, from the top of my head to my feet. I would split like a log and fall to the stones of Arts Square. My lips formed the words. “Blok is dead.” As if saying the words would make it anything less than lunacy.

“Blok, Blok,” Makar mocked me. “Lya lya fa fa. Who was he, Lenin’s brother?”

I leaned on him so that I would not come apart in the middle of Mikhailovskaya Street. Tried to breathe some air but suddenly my lungs seemed glued together.

Although I’d been sleeping with starving children for days, rubbing empty, aching bellies, holding them as they described their villages where people lay on the sidewalk with only the strength to hold one hand outstretched. Although I’d been cast out by poetry, and brave Gumilev languished in prison, and Pasha was dead in the gulf, and Anton was out of reach, this was the thing that I could not bear. I would have thought myself beyond such grief, but this anguish was of a very special sort.

I looked around me at the noble, shabby buildings, the bushes and lawns, the statue of Pushkin, covered with pigeons. Pushkin, hounded by the rabble, and now, Blok was dead. I lowered myself to the bench where I’d once sat with Varvara and Mina as we ate nonpareils out of a paper cone and watched the doorway to the Stray Dog Café. Now I paged through Pravda. Surely there would be a paragraph or two devoted to the poet, a famous poem or two, but it was just that one line: The poet Alexander Blok… passed away… The poet. You might as well have said that poetry itself had died.

I headed out to Kolomna through the shimmering summer dusk as if pulled by an unearthly hand. Every canal, every square, whispered his name. I remembered the day I went to speak to him about our reading and his wife came to the door. The day we met on Bolshaya Morskaya outside the telephone exchange and he invited me to the Bely reading at the House of Arts. Those afternoons I sat on the Pryazhka Embankment, a young girl, watching his windows. His name trembled in the air like radiograph waves, vibrated along the stones. The poet Alexander Blok passed away… A streetcar sailed by me on Kazanskaya Street so close I had to jump. I didn’t even hear the screech and bells. Gumilev’s lost streetcar. But it wouldn’t be suitable to take a tram to Blok’s house. One should go on one’s knees.

The air grew cooler as I passed the Mariinsky Theater and entered Ofitserskaya Street, wide and commercial. A few shops had opened here—a pastry shop, a cobbler, a pharmacy. How appropriate. The night, the street, the streetlamp, the pharmacy… He should have died in wintertime. Summer wasn’t his season. Blok needed a frozen canal, a group of poets escorting actresses home from Ivanov’s Tower on a frosty midnight. I passed the Komissarzhevskaya Theater, where his famous Puppet Show had played. And what about this puppet show? You die—and then relive it all… there is no change. And no escape.

Was I weeping because I’d never had that beauty? Or because he gave it to me, gave it to everyone who had heard his song. I stumbled down to the Pryazhka River and his tall house on the corner, 57 Ofitserskaya. I stood on the embankment where I’d stood so many times, staring up at those windows. In a world of poets, he’d been the poet—who had seduced us all, the angel of light, shadow against blinds, the flicker in the mirror. Blok. You saved my life. You can’t be dead. He’d taken me—this orphan—from the streets, and breathed life into my lungs, called me poet.

I heard singing through the open windows, the Orthodox liturgy. People entered and left by the main street door. Did I dare go up? Who was I? Just another dreamer whose life he’d touched. One of millions. Millions, alone and lost on this earth, and just a few angels. They show us how we must live, breathe life into the mud we are, and give us—beauty. Colors to which we would otherwise be blind. Light blue and silver and lilac. His, the snow falling. His, the fog. His, the masquerade. His Twelve, that blizzard, that mystery, with Christ leading the parade. But for me, he would always be the lover who sends roses to the mysterious woman in a restaurant, a woman with a feather in her hat who nods and says to her friend, “He’s in love with me too.”

I wasn’t planning to go up, and yet, I went. The door was open. After the greenish summer-river smell of the Pryazhka, it was hot and close in the apartment. All was just as I remembered, the door, the stairs, the striped wallpaper in the entry. The flat was full of people, a service going on, the heat and smell of flowers overpowering. A man was leaving. He passed me by, wiping his face with his handkerchief, overcome with heat or emotion. I stopped in the doorway of the dining room, where Blok was the guest of honor as well as the host, on the table in a white coffin and, oh God—in death he looked nothing like himself. I remembered him tall and golden, but the corpse was slight and dark, with a dark stubble of beard and dark hair. Death changed a man. Illness, suffering—though who of us had remained unchanged? An old lady hovered nearby, his mother maybe. And two other women. I recognized his wife, Lyubov Mendeleeva, and a woman I realized with a shock was Lyubov Andreeva-Delmas, his Carmen. He had written an entire cycle of poems about her. Now she was just an ordinary stout middle-aged woman, but the poet had made her immortal, the voice that had driven him mad. His fourth muse, or his tenth. Lyubov i Lyubov. Two loves among the many.

And here was Kuzmin, and Inna Gants, and Zamyatin with his sophisticated face, his moustache. People I didn’t know, but who knew each other, from his precious life—not long, but long enough to mark a country. The singing went on and on. It lulled me as I listened, just outside the doorway. At one side of the dining room, standing with a woman friend, was Akhmatova. She rolled against the wall, leaned her cheek on it as if it were alive. So much suffering in this world. Enough to go around for the rest of time. Bely arrived, white-haired in a black skullcap. Seeing Blok, his blue eyes grew so wide they were squares. How strange that death admitted all, opened every door. People who had not the sense to gather before had gathered now. Blok, where did you go? We were orphans without you, starving, lost. I’d cut a pine bough across the street. You could see the light green of the new growth. I held it to my nose. Like Blok, it freshened. Like Blok, tall and ever green. I laid it with the flowers. Someone, a girl—I remember having seen her but not who she was—told us the funeral would be tomorrow at ten at Smolensk Cemetery, up on Vasilievsky Island. A breeze blew the curtains. It was still light outside. How could that be?

More people arrived. It was time for me to give up my place. I shook his wife’s hand, said something, even curtsied—my God, where did that come from?—and rushed out, back down the stairs, onto the Pryazhka Embankment. The green freshness of the river calmed me. I found a little copse of trees down by the water where I could sit and watch the ripples, the silver and rose of the Petersburg twilight, hear the plash of the water, a flash of fish, and remain with Blok a little longer, in sight of the lit window. No point in walking all the way back to the orphanage. I lay down and fell asleep to the singing on the air and in the mouths of frogs.

I woke in the morning stiff and rumpled, leaves in my hair. Old people and girls with flowers had already gathered on the Pryazhka Embankment above me. A bright, clear day, without a cloud, inappropriately halcyon for a poet whose preferred moods of nature were fog, gloom, and storm. I shook my hair and my dress, tried to smooth myself out, relieved myself behind a bush, washed in the water lapping the embankment, and joined the others who waited on the corner—forty, fifty, a hundred souls. More kept arriving. I could smell the flowers—lilies—in their hands. Suddenly the sound of singing swelled, loud and full throated as the gates to the courtyard were flung open and the white coffin emerged.

They bore him aloft at shoulder height, so that all could see his profile against the sky, whittled to dark wood like a mannerist Christ. Carrying the coffin seemed surprisingly light work for such as Bely, Zamyatin, others I knew or didn’t recognize. In the crowd was every last remaining member of literary Petersburg, all but Gumilev. I wonder if anybody had told him Blok had perished. Here were Delmas and Lyubov holding up Blok’s mother as we began our march in the morning sun, and Akhmatova, in a black veil, as if she had been the wife and not Lyubov. But where was Gorky?

The corpse seemed happier in the open air, and the choir’s voices swelled as if unloosed from the walls. I tied my white matron’s scarf around my hair, peasant style, low on my forehead. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me. I only wanted to be close to Blok in these last minutes, as long as he remained above soil. It made me feel like a nun as I followed the procession, several modest lengths behind the notables.

So many women followed that procession! His poetry hadn’t been written for women any more than for men, but it spoke of us so passionately. I wondered if he had ever had that rumored affair with Akhmatova. She could barely walk from grief, clinging to her female friends. Here they all were: Benois, Ivanov, Volynsky, Shklovsky’s bald head, Anton, saying something to Tereshenko and Arseny. Here were the boys from the second floor, Zamyatin’s crew. And Gumilev’s studio. We were all here to bury our souls, following the white coffin up Ofitserskaya, turning at the Mariinsky, where more people joined us, singers and actors. Perhaps some had performed in his productions or just wished to pay tribute to the true heart of what had been and would never come again.

By the time we crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the procession had lengthened to a full city block, a thousand people at least. It hadn’t been mentioned in the newspaper, and yet the whole city seemed to know. A carriage followed behind, empty, the pallbearers clearly set on carrying the coffin all the way. Gorky’s absence troubled me. Was he too ill to come? Had he been arrested? Summoned to Moscow? Was it political? But Blok had done nothing wrong, except talk about inner freedom.

At last, we stood outside the small chapel of the Smolensk Cemetery, a vast, silent crowd, as the choir of the Mariinsky Theater sang the service for the dead—Rachmaninoff, and then Tchaikovsky. One last explosion of sound, like red and gold flames.

Then we followed the coffin through the unkempt little lanes to his family plot. No one spoke. The birds were silent. The wind had ceased its rustling in the birch trees. No more sounds. A thousand people bent their heads. Silently, the gravediggers lowered him into his berth in his white ship. And silently, they filled the grave, burying the sun. Safe journey, Alexander Alexandrovich. May the immortal poets rise to greet you.

Across the city, Iskra too, lay in her grave. Papa, Pasha. All the dead, welcoming him. Our loss was their gain.

I hid myself in the crowd, not wanting to talk to anyone. The small sun of the poet was a secret still alive inside me. I didn’t want him to spill out of my mouth. Luckily Shklovsky was easy to see, and tall Anton with his shock of black hair. I hid until they were gone. Although I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before, I was in no hurry to return to the clamor and suffocating closeness of Orphanage No. 6. Air and silence were what I needed. Wasn’t that what Blok had been complaining about—airlessness? The pillow of the times pressed to his nose and mouth.

Finally alone, I strolled along the cemetery’s narrow, shady paths. I liked how unkempt it was, the untidy rows and heavy trees. Perhaps this was how it was going to be—beauty relegated to the hidden places, to tall weeds and mossy corners. I collected blooming weeds, asters and carrot and Queen Anne’s lace. I remembered walking with Mother in the yard at Maryino, the Queen Anne’s lace waist high. Then I noticed strawberries growing on the graves and along the paths, no bigger than my thumbnail. The longer I looked, the more I saw them. I collected the little heart-shaped berries in my pocket, careful not to bruise them. I wished certain of my charges were with me. I’d already taken a special interest in a few, though it wasn’t right to favor one over another. But that’s how it was in life—you liked certain people, and didn’t we all need to feel singled out by someone as special? Wasn’t that a secret gift I could still give? I’d had the idea I would save the berries for them, but in the end, I ate them all myself, sitting against a tree, watching clouds sail overhead. I could collect more before I left.

A man came strolling up the path, well dressed, wearing a light-colored suit and hat—a foreigner? An Englishman? French? And then the hat tipped back, and the grin. My mouth still full of strawberries.

62 The NEPman

He squatted down in his beautiful suit, not wanting to get grass stains on his trousers. I held out my hand full of berries. He lowered his mouth to my hand and ate them from my palm. The blood of the berries stained his lips as he chewed. It was my heart he was eating, that graveyard fruit. His mouth in my hand, his eyes closed. He had come for me, my Orpheus, to pluck me from the dead. Was he even alive, in his light summer suit and straw hat, shoes of two colors? His laughing eyes, upturned, oh, just like hers.

He took his hat off, his chestnut hair curly, longer than before. Slowly he pulled the scarf from my head, revealing my uncombed locks, which had spent the night in the bushes on the bank of the Pryazhka. His smell, I’d have known it in the last darkness before the grave—honey, and lime. And then we were falling into the grass, the years dissolved like dandelion floss.

A meadowlark cheeeeeed, the little flowers bloomed, and holding his face between my hands, I couldn’t remember what had ever parted us. His weight pinned me to the earth or I might have spun into the blue air. Kolya. His cheek against my hair. Who was that spoiled girl, throwing herself around in self-dramatizing outrage? Three years lost over a poor peasant woman in a cowshed.

I could hear people from the funeral shifting around us, unseen, the leftover song of that choir still hanging in the air, and this, gold and bright, lime and cigars, this secret of secrets. My love had come for me. The fleshy solidity of him, this was real. He’d put on weight. He’d always had a tendency, a chubby child, but had grown hard in the war years. “You saw my poem.”

“One can’t dance it alone,” he sang in my ear as he worked the buttons on my dress. That mouth, the top lip thin, the bottom full. His eyes, very blue and turned up at the corners, eyes made for laughter. His mouth on my neck, his hand under my skirt.

I didn’t believe in salvation. I knew prayer protected no one. But how else to account for this miracle? I could feel him against me, his knees parting my thighs. Were we going to make love in the cemetery? But what was all lovemaking but love in a graveyard under the sad, envious eyes of the dead.

We heard a gasp and looked up. A woman in patched clothing, accompanied by two children, hissed, “Have you no shame?”

“Have you no shame, Comrade?” I asked Kolya, my irrepressible love.

“Honestly, no.” But we stood and brushed ourselves off. I rebuttoned my dress and Kolya retrieved his hat. I retied my kerchief. We began to walk, arms around each other’s waists, like skaters. Our footsteps fell in perfect harmony, as they always did. We passed the poor scandalized woman again—she just couldn’t get clear of us. My face hurt from smiling. He’d come for me, as he’d said he would. I glanced up and down the paths, making sure no one else was watching. If either of us were arrested, it was hard to say who would be in more danger. But my fear seemed to be missing. I couldn’t remember its address. The Cheka would have to catch me on the run. Even they didn’t have the manpower.

From Smolensk Cemetery back to the center of the city was a two-mile walk, but it could have been fifty for all I cared. My head against his, my arm around that solid waist, the scent of his body, we could have walked right off the face of the earth, our feet in step. We stopped at the Sphinx on the Neva Embankment to pay our respects, stood, hip to hip, contemplating the statues—ancient, patient in exile, built for the timeless heat of the desert, and forced to endure the damp and the tedious frost of our northern clime. They seemed to be laughing at our clothing of frail flesh. Stone being the answer to all riddles.

Egypt made me think Gumilev, languishing in the hands of the Cheka, reminding me of the danger—but distantly, like someone shouting from a far shore. No one was paying attention to us, except to eye Kolya in his foreign clothes, glances variously revealing distrust, admiration, or disgust, depending on their outlook on the New Economic Policy, which had spawned a new race of people, the so-called NEPmen—traders and middlemen, gangsters.

But we’d never been able to walk the streets of Petrograd like this before, arm in arm, back when we’d been young and unscarred, when there weren’t ghosts fluttering all around us. There’d always been some reason we had to hide. First I was too young, next I was a boy. Then we were peasants. I laid my head on his shoulder. He didn’t know about Iskra. He didn’t know about Papa. And in the time we’d been apart, what women had he known? Where had he been? Across the river, the yellow blotch of the little mansion’s facade stirred in the water’s mirror.

We stopped beneath the Rostral Columns, the wind fresh in our faces. I thought of the day I almost gave myself to the river. Not even a year ago. And now he’d returned. His hand found my breast, his lips, my neck. His breath buzzed in my ear. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “We’re together.”

We crossed the bridge, the shifting green waters glinting in the summer sun. He glanced up as we passed the yellow mansion, an end and a beginning, and leaned in to rest his cheek on mine. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t dare. There was broken glass everywhere in the space around the present. In Palace Square, the weeds grew up through the stones, and the sculptures atop the General Staff arch watched us enviously, the way chessmen would watch two pieces moving across a board of their own volition.

We leaned against the railing where the Moika met the Fontanka at the foot of the Summer Garden, our faces pressed closer as we peered down into the cool shifting blues and greens. A swan floated by, poking at some duckweed. “Still love me?” he asked. I leaned against him as a horse does when you groom it. “I dreamed this,” he said. “Standing here with you.” Holding his straw hat, he looked like a figure in a French painting. His wristwatch was gold, his necktie soft yellow. There was too much to say. My father saw you in Estonia. They dumped his body on my doorstep. We had a baby, her name was Iskra. Varvara’s dead, I think. There’s no one left but us. He bit me softly where my neck met my shoulder, sending an electric charge through me. I could stay here forever, in the shade of the tossing boughs, an old man painting on a small easel… I felt sleepy, as if I were in a trance.

“Don’t stop, we’re almost there,” he said, pulling me to him as if we were dancing.

We crossed into Salt Town, past the heavy facade of the Stieglitz Museum to the ancient St. Panteleimon Church with its domed cupola and square bell tower. “Let’s go in,” he said, opening the door for me. It was awfully unlike him. But pleasant inside, empty and cool. Our footsteps resounded between ten-foot-thick walls. The iconostasis was still intact. I’d have thought the Bolsheviks would have confiscated it for its gold and silver. A priest conducted a service for three old ladies, who sang like perfect fountains in a convent courtyard, liquid and serene. The fragrance of powdery incense excited long-ago memories. I remembered walking through Gabriel’s door and into Arkady’s world. And it was Kolya who had sent me there. If you ever need money. So much of my fate bound up with this one man, so much pleasure, so much suffering. In the end, I supposed, we were each other’s destiny.

The Theotokos watched me. Was this what you wanted? Gazing at me with such pity. Kolya put some coins in the offering box, lit a candle that had already been burned, and handed it to me. The simple, symbolic act was like a marriage. We’d never had that, something solemn. With us it was either sneaking or pretending. He took my hand and kissed it. The priest glanced up to see if we’d stay for confession, but either God knew it all or the heavens were as empty as a beggar’s pockets. In the one case, there was no need, and in the other, no sense.

Outside I blinked, temporarily blinded. Kolya took my hand. Where was he taking me, back to Furshtatskaya Street? Perhaps we would slip back into ourselves as we had once been, and start again. But no, it was still 1921, and the leafy, elegant houses were as dirty and dilapidated as everywhere else. Here was the Muruzi house, where the Poets’ Guild was garrisoned—Gumilev’s group. Were they still meeting, now that the Maître was under arrest? Had they too been taken in the sweep?

Mother’s old friend, the art dealer Tripov, lived there. Arkady’s one-time customer. I wondered if Kolya knew Arkady was dead. He must, or he wouldn’t be here, walking around like an English aristocrat. If it wasn’t for Kolya, I’d never have known the name Arkady von Princip. On the other hand, Kolya never said, Go have an affair with the Archangel. Who could say whose fault it was. Life wasn’t a tapestry, it was some sort of felt, formed by water and pressure—primitive, yet stronger than anything woven, impossible to tear.

We entered the square by the Preobrazhensky Church, where Avdokia once bought oil and potatoes while Mother prayed for deliverance. A man smoked in the shade—was he selling something, or watching one of the flats? Over a doorway a flag hung, white with a blue cross. “That’s new,” I said.

“Finnish consulate,” Kolya replied, kissing my cheek. “Things are changing. In six months, you won’t recognize your Soviet Russia.”

“I already don’t recognize it,” I said.

We stopped on the south side of the square, in the shade of a maple. How much he looked like Iskra—I couldn’t get over it. Grief ripped my throat. How could I tell him about her, how could I even begin? Not yet. I would savor what the gods had offered one precious moment at a time.

“I used to pass here on the way to your house,” he said. “Like the poor country cousin, hat in hand.”

The most confident boy in Petersburg. “Poor you.”

“Your father was so brilliant, he could cut you with a word. And your mother—”

“Let it go. Please.” The last thing I wanted was to talk about my parents. Enough to have him back, for however long. He pulled me into an archway, pushed me against the wall, kissing me as if he would devour me. Pressing into me, raising my skirt, anyone could have come by and seen us. But I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to. Were we going to do it up against the wall like some poor soldier and his whore? I twisted, but he held me there, grappling with me, whispering how he adored me, making me laugh.

At last, we passed into the courtyard of a once-stately building, where he led me to a battered door, yanked it open. Then I found myself upside down, heaved over his shoulder, as he stumbled up a flight of dark stairs to another door. Leaning on the wall, he opened it with a key and carried me in, raced me through a hall and into a light-filled room—table, brass bed, where he dumped me like loot after a robbery.

Oh, to make love to Kolya Shurov again. Our lips needed no introductions, our skin no drinks or chitchat. We only managed to get some of our clothes off before we couldn’t even be bothered with that. We panted, we clawed as if we were scrambling from a well that was filling underneath us. As if we were running a relay but both of us running at once.

I came to myself with one boot still on, my panties looped around that leg, the sheet torn off the bed exposing the striped mattress. Kolya still wore his socks and his singlet. Sock garters. We lay gasping on the beach, having made it to shore with our pirate’s plunder. He brought in a bottle of beer and some glasses, opened it—the fizz, amber, the bitter bright taste. I was so thirsty, I drank mine in three gulps. Where did it come from? Where had any of it come from?

“To our new life, Marina. May all our troubles be memory, and may our memories fade.” We drank, watching each other without blinking until we had drained the small, faceted pink stakany to the bottom, and then he refilled them. The flat looked out onto the square. From the bed I could see the dome of the church, the tops of the trees through the light curtains.

“Is the man still there?” I asked. “There was a man by the church.”

He got up, all rosy, sturdily built, his body hair red-gold. He went to the window, peered down. “Gone now.” He opened the windows, let the freshness roll through. The curtain took the wind like sails. “Like it?” He smoothed his unruly hair as he lay down next to me. “The flat, I mean.”

“Whose is it?” I asked, pouring the last of the beer into our glasses.

“Yours. If you want it,” he said. That mischievous smile. My bright fox. A private flat like this would be the possession of a commissar at least. A telephone hung on the wall. How did he get it? “Whose place is this, really?”

He tapped his nose. For him to know and me to find out. How he loved a secret. He carried a box to the table, opened it. A gramophone! A little gramophone, all in a box: a miniature horn, turntable, everything folded out. He laid a disk on the spindle, cranked it, and lowered the needle. The room filled with music—“Mi Noche Triste.” He’d been that sure of me. These sounds contained the worlds we’d lost that day, betrayals and heartaches, but I couldn’t remember them now, only the joy, and the possibility that it would resume. What were the chances? Life could turn around as fast as the Bolsheviks.

He plucked the beer glass from my hand, set it onto the table, and pulled me to my feet. I held on to him to remove that one remaining boot, and my underwear, before he placed one warm hand on my back, the other to my palm, and we danced. Five years since that first tango. Five years since the afternoon on the Catherine Canal, my hairpins falling. And here we were again. We danced as if we’d done it every day of our lives. We made famous the space between table and bed, the curtains blowing, nothing between my skin and his, our bodies pieces of a puzzle that we had solved. He ran his hands down my hips, holding on to me, kneeling, pressing his cheek to my pelvis as if listening to my heartbeat there. Whose dream could this possibly be?

Later, I lay on the bed, its linen on the floor, covered with sweat and his unique odor. He brought in a tray with vodka, roasted chicken, fresh summer pickles, black bread, and butter. Together, we made the bed and sat in it. I couldn’t stop eating. Licking my fingers. It was a sin when there was famine in Russia, when children were eating dry grass. Yet I stuffed myself shamelessly. He’d made coffee, real coffee, with evaporated milk, fed me pastries—hand pies with apples. My starving orphans just blocks away. And yet I couldn’t help it. So easy to be virtuous when you had nothing. In the face of riches, I was as squalid as anyone. Yet if I ended in some Cheka cell when all this came to pieces, who would thank me for not enjoying the pies?

It was fully night when he revealed the flat’s final secret. In the back hall, past a tiny kitchen, a door revealed a miracle. A private bath. Toilet, sink, little clawed tub. He turned on the taps, and water ran. But that wasn’t the end. In a few moments, hot water splashed into the slipper-shaped tub. “Your bath, madame.” He extended his hand, helped me in. I had to suck my teeth as I lowered myself into the steaming tub—the water was that hot, and my body had been thoroughly tenderized. But then, such bliss. Kolya knelt next to me, soaped a washcloth. Pears soap… It brought back my childhood, the English herbs, slightly resinous, Avdokia kneeling by the tub, washing me. I should have gone back for her. Everything could have been different… which wasn’t to say it would have been any better. I had to remember that. There were infinite ways things could go wrong.

But right now, Kolya Shurov was washing my back, the old scars. Shampooing my hair. It was mesmerizing to be so intimately tended, his strong, short fingers rubbing my head, then pouring water through my hair. “It’s grown out,” he said, squeezing it with the side of his hand.

I was a boy the last time he saw me, leaving him at the Tikhvin station, as he’d wept and begged me to come back. I didn’t want to think about that now. Life was giving us another chance. I wouldn’t question it, question what he was doing here or how long he would stay. I could feel he was dying to tell me. He was fat with secrets. I had secrets too, but unlike him, there would be no fun in revealing them.

Kolya scrubbed my feet, my knees and elbows, the water in the tub grew as murky as standing water in a Petrograd courtyard. As he laved me, he sang a song. I didn’t recognize it at first. And then I realized he was singing in English, and though it was somewhat changed, I knew it. “The river’s so empty nowadays. / All the gray horses are gone…” He rinsed out the cloth, hung it on the side of the tub. “I try to remember the tango, but one can’t dance it alone… Some friends set it to music. Like it? The drowned bell is a little obscure, but it was quite the success.”

“When did you learn English?” I said.

“One does what one must,” he said in English.

I rested my head on the back of the tub. Yes, yes, there was something about him, now it had come up. “That’s where you’ve been, England? Where in England?”

“Different places. Regret is a bell, a secret, / An island carved in the mind. / Brave words once said in a station…”

My poem had become a song. People in England sang it. “Funny, I pictured you in Paris. At a café, drinking champagne with a flock of attentive mademoiselles.”

“Oh, squadrons of them. Battalions,” he said. He pulled the plug, helped me out of the filthy water. “Unfortunately, there’s not much of a living in drinking champagne, and money doesn’t come floating down the Seine. Many other things, but not money. Paris is stinking with émigrés—they’re driving cabs, waiting tables. Princes and generals.” He wrapped a clean linen towel around me and rubbed my shoulders. “England provided a clearer field. They remember Dmitry Makarov there.”

Oh God.

“There were some interesting prospects—better on a number of levels.” He lit an Egyptian cigarette, oval-shaped, from a box with a bird goddess on the lid.

As I dried my hair, he sat on the edge of the tub and ran a bath for himself. Hot water gushed. I thought of my poor orphans being washed ten to a pail of cold water. He climbed in, set the ashtray on the rim, and sighed as I combed my hair in the mirror, wiping the steam. “Look how domestic we are,” I said to him in the mirror. “Like an old married couple.”

“Married couples don’t fuck like that,” he said.

“How would you know?”

He turned his head to the side to puff on his cigarette. “From keen observation. How is your husband, by the way?”

“Writing propaganda for our masters. How about you? What brings you to our shores? Nostalgia for vobla?”

He stuck a foot up in the air, twitched it to the left and the right. A squarish foot, not as long as Anton’s nor as shapely as Pashol’s. Funny that the sailor had the aristocrat’s foot, the aristocrat a peasant’s. I picked up the washcloth, knelt and soaped it, scrubbed the wide sole, the sturdy toes.

“England and Russia signed a trade agreement,” he said. “At the end of March.”

Just after Kronstadt. You could never underestimate the duplicity of our masters. They had to have been negotiating it even before the New Economic Policy. At the very moment they were crushing the rebellion, they knew what was coming.

“British labor unions pushed the trade deal through. They knew that the revolution was going to topple unless Lenin got some help—grain for the harvest shortfall, and the restoration of manufacturing. Now he’s offering concessions in exchange for hard currency. Mining, industry. You can’t make this kind of thing up—Western trade unions, pushing for a treaty that’s going to help bloodsucking capitalists get their hooks into Bolshevik Russia. There’s a poem in there somewhere, don’t you think? You could call it ‘Zholty Dom.’” Yellow house—another way of saying madhouse. He turned over in a slosh of water like a fleshy seal so I could wash his back, perching his chin on the tub’s rim. “Of course, the capitalists need a little help when it comes to dealing with the Kremlin. Someone with Russian insight, who knows the game. So who happens to be in London just at this very time? Why, our old friend Nikolai Shurov!”

“I’ve heard of him,” I said, smoothing the creamy soap over his shoulders. He still had freckles… like mine. Iskra would have had them too. I kissed them, trying not to think about the new political turn. “Shurov, wasn’t he a speculator, an agent of counterrevolutionary émigré groups?”

He laughed, flicking his ash into the ashtray he’d placed on the floor. “Biznissman. Old family friend of Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov, Russian liberal and friend to the English.”

And shot in a Cheka cell.

I didn’t know how I felt about Kolya trading on Father’s reputation to find a place for himself in the world. I tried to get over my sense of shock. Of course he would use whatever tool came to hand. He was stateless, a pariah at home, a foreigner abroad. He wasn’t doing anything any of us wouldn’t have done. Though it looked as if he was doing better than we ever would.

“This Shurov, he meets a friend of your father’s, Sir Graham Stanley, owner of coal mines in Wales and a steel factory in Sheffield. Sir Graham is particularly interested in the idea of Russian mineral rights. Oil, specifically. So, they meet with Litvinov and Chicherin, our good Soviet foreign representatives, first in London, then in Moscow, to see what goodies the Bolsheviks might be willing to lease. They even meet with the Great Revolutionary Devil himself.”

“You met Lenin?” It was ludicrous, but I believed him.

“Or a brilliant facsimile.” He ducked his head back into the water, holding his cigarette aloft. He shook the water off his face and hair like a dog. “No doubt he’d read my Cheka file, but nothing was said about that. Nothing must disturb the deal with Sir Graham. Suddenly capitalists are back in vogue. The very thing I would have eaten lead for last year. But this year I’m the honorable Mr. Shurov, of the What-Can-We-Do-for-You Shurovs of St. Petersburg, Moscow, London, and Nottingham, England. Yes, Mr. Shurov. No, Mr. Shurov. Chicherin himself takes my calls. Mr. Shurov calling on behalf of Sir Graham Stanley. Oh yes, Mr. Shurov, what can we do for you? Hang around, you’ll see.”

The very thing Varvara had seen coming, that she could not abide, that had driven her—yes—to the river, or a bullet. This should not be happening here. This influence peddling, this selling of the Russian storehouse, exactly what we had fought to rid ourselves from. Yet I also understood—what else could we do? We had to get food to the Povolzhye. At least the government had finally relented, allowing foreign famine relief. It was a maze, a labyrinth over a cesspit. While the Cheka still hunted for the poet Marina Makarova, the lover of sailors.

He got out of his tub, that good sturdy body streaming with water. I gave him a towel and he began vigorously rubbing himself, singing a snatch of “The Internationale.” “They’re desperate for cash, your masters. I’ve helped broker purchases of the people’s art—and not just your baba’s bric-a-brac. The émigrés are throwing a stink, of course. It never occurred to Chicherin that the rightful owners would get wind of the thing and sue. But as a go-between, I can help Sir Graham and the heroic Soviet Republic. I’m a most useful fellow.”

The Bolsheviks going into business with Western capital, while arresting leading intellectuals right here at home. You would think they couldn’t get away with it, that the West would see through their smiling faces. But the business folk didn’t want to see the shadows in the corners, the bloodstains on the tile.

Suddenly it was too hot in the bathroom and I wasn’t used to drinking. I had to open the door. “What about the famine?”

“Soviet officials are in Riga right now, negotiating with the American Relief Administration.”

The Americans?

“They’re the ones who know how. They fed Belgium after the war, and Poland. They’re the only ones who can handle the scale, and they’re surprisingly incorruptible.” Americans rescuing Russia from the Bolsheviks’ mistakes. The ultimate irony.

“Lenin’s worst nightmare.”

“He’s got no choice.”

I thought of my orphans—so many, and they just were the ones with the will to make it to Petrograd. What of the millions too weak to even walk out of their izbas? The stories I’d heard were too awful to be believed, but I believed them. We had to eat the baby, my own children had whispered to me.

“Everybody’s anted up,” Kolya said, examining his chin in the mirror, wondering if he needed to shave. “The émigrés, the laborites, the pious churchgoers. But only the Americans can organize it.” He sudsed his face, washed the soap from his hands. “Of course, there’s a snag vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks. The Americans are demanding to bring in their own people, hire local help, man their own kitchens, run their own trains.” He began to shave with a glinting razor, starting with his neck, washing the foam from the blade with each stroke. “Their man Herbert Hoover’s pretty canny. He knows not a bag of grain would be left for the Povolzhye if they left it up to us. Naturally, the Bolsheviks think they should run the show—when they couldn’t run so much as a tobacco shop.”

The children had told me how they searched the dust along the railway tracks near stations, looking for wheat that might have spilled, staying alive grain by grain. “It wasn’t until last month they even admitted there was a famine.”

“They wanted the trade agreement to look good. So they’d get better terms.”

How I’d missed knowing what was going on. Since I’d stopped going to Gorky’s, I was as in the dark as anyone. I read the signs, like a farmer reading clouds or the thickness of fur on caterpillars. We saw arrests, the sudden appearance of flower shops, and guessed at the rest. We combed every article for loose grains of news.

He examined his smooth face in the mirror, stroking his cheeks, rinsed and dried his razor. I pressed myself to his warm, moist back, resting my chin on his shoulder. I should tell him that I was tainted, that the Cheka was looking for me. I could ruin all his hopes for his deal if they found me here. He saw my worried face in the mirror. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “Things are going to work out. Trust me, this is just the beginning.”

I started to cry. How could I let him believe I could be part of this? “Kolya, there’s something I need to tell you—”

But he turned and put his fingertips to my mouth. “Talk tomorrow.” And replaced his fingers with his lips.

63 Secrets

I woke in the morning to find my love on the telephone, speaking low. Then he hung up, asked for another number, a Moscow number. “Yes, hello,” he said, in English. It was a shock. He’d never spoken more than two words of that language in his life. “Good to hear you too, Graham.” He had trouble with Graham, he pronounced it Gram. “Yes.” He laughed, sipped from the fragrant tea he’d made, stirring with a little spoon, that light chime. He sat on a chair he’d dragged up to the telephone on the wall in the little hallway. “Yes, well, they’ve been through it. You can’t expect—” He laughed again. The sun filled the white curtains, painting them with the boughs of the trees just outside. The warm air sucked the thin fabric, making it billow, then pulling it flat. Kolya perched in his fine underwear, socks and garters, his hairy legs and arms solid. That adorable, maddening man.

And I was happy. Nothing had changed, everything had changed. Beads of sweat clung to my hairline and under my breasts, the fragrance of the sheets. I yawned and turned onto my side, watching him, that mobile mouth, the persuasive sandy voice—and a slow, liquid pleasure rose from my thighs and my hips to spread throughout my body like wine. He was here. He had come for me, plucked me from the sea just as the water closed over my head. I could still feel his lips where he’d eaten the strawberries from my hand. I put my mouth where his had been.

“God, don’t let them pull that—” he said. Pull that… I had not heard that before. “No. Litvinov assured us— Mmmm. Yes. It’s sitting in Amsterdam, all ready to go. I can have it here in five days, maybe less, but don’t tell them. We’ll just have to watch the docks when it gets here. But I’ve got good contacts in the railway union. We won’t have any trouble with them.” He listened, drinking his tea. “A week, two at most. Good. Send her my love. Of course. Easy Street. See you soon.” He replaced the handset onto the cradle above him, stood and stretched.

I felt too lazy to get out of that messy bed. I watched him through the curls of shiny brass. “Who was that?”

“My partner, Sir Graham.” He slid onto the bed like a boy falling onto a pile of leaves, nuzzled my neck, bit my shoulder, stroked my arm. He didn’t seem to care how bony I had become in the time we’d been apart. If he found me attractive, that’s all I cared about. I reached under his singlet to feel his chestnut pelt. Ah, I had missed that. Anton had only a few stray hairs, without curl, although Pasha… may he rest in peace. So many men, but only one Kolya. How I loved that good ruddy skin, all the textures of him, his curls growing out, the smoothness of his closely shaved face, though I missed the beard he’d worn as Mechanic Rubashkov and my peasant husband. How many lives we’d lived through together. I knitted my fingers in with his, threw my leg up over his hip. “Why don’t you take off your socks?”

He kissed me, but shoved my leg off him, sat up. “Don’t you like my socks?” They were an argyle plaid. “I have some errands to do. Eat some food, write me a poem about how much you love to fuck me.”

“Send who your love?” I asked, sitting up against the big pillows.

“Lady Stanley,” he said. “Lumpy, middle-aged. She grows sheep. They win prizes. Also she paints on plates.” He tugged down the sheet, traced the curve of my breast, tickling the nipple, making it stand up. “Don’t be jealous. She wears gum boots, probably to bed.” He bit my haunch. “Poor Graham.”

“I thought you didn’t like the English.”

“I like doing business with them.” He went to the table in his argyle socks and his erection, buttered some bread, brought it back to eat it—dusting me with crumbs. He offered me a bite. “They don’t see the rest of us as quite human. But once you know that, you can work with them. Which is to say, they’d sell out their own mothers, while saluting the Union Jack. Crazy, but…”

The English had brought him here. Also my poem. What were the chances that two such people, loose in a world of chaos, would end up together in this pretty flat, on these crumpled sheets? There was no reason to believe it would go on, but for this moment, I would drink it deep.

“I could see you living in England,” he said, running his hand along my flank. “In a big hat. Playing croquet. When I’m done here, maybe you’ll come with me.”

I opened my mouth to say that I wasn’t going to pretend. No fantasy futures, I’d had that burned out of me. The future was unknowable. In trying to imagine it, you were just projecting the present. But he put his fingers across my lips, kissed the crumbs from the corner of my mouth. “Just think about it. How long has it been?”

“Eight years.” My father, at Oxford. Father… How could I tell him? He’d never understand. “What’s sitting in Amsterdam?”

“A ship, loaded with grain, medicine, for the Povolzhye. A goodwill gesture.” He said it in English, obviously a Sir Graham phrase. “It’s been sitting there a month, we just got clearance from the Bolsheviks. Even with a famine, they sit on their hands. That’s your Soviet government.”

Those sons of whores. A hard knock on the door broke into my fury, and I flew out of bed, sank to the floor.

“It’s only my driver,” Kolya said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“They’re all Cheka.” I raced down the hall, shut myself in the bathroom. I heard Kolya answer the door—men’s voices, laughter. A minute later, Kolya rapped on the wall. “You can come out now.”

I cracked the bathroom door, listened, padded back into the flat, peered out the cutwork curtains. No car. No one standing in the square. “They’ll be watching you,” I warned him. “Everyone they send to you will be Cheka.”

He pulled on his pants, buttoned them. “You’re telling me something I don’t know?” He found a shirt in the wardrobe, crisp, pressed. “Why are you so jumpy?”

So I told him about Gumilev, the sailors’ club, the search of my room at the House of Arts. “If I hadn’t been working that night, you wouldn’t have found me at Blok’s funeral. I’d be with Gumilev in the Peter and Paul Fortress.”

“But why would they want you? A girl who writes little poems.” To him, there was nothing more innocent.

“Sit down.”

Kolya sat at the table, half dressed, and listened to each worsening turn of the story. Father’s imprisonment, Varvara’s offer to keep him alive in exchange for my service. My conversation with Gorky. The ear. His body dumped on my doorstep. Burying him with only Gorky in attendance.

He wiped his tears. “I’ve always hated that girl.”

“The feeling was mutual.”

He took out an Egyptian oval cigarette, lit it with his old lighter. “You wouldn’t do it to save his life?”

“Once they have you, they never let you go. Everyone I knew would be in danger.”

He turned away. Now I wasn’t so beautiful. He sat smoking and watching the curtain breathe.

I pulled on my slip. “He begged me not to work for them. It would have driven him mad if I’d agreed.”

Kolya reached out and hooked the curtain with a finger, peered out through the parting of the cloth. The leaves on the trees were fluttering, fingering his face with their shadows. “Is there more?”

“It’s enough for now. But you should know, it’s Red Terror all over again. The Bolsheviks are telling us, Don’t be fooled by restaurants and flower shops. We’re still in charge.” All the fear that I’d been barely containing since Kronstadt came bubbling up again. “I can’t be arrested again.”

He came back to our bed, tucked my head under his chin and rocked me. “You’re safe now. They won’t risk screwing up this deal for some girl poet, even if she’s Dmitry Makarov’s daughter.” He kissed my hair, murmured in my ear. “If I shot Lenin and you fed me the ammunition, they still wouldn’t arrest us, that’s how much they want this deal.” His confidence began to invade me, calm me. “If they haven’t arrested me with my record, I promise they won’t arrest you. People start getting arrested around Sir Graham, he gets nervous. They won’t take that chance.”

But why take the chance on attacking the intelligentsia now, with so much at stake?

The answer came quickly: to keep us quiet, while they did their bizniss.

We sat like that for the longest time. Like survivors of a shipwreck, in which everyone we knew had drowned. What he said sounded reasonable, but I knew not to trust it entirely. In our looking-glass world, things changed overnight. You could break your neck. Deals fell through, political players changed partners. I didn’t think he would intentionally try to deceive me, but he’d been out of the country too long. Before, he’d been a cautious and clever fox. He cheered me as he always did, but worried me as well. I had already seen a fox in a trap. I’d made a hat out of him.

The next day, Kolya bought two large containers of milk from a Finnish peasant at the market in Salt Town, paying for it in fat handfuls of Kerensky currency, newly back in circulation. I had a hard time getting over the look of them. My lover insisted the Finn help us convey our purchases to Orphanage No. 6. He wanted to thank Matron, and see if she’d allow some of the grain Sir Graham was bringing to be delivered for the children. I’d forgotten this side of Kolya, his generosity, his capacity for tenderness, as well as his love of grand gestures.

We picked up a trail of besprizorniki as we walked along, this well-dressed foreign gentleman handing out coins and cigarettes through the park at the Mikhailovsky Palace and past the bronze statue of Pushkin, hand outstretched as if he too wanted a tip. The old Stray Dog Café had reopened as a new restaurant for New People, their pockets bulging with new money. More ragged children rushed over to see what was going on. Some wore only shirts, all were barefoot. The Finn set down his cans and wiped his forehead before setting off again. We waded through children like Moses as we made our way up the stairs of the porte cochere. Orphans clutched at our clothes and wouldn’t let go. “Comrade!” “Comrade Marina!”

“Merde,” Kolya said, as we entered the lobby and he saw for the first time what I’d come to accept as the new reality. Children slept right on the bird’s-eye marble without so much as a pallet. They rocked themselves, thumbs in mouths. At the desk, Alla Denisovna and my lover eyed each other like boxers in a ring, assessing each other’s reach and condition with wary approval, her eyes flicking to the Finn with the milk cans. We waited as she went to get Matron, children climbing all over Kolya, who was handing out smiles and kopek coins like a pasha. He would have been a good father—indulgent, playful, the kind any child would have adored. I still could not bring myself to tell him about Iskra. I ran my hand over the cold marble and wondered if he’d ever checked in here with some elegant lover in years gone by?

Matron emerged, her solid military air. She evaluated the situation immediately, instructed Alla to take the Finn to the kitchen, and not to take her eyes off that milk until dinnertime. Meanwhile, Matron led us back to her office, where we sat before her desk and Kolya explained that he was involved with a group bringing in aid and wanted to make sure the orphanage had what it needed. The more he talked, the more skeptical she became. He started making assurances, not only about his cargo but about the Americans as well. Finally we rose. I kissed her three times. “Thank you.” Then under my breath, “You might see me back here yet.”

“It’s the baby’s father, isn’t it?” she said, low. “Does he know yet?”

I shook my head.

“You can come back if you need to,” she said. “You always have a place with us.”

Me and all the other orphans.

When we emerged, the children surged, clinging to us. “Are you leaving?” the little girl Tinka wept, a bright, sensitive child, clutching my dress. “Are you getting married, Comrade Marina? Please don’t leave…” She was making the others cry.

I knelt down. “I’m going for now. Give me a kiss and say Poka.” See you.

She flung her arms around my neck. I looked up at Kolya—now he could see what I’d been doing here. She kissed me, hiccupping, her lips a ripple of grief. “Poka,” she whispered tearfully.

“Poka,” I said to the children, who followed us to the lobby door.

By the time we got onto Nevsky, most of them had returned to the porte cochere. Kolya took out his handkerchief, wiped his face. “Poor devils.” He kissed me on the forehead. “We’ll do something for them, you’ll see.” He drew me close, his arm around my waist.

That’s when I realized where we were standing. I’d been so distracted, so frankly relieved to be away from them, I’d failed to notice. I jerked Kolya away from the spot with a cry. He must not walk there.

He stumbled off the pavement. I started walking fast across wide Nevsky, blindly, then realized I was heading toward the House of Arts. I turned in the other direction, away from my life.

“What’s going on? Are you having a seizure?”

There was nowhere to go, no place I could step that was free from my ghosts. The city was a minefield.

Kolya drew me close, made me stop my panicked flight. He held my shoulders, had me gaze down Nevsky, spread out on either side, shining in the sun. “Look. We’re here. Together. Look how beautiful it is. Stop running.” I took a deep breath. Yes, it was beautiful. The columned sweep of Kazan Cathedral, the Singer Building with its art nouveau dome, the old red Duma tower, the yellow arcades of Gostinny Dvor. The Catherine Canal, the golden-winged griffins of the Bank Bridge, which had led to our first tryst. “It’s coming back to life,” he said, “and so are we.”

But the weight of that corner, where my baby had died, stained the beauty of the day.

We walked arm in arm, away from the House of Arts, toward the Alexandrinsky Theater. Its park swarmed with besprizorniki—ours, turned out of doors to fend for themselves until nightfall, and also the feral ones who avoided the orphanage, they fought like tigers if someone tried to bring them in. I needed to tell him the rest, the last piece of my story. “When we parted in Tikhvin… turns out I was pregnant.”

I felt the intake of his breath, the stiffening of his body at my side. “You never sent word.”

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t have known how anyway.” The air had gone out of the day. “She was born in July, in Udmurtia, near a town called Kambarka. She died last October, right on that corner where we were just standing. Just before Yudenich attacked.” I tried to keep my voice level, like someone reading a newspaper aloud. “I’d come in from the country, thought I could stay with Mina. But she was mad at me for abandoning her. I got work at the orphanage. It was fine for a while. I lived in the flat with the Golovins and the Naryshkins, worked nights. I could take the baby. It was working out. But Arkady found me there.”

I watched the orphans, begging, picking up butts, lolling against the Catherine statue. He tipped his head back, staring up at the white summer sky. “And?”

“He had a new gang by then—Orphans. They found me at work, dragged me out and stuffed me into a car. But the baby was left behind. When I didn’t return, one of my boys thought I’d been killed, and he jumped off the roof. With her under his coat.”

His eyes closed, his tears dripped back into his hair.

I pitied him. I’d had all year to get used to this. I’d just given him a child, and then taken her away. I slipped my hand into his, brought it to my lips.

“What was her name?”

“Iskra,” I said. “Though the midwife baptized her Antonina. She looked just like you. Matron knew it right away when she saw you.” I put my arm around him, rested my head on his shoulder.

“Do you have any pictures?”

“No.” She’d come and gone, like snow melting in your hands. “Only a lock of her hair. I’ll show it to you.” We stood, eyes closed, forehead to forehead the way we always did, leaning in for the comfort of one another, like good horses.

“I want to see her,” he said. “Can you take me?”

“It’s Novodevichy.” A good hour’s walk.

“We have time.” He rubbed his forehead against mine, then his clean-shaven cheek. We walked around the Alexandrinsky Theater and down Carlo Rossi Street out to the Fontanka, across the Chernyshevsky Bridge, where I’d stood on that terrible morning, with her on the balustrade, wondering how to climb it with her in my arms, and jump. Now the water flowed freely, and three houses painted green, pink, and yellow admired their reflections. Like three old friends. So much of my history locked into these stones, the chains, the towers overlooking the river. Varvara’s old room where she’d tended me after my release from the Cheka prison was just a few steps away. Had she thrown herself off this bridge? Sometimes I hoped she was on a train to the Povolzhye, to help with the famine. But I knew she wouldn’t be, that she would not be able to bear the sight of the starving, knowing what she had done to ensure this disaster. I’d always thought we would be together, like these three houses—Mina, Varvara, and me. Three fates tied together—well, that proved true.

A few boats plied the embankment. Bargemen hoisted boxes onto their decks. Suddenly the waterfront was alive again. Change in the air. Perhaps for me as well.

“I wish I could have seen you pregnant,” Kolya said as we walked down the other side, his straw hat pushed to the back of his head, our arms around each other’s waists. “Fat, waddling along.” He kissed my temple. “Then the child in your arms.”

“Everyone loved her. She had red hair, and eyes like yours, only green.”

The ripples in the water, following us down. “Maybe we could have another one,” he said.

I felt a flash of anger. He was master of the conditional tense. I pulled away from him. He didn’t know what he was asking.

“Don’t say anything now. Just think about it. We have time. We have our whole lives.”

But there was only so much pain a person could endure and I had reached my limit. I watched the boats rocking among the reflections of the stately buildings. Were they fishing boats? Were they moving produce?

“Does she have a stone, the baby? Some kind of marker?”

“She doesn’t even have a legal grave.” That horrible day came flooding back. Even now, the memory was too fresh, too raw. “The gravediggers took pity on me and buried her. I gave them your gun.”

“I should order a stone.”

“No,” I said, more emphatically than I thought I was going to.

He put his hand in mine. “Why not?”

“We’re the only ones she was important to.” Skeletons of old barges, torn apart for firewood, bobbed at the river’s edge. “When we’re gone, there’ll be no one else.” It seems too sad to leave a monument. “I wrote her a poem… That’s my stone.”

Gulls flew upriver from the sea, screamed and circled. Lost, lost, lost.

“Those shoes,” he said, nodding at my feet. “Are they your only pair?”

Aura’s boots, stained and scuffed. “They’re almost new.”

“You don’t have to do without anymore.” He cupped the back of my head in his hand. “It’s the least I can do. And the apartment, that’s yours.”

How could he give me an apartment? It wasn’t London. People had to be registered, the domkom kept records. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand?” He shrugged, adjusted his boater. “A man gives a woman a flat. You’re the only girl in Petrograd who wouldn’t understand.” The way he was smiling, sweet, I sensed a joke he was having with himself. I’d been on that cart through a thousand muddy villages. I’d learned a thing or two about my clever man.

“And where will you be?” I asked.

He looked like a schoolboy, swinging along. Like Tom Sawyer, chewing on a piece of straw. When he looked the most innocent, that’s when Kolya Shurov was sure to be up to something. “Me? I’m the Holy Ghost. Everywhere and nowhere. Decisions are made in Moscow. Coal in the Donbass, mines in the Urals, gold in Siberia. Famines in the Volga. And in Petrograd—my Beautiful Lady.” He stopped and bowed, pretending to doff a plumed hat.

“Not so beautiful anymore.”

He rubbed his smooth cheek against mine, lime and fresh linen. “Always beautiful.” He held my face in his hand. “Don’t you see? I’ve designed this whole business so I could be with you. I could have done a million things. I’m not here because I missed Lenin’s borscht.” He kissed my eyes, my mouth, softly. “We’re no good apart. Look what happens—all hell breaks out.”

We walked to Novodevichy, stopping on Moskovsky Prospect for peaches, and flowers. He wanted little white roses, tinged with pink, wrapped in ivy. “Daisies were more her flower,” I said. “She was so bright, so gay.” He bought both, peeling off banknotes—he didn’t even bargain. As we continued to the convent, eating our peaches, holding our flowers, I thought of that girl I’d been in the days after Iskra died—Vintovka up in the corner room overlooking Moskovsky Prospect, waiting for the Whites. Everywhere, ghosts and more ghosts.

Finally, we entered the shady, moist precincts of the convent, moving along the overgrown paths alive with buzzing cicadas. It still bore the feel of abandonment, more melancholy than Smolensk. Some of the headstones had fallen. I searched for the four-sided plinth that marked the spot, picking my way through the vines and tall grass that knitted the cemetery together in burgeoning green. Finally, I saw it, the gray mossy granite. I led him through. He had to hold on to his hat not to lose it to low-hanging branches. To the right of the tall column marked SVORTSOV, I showed him where I’d buried our child. Her patch of earth, indistinguishable from the rest of the graveyard, the grass starred with tiny flowers. I knelt. “Iskra, it’s your papa.”

He lowered himself next to me, handkerchief on the grass under his knees. “Hello, sweetness,” he said to the earth. “Dearest. I didn’t know. Forgive me.” Tears rolled down his face. He put his roses on the grass and I scattered my daisies. His grief was unfeigned.

Perhaps we should have another child. Perhaps we could start again.

64 Spilled Blood and Roses

My apartment. My kitchen, my bath. I worked at the gateleg table as the sun filled the room, the pretty windows overlooking the trees and the Preobrazhensky Church, with its eagles and chains. I wondered who had lived here before us. Perhaps someone Kolya had known from before. I imagined a woman—the one he’d brought to the ballet that night when I was still a girl with a bow in my hair. How I had wanted to tear her hair out, or his. The low back on her dress as he led her away. Her perfume, L’Heure Bleue.

I kept thinking people were watching the flat. I couldn’t help noticing a bald man in a light-colored jacket. A neighbor? Or something more sinister. And a small man in a straw hat, cigarette holder in his mouth, seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time waiting for someone across the square.

When I pointed them out to Kolya, he shrugged. “Don’t worry. No one’s looking for a little girl poet.”

The flat had two exits—stairs to the street and back stairs that led to the courtyard. I promised myself that if anyone came up those stairs, I would be out the back like a shot. The lipstick and new shoes were lovely, coffee and butter, the brass bed, the taps that issued hot water just for the asking, but all was a dream, I had to remember that. Reality was still out there, whatever Kolya said. I had to take care not to fall asleep inside this fantasy.

On the other hand, my passion for Kolya hadn’t faded a bit. When he returned from his bizniss, I never could wait for him to make a leisurely drink, put his feet up, tell me about his day—all that domestic rigmarole. We made love like a hurricane. The top of the mountain blew off and spewed lava, created new islands, new continents. I smelled him on me as I wrote, when I read, as I made my lunch. We couldn’t be in that room together for five minutes without our clothes flying. We made love on every piece of furniture, in the bath. We tore the bed to shreds. Only then, exhausted, could we eat and talk.

And how he loved to talk, to share the grand exploits of his day. I privately called these monologues Tales of Brave Ulysses. His glee at receiving two pink marble urns right out of the back of the Hermitage. The tense negotiations for a bauxite concession in Murmansk. A comradely meeting with the commissar for transport. He never asked about the poems I wrote, more interested in whether I went out and spent some of the rubles he’d left me. It hurt that he was not interested in my work, but I had to accept that this was not part of our shared life.

Every night, we made love, bathed, and set out for the evening, to some restaurant or nightclub—a new city was springing to life, full of people I’d never seen before, thuggish men and their girls. How could they have sprung up so quickly? Five months since we’d had the NEP, and the gangsters were already triumphant. I couldn’t get used to it. I couldn’t get used to any of it. The phone rang at odd hours. I hadn’t lived in a flat with a working telephone since before the war. Kolya and I had a special signal—ring twice, ring off, ring again. Otherwise I let it go. Kolya told me to ignore it. “If you start taking messages, I’ll have to return them, track people down, blah blah blah. I have better things to do with my day. Best to keep my sense of mystery. I’ll call them when I want them.”

A flood of presents crossed the threshold. He was always a generous man. Blue satin shoes, a pair of emerald earrings. “For the lovely Esmerelda.” A dance dress sewn with silvery beads shimmered and hissed when you shook it. It looked just like water. That color… reminded me that Blok was dead, that silver and lilac world. I was happier with the simple cotton dresses Kolya reluctantly produced, one in green with red chevrons, the other, navy with a white collar. A pair of leather pumps, scarves. But he loved buying me underwear, and silk stockings. I had been wearing my underwear for so long, sewing up the holes, that my body couldn’t imagine such luxury. He teased me when I protested about silk underwear. “When did you become practical?”

What a question. So many things we still didn’t know about each other. I had no faith in his unreal world, no expectation it would continue. What would I do with a silver dress when the trapdoor gaped and all this disappeared? Yet… a beauty shop opened in a courtyard off Manezhny Lane, and I finally succumbed. Unreal to see myself in the mirror, my hair newly cut, knowing that people still didn’t have tea, or shoes, that the Povolzhye was shriveling. I felt ashamed of having the money to have my hair styled. It cost ten thousand rubles—the denominations exploding. How long would a worker at Skorokhod have to labor to see that kind of cash? The Kerensky bills didn’t even seem real, nobody had accepted them in years.

I wandered the streets full of uncertain people, ragged and vulnerable. Slightly out of plumb. They didn’t walk so much as dart, glancing quickly out from under their eyebrows, startling easily, picking their way like invalids who didn’t trust their footing. In the cool of a courtyard, children played under a grandmother’s watchful gaze. A woman hung her laundry, a man sat on a box before a cage of rabbits, letting them take the air. He must have been raising them in his apartment. From the windows above, a woman was scolding someone. An old babushka rested her sagging bust on a windowsill. Her gaze met mine. You will be me tomorrow. In the blink of an eye, all this will be over. The Catherine Canal flowed green past the Church of the Spilled Blood with its twisted cupolas. I stood at the rail, gazing down toward Nevsky and the Kazan Cathedral with its pillared crescent. So much water had flowed under the bridge since terrorists spilled the blood of Alexander II, ushering in the iron rule of Alexander III. So much water, so much blood. All these islands connected by their pretty bridges and ugly past. The autocracy it supported, vanished forever, the moment of freedom, when the revolution could have saved itself, gone as well, in blood. I studied my city with the nostalgia of an exile, as if these impressions would have to last me a lifetime.

Now I could see the great bow of the House, our ship, the country in which talent was the only passport. Already an outcast. Exiled. Just a woman, like any other woman, stockings and skirt, a hank of hair, lips fattened by kisses. Where once I had been a member of a God-given fraternity. I had been one of them. Not somebody’s girl, not a hopeful hanger-on hiding behind the coats. I’d been invited there by Blok himself. He still lived on, not in Petrograd, where they buried the sun, but in Petersburg, where he lived and always would—in certain sounds, in the color of sky, in the gathering mist. And what of me?

As I pondered, three figures were headed my way. I would know them in the dark: Anton, tall and angular, scowling; Tereshenko, with his boxer’s shamble, hunched, aggressive; and Slezin, slight, quick, small shouldered, hands in pockets, listening. The three of them hogged the sidewalk, pale, intent, oblivious, discussing some urgent matter. A woman with a handcart ran into them on purpose to teach them a lesson. I wanted to join them. Kolya didn’t understand the communal life of art, the intense involvement in the making of it, the sense of its absolute value. This was where I belonged, not having my hair cut and eating éclairs in the flat on Preobrazhenskaya Square.

Yet it was over for me. I had been associated with Gumilev and the Kronstadt sailors, someone had said something to someone, and it was done. If Anton was ever brought in for questioning, he had to be innocent of my whereabouts. They came closer, and I stepped back into the shadow of a passageway in my chic shoes and green dress, my bright new hair, and let them pass by, close enough to touch. How thin Anton was, how shabby and badly shaved in the bright summer light. I was already growing used to Kolya’s fleshiness, his vigor. My friend was pale, but utterly engaged. Talking to the others about some urgent literary matter—the future of futurism, their inclusion or exclusion from some reading or other. The role of Kolya’s mistress fit me a bit like the party frock my Golovin grandmother’s dressmaker had once constructed for me—sea green with a satin sash, it made me look like an angel, but frankly it itched where the netting was sewn to the waist and left an angry red line on my skin. I loved Kolya, but I was also a poet, and this was my flock, my tribe. Couldn’t I have both? Couldn’t I have everything? But life was not kind to me, and the sword of arrest hung heavier. I leaned against the grimy stones, my new shoes in dirty water, and waited for the bitterness to subside. I had Kolya again. And no one was keeping me from my verse.

Outside a café on Mokhovaya Street, a whistle greeted me. The orphan Makar, out selling his newspapers. “Hey, Comrade Marina! What’s up—rich boyfriend?”

“Something like it.” I smiled, pushing back my curls. “How’s business?”

He shrugged, hoisting his merchandise higher on his hip. “Getting out of the newspaper racket. Pravda stinks.” He tugged on my sleeve, lowering his voice. “I got a new line. Galoshy is what sells.” Rubbers. “I know this guy who brings the good stuff in from Finland. Packs ’em in fish. Ha ha ha ha. Fish! Anybody looks, it’s just fish. Smells right too. Pre-stunk.”

I gave him a ruble and got my Pravda. “I’m sure you’ll clean up.”

“Everybody’s looking to have some fun. You want anything, I’m at the Little Brick after midnight.” A dance hall for workingmen. “That’s where the money is. Your fellow gets an armful, some nice Katya, and remembers, Ai! I got no preservativ for Comrade Eel!” The boy was growing a slight fuzzy moustache. He must be eating better, or perhaps puberty happened to everyone, even orphans. “For you, five hundred rubles.”

Well, that certainly would pay better than Pravda.

I returned to the flat, took off my new shoes and cleaned them, hung up my dress, and made some tea, and in my new slip with a lace edge sat down with a biscuit and opened the paper.

A counterrevolutionary monarchist group, the Petrograd Fighting Organization, had been infiltrated and captured. Eight hundred people arrested. Eight hundred monarchists! I couldn’t imagine. Led by Professor Vladimir Nikolaevich Tagantsev. A jolt of terror shot through me. My gymnasium—the Tagantsev Academy—was founded by Nadezhda Nikolaevna Tagantseva. The same family, it had to be. It said this Fighting Organization had been waiting for the Kronstadt uprising to seize power. I tore through the paper to find the list. There had to be a list—the list of the executed. There it was. Sixty-one names. Sixty-one executions. My eyes flew down the page and stopped at number 30.

I held my hand over my mouth. Actively helped create counterrevolutionary content… received money… He’d thought that they had a gentleman’s agreement. That he would serve them faithfully, and in return they’d let him keep his conscience. Wrong. Wrong wrong. That they would let him walk around like that, free in his own mind. With an intact spine. EXECUTED.

A Kerensky minister, Lazarevsky. Gizetti, literary critic, and his wife. Naval officers, geologists, chemists, physicists—EXECUTED. EXECUTED. EXECUTED. I didn’t know what to do with the paper. I threw it down, I picked it up, I marched about the apartment. None of them had done anything but think for themselves. The Bolsheviks were killing symbols now, like slaughtering real swans because they were a metaphor for the Whites. They knew what they were doing—attacking the symbol because the thing itself was gone. Creating enemies out of nothing, so they could justify their crimes. Like that hungry old woman trying to eat the painting of sausages off the shutters of a shop. It didn’t matter that the Bolsheviks had crushed the last real opposition—the revolutionary sailors. Now they would impress upon us, the intellectuals and disgruntled workers, that despite the return of capitalism, and the famine, the Bolsheviks were still firmly in the driver’s seat, reins looped double about one hand, the knout in the other.

Out the window, the bells of the Preobrazhensky Church began chiming vespers, then farther off, St. Panteleimon, and the Church of the Spilled Blood. Kazan Cathedral, and St. Isaac’s replied. I found the bottle of vodka—prerevolutionary—and poured out a glass and saluted them all. Nikolai Stepanovich. Vechnaya pamyat’. I was sure he’d died with valor. He’d lived his freedom openly, and they’d killed him for it. I’d admired him, his quixotic position, but was this really what Gorky had in mind for me when he’d said to go home and live as if I were free?

I refilled my glass and toasted Nadezhda and Vladimir, then Blok, and Pasha. I reread that sickening list and kept stopping at Gumilev. Something was off about it, the way they described him. Former nobleman, philologist… board of Universal Literature… So many things could have been said about the man: Poet. Belle-lettrist. His foreign connections, positions on the boards of the House of Arts, the Poets’ Guild, the House of Writers. He’d been born at Kronstadt, for God’s sake. But none of that was mentioned. Only Universal Literature. I’d thought at first: that’s what happened when your enemy wrote your obituary. But one had to read Pravda like a poem. What wasn’t said was always as important as what was. That Universal Literature was a shiver in the air.

Gorky’s crown jewel, his most treasured idea. In saying Universal Literature, they meant Gorky.

Now I was seeing a second picture. Gorky hadn’t especially liked Gumilev, but would never have allowed them to shoot a poet, any poet, without a tremendous fight, and for Gumilev he would have gone all out. For whatever reason, Gorky had not been able to prevent Gumilev’s execution.

I saw it.

A case was being assembled against Gorky and all he represented, everyone he protected.

The sound of chimes, dying in the twilight.

I prayed he’d left by now. Yet without Gorky, we were all on the run. What chance did we have if the Bolsheviks terminated the House of Arts and Universal Literature? No protection, no work… We’d be blown to the four directions, to disappear like the last grains in the drought-stricken Volga.

I peered out the curtain into the darkening square. Below, the man in the straw hat smoked in the shadow of a tree. Why did they have to keep watching the flat if Kolya already had a driver who knew his every move? Why wasn’t that enough? How I hated this cat-and-mouse game. I couldn’t stand to be locked up again. And to think that Papa had stood a year of solitary confinement. That cell, the weight of the walls, the moisture, the dark, I would go mad. It terrified me to consider whom I might implicate under duress. I thought of the list of the executed. Varvara had told me she wouldn’t be there to save me.

I thought of Genya waving his red banner like a windup toy. He had thought I was the naive one, explaining that the death of the sailors was inevitable. What did he think of his masters now?

Oh, what were they doing at the House of Arts? I should be there. Were there protests? A defiant evening of Gumilev’s poetry? Or would they be hunkered down, speaking in whispers, waiting for the next blow. I had to see Anton. Neither of us had liked Gumilev and yet from now on to say Gumilev would mean literature, culture, a Russia we’d hoped we could live in. I thought of Anton’s agitation today on the street. This must have been what they were talking about.

But how could I contact him? They would certainly be watching the House of Arts today. They might have informers. One of Gumilev’s students, perhaps, a wide-eyed hanger-on. No, I couldn’t go there, trailing the contagion of my own political cloud, like typhoid. And what about Gorky? With Moura gone, oh Lord.

I heard the automobile outside, the slamming of the car door. Thank God, he was home. But he lingered downstairs, chatting up the driver. He couldn’t turn it off for a second, could he? He had to charm any and everyone. Finally, I heard him clambering up the stairs, ran to meet him, pink cheeked and smiling, clutching a bunch of big-headed roses and a bottle of champagne. His flushed, grinning face. “They’ve offered Sir Graham a copper mine. Near Chelyabinsk. A sure thing. Get dressed, we’re celebrating.”

“They shot Gumilev,” I said.

“Who?” He set his gifts in the kitchen, handed me the roses.

In the future we’d say roses when we meant slaughter, when we meant blood.

“The poet Gumilev. I told you, they arrested him. Right out of the House of Arts. And they searched my room, remember? They shot him.”

“Poor devil.” He set two pink coupes on the counter and was already removing the metal net from the cork, unwinding the foil sleeve. He popped the cork, and the champagne spilled out. “Hand me that glass, quick!” I handed him one, and the bubbling liquid poured in. He handed it to me, licked the spillage off his hand, took the bottle and the other glass out to the table by the windows. I stared at that paper of roses, and left them where they were.

I stood over Kolya where he’d sat down at the table and kicked off his shoes.

“They shot him, Kolya. Sixty-one people!” I picked up the paper and thrust it at him. “I could have been on that list.”

“But you weren’t. Here’s to good timing, and Englishmen.”

I simply stood there. Was it Gumilev I was weeping for, or myself? “They’re watching the house. Your driver’s Cheka. This isn’t a joke.”

“Drink.” He lifted my glass to my lips. I drank, watching him over the rim. “They’re not going to arrest you. What matters to them right now is the restoration of the rail line and copper for Lenin’s electrification of Russia.” He took off his straw hat and his beautiful pale jacket, smoothed out his chestnut hair. “Listen. You and me, we’re not Gumilevs. This is a different game altogether.” He toasted himself and drained his glass, caught the hem of my slip and tried to pull me over to him, but I brushed his hand away.

“You’re wrong. They can play two games at the same time. Three.” I wondered what the man in the street could see of this. I turned off the lamp. “If Sir Graham wanted mining concessions, why would he care about me, some girl poet he never met? He might even be willing to sacrifice Kolya Shurov, and chalk it up to the cost of doing business.”

My love smiled that smile that said he had a secret, that he knew things. “Trust me,” he said. “Sir Graham’s interest in this deal includes Kolya Shurov.”

“What do you have on him?” I said. “Murder?”

He grabbed my wrist and pulled me onto his lap. “That’s top secret and classified.”

I drank the rest of my glass, let him pour me another. I hooked my arm around his neck, drew him close. His smell made me want to kiss him, to forget all this, but I could not. Was I drunk? Not drunk enough. “Listen to me, Kolya. I want a visa. A passport. Passage to England. Before you sign the deal.” My own words surprised me. But now that I’d said them, I saw that was exactly what I wanted. To fly, to go somewhere I could take a breath. Where I could live without looking over my shoulder, where I could use my real name.

“Why before? This deal’s a triumph,” he said, pouring another glass. “I’m sorry they shot your friend. But this is the future.”

I tipped up his chin so he could see how serious I was. “Once it’s signed, we’re all expendable. Especially me.”

He grinned. “Believe me, the only one who cares about you is me. Of course they’re watching the flat. I’m acting for an English industrialist. Of course they want to know where I go, who I meet. But they’re not going to do anything about it.”

“I need to leave, Kolya,” I said, my voice rising, an edge of hysteria. “I don’t want to be what they have on you.”

“There’s plenty of time,” he murmured, his hand on my neck, sliding down inside my slip.

“Stop it.” I grabbed his hand and bit it. “Listen to me. Get me my papers, or I’ll find a way, I swear.” I didn’t realize until now that I could not stay here anymore. I couldn’t be a Gumilev, living so nobly among the ruins, proudly, bravely, steadily, while the Cheka pounded on my door. Or an Akhmatova, that tower. I wanted more than to witness the end of all this, and then to be killed myself. “You’ve spent too much time among the English. You’ve forgotten what it’s like. You haven’t seen what we’ve become.” I heard the panic in my voice, but I couldn’t help it. “I’ve been in that cell, Kolya, and you haven’t.”

His upturned blue eyes, finally serious. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll get things going, all right? I can’t guarantee it’ll happen by the time we sign—we’re pushing for a quick resolution. But I’ll contact the trade office in London, get things started from that end. ‘My assistant requires a visa.’” He nodded at me, as you nod to a child, so that he’ll nod in return. “I swear. You’ll get your papers, and then if you decide you don’t need them, you can put them in a drawer.”

I wiped my face, exhausted. Clever Kolya, too clever by half. But as long as I had those papers, it didn’t matter what he thought.

I couldn’t sleep, not even after the nightclub, the sex, more champagne. As he slept, I wrote:

He lay on the bed, snoring, spread out like a king, as if no harm could ever come to him. His daughter had slept the same way. God, I loved this man, but we’d both become what we had within us to become—he the businessman, gambler, maker of deals, charmer for a purpose and for no purpose. And I was still me, after these long and difficult years, putting one word against the next, holding up my tiny pocket mirror to the world. We’d grown into our destinies, Kolya and I. Yet after everything, I still felt him like a rush of cocaine. The smell of him all over everything, the bed, my hair. We could have another child…

He turned over, making the springs squeak, squinted against the light. “What are you writing? Come back to bed.”

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be up for a while.”

He stretched like a cat, twisting his solid body clockwise and counter, enjoying each ligament’s torsion, poured himself some water, drank it down. “What’s it about?”

“Roses,” I said.

The time would come when you couldn’t even say Pushkin, or Blok. People wouldn’t know what that meant. Russia without her poets… what would that place be like? Poetry replaced by prose—like dance replaced by long-distance marching. Nothing to recite when life turned and flashed its teeth, and you had to retreat inside yourself to the place only poetry could reach.

He got up, nude, shuffled to the toilet, pissed like a fire hose. Then he was back, leaning over me, kissing my neck, loosening the pen from my hand, putting it on the table, screwing the lid back on the ink. There was no question of writing when Kolya was awake. A haze came over me, I got lost, his touch, his spell. But I knew now I would not give him another child, not in Russia. He could have me, body and soul, but not that.

65 The Call

I went out the next day to sniff the wind, see if I could learn something more about Gumilev. With a hat, new dress, new shoes, who would recognize me? Still, I went to the House of Scholars, where I was not as well known. I found a handwritten sign on the wall:

I stood staring at the note. Noon today. The black clock over the entrance showed quarter past eleven. In “The Lost Tram,” he had imagined everything, though he’d placed his requiem at St. Isaac’s.

The church was cold, the marble dirty, a feeling of neglect, death and more death. There were requiems all day for the fallen. The writers stood together, just as they had with Blok, but far more perilously. His studio students, hundreds of people. Each of them knew he would be watched, his presence noted, but it was the moment to show one’s face, albeit silently, with eyes lowered. The choir sang, the ruddy priest grimly swung his censer. No coffins. No bodies. It was a brave thing on the part of the priests as well. I prayed for him, and the Tagantsevs, for all of them, the precious ark of Russian culture, slipping away. What would become of us? Akhmatova stood by the wall. She looked ready to collapse. To have lost not one but two of her great generation, first Blok and now her husband, her friend. She was the only one left. So pale, thin, and tall. Grief personified. I stood near her, not daring to speak. There would be no more services like this. I imagined they’d close the cathedral after these requiems. “Vechnaya pamyat’…” we sang. Akhmatova crossed herself.

What we’ll be asked to bear, before this is over, her profile seemed to say. Remember this. We can’t save anyone, we can’t save ourselves. All we can do is the thing no one wants us to do, live on. And spare ourselves nothing.

Yes, she would witness, and wait for the executioner. Just as Gumilev had done. These giants. I thought with shame how I’d begged Kolya for that visa. But I remembered too what Gorky had said: She’s a martyr looking for a cross. And what greater cross than Russia? I recognized her old friend Olga Sudeikina. I saw Anton, standing with Sasha and Dunya, and he saw me, even in this crowd, even in my new finery. I nodded back. Yes, I’m still here. Still above ground. Don’t ask. He started toward me, but I shook my head, pulled my hat lower, and backed into the shadows.

I returned to the consular district, back to our little flat, missing my friends, feeling my forfeited place in the family of Russian courage. I felt the chill of autumn coming, the anxious calls of birds taking to the air, the honking of geese. Bears in the forests were gorging, preparing for a long sleep. And how long would our sleep be—our Sleeping Beauty castle back under the spell of the sorcerer? How many more centuries before we awakened again?

The phone was ringing as I entered the flat. Not thinking, I answered. “Hello?”

A man spoke in terrible Russian. “Izvenite. Nikolai Stepanovich tam, pozhalusta?” An English accent.

“He’s not here,” I said in English.

“Stanley here,” the man said. “Give him a message, will you? Tell him Adela’s arrived safely, she’s tucked up at the National, safe and sound. And we’re looking forward to seeing him.”

“I will tell him,” I said, and hung the handset onto the cradle.

So Sir Graham Stanley was not a figment of Kolya’s imagination after all. He had a certain kind of clipped voice, a regional accent. I wrote down the message. Sir Graham called. Adela’s arrived. Hotel National. Look forward to seeing you. The National—Moscow’s best hotel, it was their equivalent of the Astoria. First House of the Soviet. Obviously open for foreign businessmen of a certain rank.

I lay on the bed, still thinking of Gumilev’s requiem mass. Of Akhmatova’s mute presence. Such grief, all we could do was hold it, our piece of it. It was too heavy a cloak for any one of us to bear alone. And seeing Anton…

But something about that phone call began to nag. Tell him Adela’s arrived…

Why would Sir Graham call Kolya to say that Lady Stanley had arrived safely? Kolya often took an interest in old people, I knew. Perhaps they were fond of one another. Yet it didn’t feel quite English. Sir Graham referring to his wife as Adela. He would have said Lady Stanley. I wondered… Kolya had said nothing about going to Moscow.

I went back to the telephone on the wall, lifted the receiver. I’d never placed a call from here, only accepted them. Ring twice, ring again. Don’t answer.

I depressed the cradle a couple of times. “Number, please,” said the operator. I could see her at her station surrounded by hundreds of other girls just like her.

I took a breath. “Hotel National, Moscow.”

“Connecting. Please stand by.”

I waited, listening as the operators on the trunk line forwarded the call, the hailstorm of clicking at phone exchanges from Petrograd to Moscow. How I wished there was something like this that could connect people through layers of time as well as miles. Layers of secrecy and misdirection.

At last, the Moscow operator came on the line. “Hotel National, go ahead.”

“Hotel National,” said a nasal, official-sounding hotel operator.

“Yes, could I have the room of Adela Stanley, please? Englishwoman. Just arrived.”

“No Adela Stanley. Sir Graham Stanley… Oh, here. Shurova, Adela. Same suite. I’ll connect you now.”

Shurova. Of the Knock-Me-Down-with-a-Breath Shurovs of Petersburg, London, Nottingham, Hell, and beyond. “No, that’s all right—” But the phone was already ringing. I was paralyzed. No! I did not want to hear her voice.

“Allo?” Youthful, high. Just a girl.

“Eto Meesis Adela Shurova?” My strangled voice, it would not cross the hurdle of its last jump.

“Da?” Her voice warbled, a bit impatient. Spoiled.

My arms felt weak, my throat narrowing. “Velcom Moscow Gotel Natsional,” I said in the heaviest accent I could muster. “The gotel wish you fine to stay with us.” Tears burned my face. “From Petrograd, message to Meester Shurov. Call Petrograd office at earliest convenient? You tell?”

“Yes, I will. Budu. Ya budu skazat’ evo.” I will to tell his. She’d been studying, so she could talk to her Russian husband.

I hung up the handset, my arms so weak I almost dropped it. Shurova. I fought to catch my breath. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Someone should tell her he wouldn’t give a damn if she spoke Russian or Swahili, as long as she was beautiful, as long as she liked a good fuck. What went on in her head mattered not at all. To him a woman was an animal, a glorious one, but anything else about her was simply the difference between a brindled roan and a bay with black socks. Bile filled my throat. In the same suite. I saw it all now. Even if she was a cold English fish with eyes on the same side of her nose like a halibut, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was related to Sir Graham.

Not his wife, his daughter.

I collapsed onto the bed, clutched at my head. Sir Graham’s interest in this deal includes Kolya Shurov. My brain exploded, coated the striped wallpaper in blood and gray goo.

I thought I knew him, knew the shape of his deceptions. But there were dimensions, whole universes I had yet to suspect. And I’d told him everything. About Pasha, and Iskra, and Gorky, and Father. And he’d given me nothing.

Don’t answer the phone. I don’t want to have to chase my messages.

Married. I should have known something was wrong in all this bizniss. He was playing everyone. Why did I think I would be exempt? No, Sir Graham would never trust just any Kolya Shurov riding in on a rented horse… He had probably gotten her pregnant too, to seal the deal.

I had to think fast, but my mind was up circling the pattern of grape leaves around the ceiling light. I could kill him. I could slit his lying throat when he came in the door. I could wait until he was sleeping.

Don’t do anything rash.

But Shurova. It kept shocking me, like a bad socket on a lamp. I couldn’t resist putting my wet finger on it. We could have another child… How could he have said such a thing with a secret like this up his sleeve? To think how long I’d waited for him, the way other people wait for the Messiah. When was he planning on telling me, after I’d borne him another little redheaded baby?

I rolled from side to side, trying to find a place to rest. I felt like my ribs were broken. I could do nothing for him, none of the things she could do with her name alone. What could I offer—a poet with one dress and another woman’s boots, this restless orphan—besides love him as richly as any man could desire, and remember him, an officer in a sleigh, a fattish boy with a top hat and a pony whip? No wonder he was so sure they wouldn’t arrest him. No wonder.

That gap between my ribs, a heart-sized bruise.

I could imagine his reunion with his wife. How he’d make love to her in their room at the Hotel National, Moscow. Maybe not passionately, but with exquisite tenderness. She would probably undress in the bathroom. And he’d be the perfect gentleman—why not? It wasn’t love, it was diplomacy. He’d be all charm, so she would come to him, binding herself with each surrender. He’d be her guide, his tutorial hand light at the base of her spine, the energy radiating… Oh, I knew that pleasure. He’d show her the twenty towers of the Kremlin. But not the grave of Seryozha Makarov, hard by the Kremlin wall. He’d walk her into Red Square, tell her to close her eyes, and he’d position her before St. Basil’s Cathedral. “Now look.” Her gasp, her joy. As if he’d built it for her. They’d stand, hand in hand as he relayed the story—how after it was completed, Ivan the Terrible put out the eyes of the Italian builders, so that they’d never again construct anything so beautiful—astonishing her with our cruelty, our sense of iron destiny.

That fist in my ribs would not stop.

And she’d beg him to bring her to Petrograd. She’d heard so much about it from him when they were together in London. But now she was here, he’d discourage her. How he loved a side deal. Me, his redheaded mistress in Petrograd, and Adela, his English wife in Moscow. And London. And the world. No wonder he didn’t want to get me a passport.

I could smell him in my hair, on my hands. I felt his kisses even now. He’d filled me with such visions of the future. While all the while, it was just the mirrored box of a magician’s act, gently lit in fantasy light. Worlds and worlds. In this world, there were nightclubs and silver dresses and impossible sex morning and night. In this world he adored me, was going to protect me, was going to get my papers, we would have another child. Then, in a world parallel to it, one floor up or one floor down, there were his wife and Sir Gram, contracts and copper and Lady Stanley and her gum boots. In that life I was simply a sensual memory, a city he could visit when he had time.

Ukashin had taught us the spiral of worlds, the vertiginous layered dimensions of cosmic reality. People had dimensions as well, stories in which they were heroes, stories in which they were the devil himself. In one of those worlds I could cut his heart out and eat it raw, still beating. In another I could bludgeon him to death with a bottle of wine. In a third, I’d strangle him with a silk stocking. In a fourth, lie sobbing and screaming on the floor. And in a fifth, just an empty room. Table, bed, chairs. A phone ringing with no one to answer.

He returned that evening, arms full of packages. He dropped a book on the table, and a wrapper of sweet peas, fish in newspaper, a loaf of good bread. He kissed me on the head as if I were a child. “What a day! Let me put these away.” He bustled into the kitchen. I didn’t follow him. Didn’t wrap myself around his ankles like a cat. He returned in a moment, a bottle of vodka pressed to his chest, two pink glasses pinched between forefinger and thumb. He set them on the table, filled them, collapsed into the other chair. His long hard day, poor dear. He lifted his glass. “To the Bolsheviks. Long may they rule.” Those dear happy eyes, turned up at the corners, though hers had been green, and his were lying blue. He nudged my vodka toward me. “They just gave us the all clear to bring the Haarlem into Petrograd. Grain for the Volga, Marina.”

Grain for the Volga. I examined my glass, its narrow facets. How many facets did he have? Sparkling, and each a little different. “When were you going to tell me about her?”

He cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled. Whatever could I mean? The Haarlem? His face registered not the slightest shock. What a gambler. When he hadn’t a card worth a tinker’s damn. If only his father had been so good, he wouldn’t have lost their fortune.

“I know, Kolya. She called. Adela.”

He went white, then red, respecting all factions. “What did you tell her?”

Now I wished I’d told her everything, instead of taking the coward’s way out, hanging up. “I told her that her husband was a liar and a thief. That he was already married and that she should jump in some English lake.”

He drank down his vodka, traced his brow with the glass. “I was going to tell you, I swear. That very first day. But I couldn’t. Then you told me about Antonina—”

“Iskra.”

“How could I tell you? When? Standing by her grave?” An automobile sputtered along outside the open window. “I just want you to be happy, Marina. I didn’t want to complicate it.” He always wanted to make everyone happy, that was his weakness. Truth was an unfortunate orphan tugging at his coat, trying to get his attention as he pushed it away with his foot.

“But you did—complicate it.”

He stretched out his hand to me, but I wouldn’t take it. “Be reasonable. I didn’t know I’d be coming back. I had to start over, and England isn’t so easy for foreigners. Even with my sterling references.” He smiled, weakly. “Sir Graham invited me to a holiday weekend at his estate. There were three daughters, the younger two married, but this one was left over.” He shrugged, sticking out his lower lip, as if it was nothing. “People get married, why not this girl? Good as anyone. Important family, sweet temper. No beauty but that was fine.”

“How are her teeth?” I drank down my vodka and poured myself another. The curtains sighed in the mellow light of early autumn.

“Not bad,” he said with a wry smile. “Then this trade agreement changed everything. I saw a chance to come back. It’s what I’d been waiting for, a triumphal return. The lion rampant. Rawr.” He was trying to make me laugh, unsuccessfully. Dragging his chair closer, our knees touching under the table, he threw his arm over the back of my chair, leaning in, knowing that just the smell of him disarmed me. “You’re still married, aren’t you?” he said. “Does it make any difference to me? Did it ever?”

Of course it didn’t.

“So why should this be a big deal? Have you suddenly become a moralist?” His eyes glinted, knowing he’d made a good point. “It was necessary, to become part of Sir Graham’s world. It was my ticket home.”

It was insane, pretending he’d done it all for me. “Tell me one thing. Do you love her?”

“Don’t be absurd. Don’t even think about her,” he said, even softer. “There’s you and me, and that’s it. Always.”

I wasn’t going to listen. “So you thought I’d just sit here waiting while you went down to Moscow and greeted your English wife? Wait for you to drop by when you want a good fuck or some nostalgic chitchat?”

“Oh, and you are such a good fuck,” he said, pushing up my skirt.

“Don’t touch me.”

His hand dropped. He pushed himself away. His face grew hard, something I’d seen before, when he dropped the charm. It was always shocking to see it, the coldness below the warmth. “Well, that’s how it is. Without this situation, I wouldn’t be here. We’d never have seen each other again this side of the grave.” But now he remembered who he was talking to. This wasn’t a business negotiation. He softened, leaned forward, took my hand. “Don’t get off the train, Marina.” As I had in Tikhvin, which I’d regretted for so long. “Let it be what it is, imperfect but—my God, who gets to have what we have?”

There was no doubt about that. I could have lived my whole life with Anton and never seen a half second of the passion I felt every time this man and I were together.

“Have I ever cared who else stumbles into the picture? That oaf Genya, whoever else you’re fucking these days. Poets, sailors. It doesn’t matter to me. You’re mine, I’m yours. Please, for God’s sake, don’t get off the train again. It’s taken so long to get here.”

I had to put some distance between us. He was making too much sense. I got up, marched unhappily behind him, like some prosecutor. “Tell me the truth, Kolya. No more lies. You haven’t applied for my papers, have you?”

He gazed up at me with his sheepish guilty-boy face, that winning pout, eyes lit with hope for forgiveness. He wanted us all, me and her, and Sir Graham’s millions, and copper and marble and for everyone to love him. I’d never known a greedier man. He reached back, trying to catch my dress, but I moved away. He stroked the edge of the tabletop as he would stroke my leg. “I’m not returning to London,” he said. “We’re opening offices in Moscow. You want to come to Moscow? There’s a housing shortage, but I can find you something…”

“What would you do with your precious Adela?”

“Sir Graham goes back to Nottingham soon. I can’t see her staying alone in Moscow, when I’ll be traveling so much. Overseeing the concessions.” His smile, as if we were both in on the joke.

“Still wanting it all.” I poured a last vodka and drank it off, hoping it might soften the fist between my ribs.

“Who doesn’t?” Now he was looking at me directly, hands on the table. “Don’t you? What do you want most of all? Tell me, if you even know.”

Once, the answer would have been so simple. I would have said: You. To be together under any circumstances.

Once, I might have said: Just to be known. Accepted as a poet. By a Blok, a Gorky. And now I was. Part of the House of Arts, not just the building at 59 Moika. The secret society of artists that knows no walls.

Once, I might have said: Revolution. Freedom and justice, all the promises the Bolsheviks had made come true. I might even have said: For Kronstadt to hold, for the people of Russia to have risen up in the sailors’ defense.

I might have just said: I want the impossible. Iskra back, and Seryozha, my father, Volodya home from the war. Maryino and fireflies, summer rain. To start over.

But now I just wanted to walk across the Troitsky Bridge without screaming. Never to be cornered again. Really, just to be completely forgotten. To go about my business without looking over my shoulder.

He was waiting for an answer—tapping one of his Egyptian cigarettes on its pretty box, putting it between his lips, lighting it with his battered lighter made from a shell cartridge. I was sure she’d given him a gold one for a wedding gift. All my love, Adela. But he didn’t want to show it to me. What did I want? He wasn’t talking about impossible things. He wanted it to be something he could give me. Besides fidelity, a life together, a real life of washing out clothes in a basin and hanging them by the fire, making dinner over a Primus stove, getting under the thick covers on winter evenings. Kolya Shurov didn’t want a life with me. He just wanted moments, like candies stuffed with brandy, like Roman candles, like arias. Exquisite moments of passion, of playfulness, of beauty. But life was all the rest.

We gazed at each other, like two old warriors sitting on shaggy horses at a crossroads filled with skulls.

“Your problem is, you don’t know what you want.” He pushed the box of cigarettes and the lighter away from himself, rose and stood next to me, smoke trailing up from his hand on the chair back. “I know who I am, what I want. I want that tightrope walker. I knew that girl. But who are you now? The revolutionary? The adventurer? The poet? Or this”—he gestured to me with his cigarette—“sanctimonious little wife? I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore.”

Adventurer, that’s what Arkady had called me. But I’d lost my taste for adventure. At one time, I’d have been dazzled to be a man’s mistress. How romantic it would have sounded! Now it seemed like the hard heel of a stale loaf of bread. Politics was a failure, idealism had drowned itself and lay like Ophelia in the water weeds, the surface floating with pages from my Cheka file.

What did I want? A new baby? If I asked in my truest heart, what I wanted was—sails. Open water. The freshness of the wind. That formless airy unwritten thing—the future.

Freedom. More than courage, more than poetry. More than fame, or love. To love Kolya would always mean this: a storm, followed by wreckage, then a few days of startling blue sky while you hammered the roof back on the house, just in time for the next storm.

I could smell salt in the air.

She will never be with anyone. My mother’s curse.

Perhaps it was true. And if it was, there was nothing to be done about it. I was not afraid of being alone. I would take—white sails.

I gazed at my great, my one true faithless love, whom I’d wanted since he was a boy of twelve and I a freckled six-year-old. I hadn’t even started school yet when I’d set my heart on him. Now he was mired in a loveless marriage and hopes of gain, Sir Graham this and Chicherin that, immaculate pale suits and two-toned shoes… My dear, my dear, he thought he had it all, and me as well, his dog on a little leash. NEPman with Lapdog. I wondered what Chekhov would make of this.

I lit one of his Egyptian cigarettes, and considered what he was offering.

If I had a certain strength of mind, I could do as he proposed. Live in his flat, write my verses, I could hold poetry evenings here as Galina Krestovskaya had once done. And have my love whenever he came through town. We would dance on tables and smash our plates, set fire to the bedroom.

But I was not so strong. The heartache would break me. If only I didn’t love him the way I did, like a forest fire, I might hold on to myself, live with it. But I could smell the coming dampness. I felt the dark gathering in the corners of the bright and pretty room. I had waited so long for this—just to taste that sweet mouth, feel his body in my arms, urgent, irrepressible. To sleep with him at night and wake with him in the morning. Kolya wanted everyone to be happy, but he made everybody miserable in the end. “Get me out of here, Kolya. On your Dutch ship. I want to be on it when it leaves.”

“What happened to your glorious future?” he asked, letting the smoke wreathe his hair. “You used to argue with me, heaping abuse on my capitalistic endeavors. Where’s your revolutionary spirit?”

What irony—Kolya Shurov, proponent of Communism? There’s a role reversal. But I could not stomach a future built on mines in the Urals and the graves of Kronstadt. Without Blok, without Gumilev, without Gorky. The only sound would be the trumpeting of the triumphant rabble. There might be money, copper, and railroads, but where would our voices come from? No sounds could escape the collapsing star. That’s what Blok meant when he said there were no more sounds.

I turned away from him, moving to the window, gazing at the sunset blush outside the thin curtains. Down in the square, one or another of our watchers would be waiting for us to leave for dinner. I would remain a person of interest. I would not avoid a prison camp, an ugly death. The airlessness closed in on me even before the breathing curtain. Unless I was prepared to do more or less what Genya was doing, my cries would never be heard. I remembered the day I sat on the embankment watching The Mystery of Liberated Labor. I understood even then that the revolution had passed into the realm of myth, had become a religion, codified, with hierophants and heretics.

“You ask me what I really want,” I said, watching the man in the straw hat in the shadow of a linden tree. “I want a passport, a visa. And a berth on the Haarlem when it leaves. That’s what I want. You can do this for me, Kolya.”

He came to me then, pulled me to him, that intoxicating smell, the slight give of his flesh, his breath against my neck. “Give me some time. A few weeks. We’ve waited our whole lives for this.”

And then I knew he wasn’t going to help me. A few weeks meant never. The Haarlem would be gone. Winter would come, and then spring. The air turned to chlorine gas, it made my eyes smart. He loved me, he wanted me, and he wasn’t going to let me get away. He could, but he wouldn’t.

This sweet failed life. Soon the birds would be flying south, the winds turning cold. And I was trapped, trapped by my love. This was why Akhmatova had not left. It wasn’t her nobility at all. It was that life caught you. You lived one day after the next, and fought the rupture.

66 Hey, Little Apple

Makar was there, right where he said he’d be, outside the Little Brick, in the old neighborhood near the Poverty Artel. Such a long time ago. Music spilled out onto the street, a neurasthenic band braying a version of “Yablochko.” “Hey, Little Apple, where are you rolling? Not to Lenin, not to Trotsky, but to my sailor of the Red Fleet.” I leaned against the building, had to catch my breath. “Hey, Little Apple…” Had it become just a tune? Didn’t people remember the words anymore? Or perhaps there were new ones now.

The boy was selling something to a worker and his flushed girlfriend on their way home for a late-night tryst. I waited until they were done before I approached him. “Hey, Makar,” I said. “How’s business?”

“Ne plokho.” He shrugged. But he touched a bulging pocket. He must be cleaning up.

“Listen, I need you.” I pulled him to one side, out of the light from the streetlamp, and spoke into his dirty ear. “I need to talk to your Finn.”

The orphan frowned, folding his heavy brows until they formed an unbroken line. “What Finn?”

“Your friend. The fisherman. Who brings the necessary, to capture the white sea.”

The boy laughed, startled that one of his old orphanage matrons would make a dirty joke. “What do you want with him?”

“That’s between me and him,” I said.

He shook his head, lipped his faint moustache. “That’s not how it goes. I set something up for you, I get a piece. You can’t cut me out.”

“I want him to take me to Finland.”

Makar’s eyes opened wide, gave me a look of admiration that I would venture such a bold move. And perhaps pride that I trusted him with such an illegal activity. Well, who else did I have these days? My rich boyfriend had gone down to Moscow to show his wife around. There would be no visa, no first-class ticket or even a berth on a cargo ship bound for Amsterdam. I would have to take it into my own hands.

“Maybe I’ll go with you,” he said. “I was never on a boat before. I’ve just been here.”

“Let him know. I’ll be back tomorrow night.” I turned my face from the streetlight so I wouldn’t be seen.

“Wait, just a minute. Wait there.” The orphan disappeared through the curtain of the Little Brick, into the din.

I waited on the street corner through several rounds of crude advances. “Come on, kitten, I’ll pay your ticket.” “Milaya, you’ve been waiting for me all your life.” “How much for a quick one? We can go in that courtyard. Fifty thousand? I’ll get a scumbag—what do you say?” The inflation was prodigious. A match was two hundred fifty rubles now.

Eventually the boy emerged from the rust-colored curtain, leading a tall, ginger-haired man who didn’t look much like a fisherman—too tall, too slouchy, with a red beard, a long sharp chin and long nose. His eyes were very dark under pale brows, level and dangerous, like the barrels of two guns.

“This is her,” Makar said. To me: “This is the Wolf.”

So this was what had replaced Arkady von Princip, a lean, voracious redheaded Finn of twenty-five or so with a fresh scar through one pale eyebrow. He held his sharp chin in his hand. “The kid said you want to take a tour,” he said.

“How much?” I said.

He looked at me closely, squinting at my dress, my boots. I’d changed back into my old clothes—if I’d worn the things Kolya had bought me, the price would be double. “A million,” he said.

I was blown backward as if in a strong wind. “Where is this tour going, Africa?”

“Sestroretsk.” Just over the border.

“That’s not far enough. I could walk there and keep the million,” I said.

“So walk.” The Wolf turned to go back into the nightclub.

“You really a fisherman?” I called after him.

“Fisher of men,” he said. And laughed and stepped back toward me. “And you, you’re really a teacher?”

“In the school of many sorrows,” I said. “How about Helsinki?”

“Two million,” he said.

What a disgusting fellow. “It’s not that much farther.”

“I have no need to go to Helsinki. It’s more complicated all around.”

A million, two million—it made my head swim. Everything was so expensive now—yet, the new people had bathtubs of money—for restaurants, for nightclubs, and beaded dresses and silk stockings. How in the world could I raise that kind of money? A million. He might as well have said ten times that. “I don’t like Sestroretsk. It’s too close. Too many eyes on the border.”

“I know a customs officer,” he said. “My brother Ahti. You know who is Ahti?”

I shook my head.

“The God of Water. It’s good luck for us, Sestroretsk.”

I didn’t like it. I especially didn’t like the brother. Too many heads to get ideas. Like taking my money and dumping me right back into Russia—why not? Or worse, into the hands of the Russian border police. Or into the sea. No, I could see it as clearly as if I were Vera Borisovna. “How about Kuokkala?” The former Russian artists’ colony on the gulf a couple of miles northwest of Sestroretsk, a place I actually knew. My Uncle Vadim once rented a dacha there, next door to the artist Repin.

The Wolf considered it, rubbing his chin.

I wondered if the painter had remained after that coast was returned to Finland. Seryozha had adored that old man, as did Vera Borisovna. We went visiting as often as she would allow it. My brother in particular had been fascinated by a half-finished portrait of a young man in a black suit smoking a cigarette.

“Nothing’s going on in Kuokkala. Sestroretsk, that’s where you want to be. Catch the train for Vyborg.”

Those afternoons at Repin’s, painter of The Volga Boatmen, and the famous portrait of the barefoot Tolstoy. All of us had posed for him. Those pictures, where had they gone? Sold for grain to the Volga? My mother, knocking sweetly on his door—she had the perennial entrée of beautiful women everywhere. Seryozha watching the artist with the same concentration with which the artist studied him. Surely there were still some Russians left in Kuokkala. If I couldn’t get to Helsinki, I’d rather land on familiar terrain. Somewhere without the Wolf’s brother.

The Finn gazed at me, stroking his little beard. “I like you, Teacher. You find two more people, I’ll let you go for eight hundred thousand.”

“Each?”

“No, just you. For them it’s the regular price. But it’s a bargain. People will cross you on foot for two million, and you’d have to take the train, hide in the woods. This is a hundred percent safer.”

“I don’t know anyone else,” I said.

The Wolf sighed. Makar was back, stuffing cash into his pocket. “So when do we go?”

“Thursday,” said the Finn.

Three days to collect a million rubles. But I had an idea how I would get it.

Our brass bed was the big seller of the day. I felt I was killing swans, selling it. That bed was our love, where he’d hoped we’d spend the months and years ahead. We would never sleep in it again. Forgive me, Kolya. But I’d told him plainly. I could not be his toy. I could never put my life in his hands after that duplicity. I watched the two metalworkers break the bed into parts—footboard, headboard, frame, and springs. All around me, the empty places where our love nest had been feathered. It was so soon, but if I waited, it would be too late. Don’t hesitate, Arkady taught me. In a few months, I’d be accustomed to our lives—the comings and goings of Mrs. Shurov, waiting for visits. Perhaps I’d buy cocaine through the Wolf. Drink. Make interim arrangements. It would be the death of me.

The metalworkers didn’t want the mattress. I could sell that separately. They would cut up the brass for rings and pins, belt buckles. The iron they’d do God knows what with, the springs they’d sell individually to upholsterers.

“They’ll make four times what they paid,” said Makar, counting out the cash and handing it to me. My little assistant was proving his worth. The wad of Kerenskys was growing as thick as a Bible. A couple bought the rugs, Makar talked the price up. I sold the curtains, the pillows, the mirrors, the pink champagne glasses. The groceries went to a woman wearing the ugliest hat I’d ever seen, someone the orphan knew from a brothel near the Little Brick. Sugar and sardines, quail eggs, salt and caviar. He counted the money twice, held it up to the light. She’d wanted the wine and the brandy, the whisky and the vodka, but didn’t have enough money. “Put it away for me?” she purred to Makar. He looked at me quizzically, as if asking the adult what to do, but crossed his eyes when he did it. No.

“I have another customer,” I said.

“How much? I’ll double it.”

How much would this nonexistent customer give us for bottles of vintage wine and cognac, English whisky and vodka? “A hundred thousand,” Makar said.

“You little runt,” the woman replied, resettling her hat. “Go jump off a bridge.”

He looked to me again, shrugged. I touched my eyebrow, meaningfully. We would have been a good team, Makar and me. Who could have imagined this in the days when I told the boys the story of Shinshen, and Iskra and Maxim were still alive?

In the end we came down to eighty. “If you can be back in a half hour.”

“I’ll be right back. Don’t sell any of it, promise me.”

Where did these people come from? How had they survived the war ready to set up shop as soon as the season changed? Such strange times. Yes, perhaps it would all end well, just as Kolya hoped. But I felt the lid descending, the last door closing. Kolya had too much faith in himself, which was fine for him, but I could not make a life out of hope. Makar counted the money, smoking his dirty chinar—I’d given him a box of Egyptian ovals but he must have sold them. “Sure you want to leave?” he asked. “We could make a fortune together, and live like kings.” He handed me a pile of cash. “Here’s another hundred thousand. How much do we have altogether?”

“Almost a million and a half.” I’d sewn myself a wallet I could wear under my clothes, where I kept the bulk of the funds. He was an impressive salesman. I should introduce him to Kolya. I’d told him if he could find enough traders to empty the Preobrazhenskaya Square flat in two days, I’d give him ten percent. I’d been skeptical, but he said, “Give me one day.” All day yesterday, he’d brought people up to the flat, and today was even richer. How could an orphan know so many people with money to burn? I supposed that’s what you got when you moved from newspapers to galoshy. Two million would get me all the way to Helsinki. But I would be happy with Kuokkala, and had other plans for that extra cash. In just two more nights the moon would be dark. That’s when the Wolf did his fishing.

The portable phonograph and two pairs of silk stockings sold to a NEPman, Makar’s best condom customer, so he said. The man also bought the pretty dishes. He counted out the money with a flourish before his moonfaced girlfriend as my partner played lookout, watching for bandits. “How about the telephone?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it. Private phones were still rare. Kolya used it for work, but it was a traitor. Don’t answer the phone. “Two hundred thousand,” said the boy without blinking an eye, a boy who’d never held a thousand rubles of his own.

“Little swindler. I can get one for eighty,” the man said. “Real Ericsson, straight from Sweden.”

“So get one,” the kid said.

I was scared sick with what the Cheka might be thinking about all this coming and going in the apartment of the Angliysky spy Nikolai Shurov, furniture and rugs leaving out the front door in his absence. But the birds were flying, I had no choice. I had set my course.

In the end, he didn’t buy the telephone. But the woman came back for the liquor, with a bosomy girl in tow carrying two canvas bags. Did she want the telephone?

“I’m tapped out,” she said, as she filled her bags with bottles and handed them to the girl to lug home. “For God’s sake don’t drop them, Mila, whatever you do.”

The girl meekly carried the bags away.

We sat eating in the emptying flat when a knock on the door made us jump. Makar pressed his ear to the wood.

“It’s me, idiot.” A man’s voice. “Open the fucking door.”

He let in a burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard and heavy black eyebrows. I almost dropped my glass when I saw him, caught it before it fell. A face I never wanted to see again. Borya, Arkady’s lieutenant. Saint Peter at the gate. He wasn’t nearly the man he’d been, but who was? I still had the scar on the palm of my hand. Would he remember me, the girl locked in the room overlooking the Tauride Gardens, the one he almost threw out the window? Or that night in the woods when they shot at me as I ran?

He spat sunflower seeds onto the parquet, denuded of its rugs. “My friend says you have some goods to off-load. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“I remember you,” I said.

He gazed at me, not trying to place me. “Yeah, so what?”

“How about a telephone?” Makar said.

The big man glanced at the machine on the wall in its black lacquer case, curled his fat lip, shrugged. “How much?”

“Two hundred,” Makar said.

“Stop wasting my time,” he said. “You’re on my list, malysh.”

Something was wrong with his leg. He was sparing it. “What happened to you?” I asked.

He fixed me with a terrible gaze, an Evil Eye stare. “What do you think, shit for brains?”

Arkady. The men deserting him, he must have shot him, struck him, beat him. But this was the world I was moving back into. The world where anything was possible. “Listen, I’ll trade you that phone for a gun. Something small. And ammunition. A straight-up trade. Something that won’t blow up in my hand. Can you do it?”

Makar stared at this woman, his little comrade matron. He didn’t know me after all. Borya laughed, a small and joyless snort. Can I do it? Yes, I’d asked the right man. He turned to Makar. “Ten tomorrow.”

I lifted the telephone down from the wall, held it out. The big man took his knife and cut its throat.

“You still out on Kamenny? St. John the Baptist?”

He hoisted the phone under his arm. “The kid knows where.”

67 The Émigré

I stood out on Nevsky in the dark, watching Anton in his lit window. I knew he’d be up. The other passengers already asleep, only a window here and there still glowing in the velvet night. He didn’t sleep soundly, and so preferred to work until he was exhausted, then slept hard, grinding his teeth, well into the morning. I wondered if he could see me down here, though I knew the reflection of himself and his own flickering lamp in the window glass would be his only view. I wanted to touch him, to put my cool hand on his hot brow, lead him to safety. Soon this whole ark would list, would founder, and drown in the rising waters of control and mediocrity. I watched and waited, but I saw no one. I was betting the Cheka didn’t have enough manpower to surveil the House of Arts all night. Not for one girl poet, one insignificant nobody.

I slipped into the sleeping house through the Bolshaya Morskaya entrance. I wondered what the Cheka had been looking for in my room, searching my papers that night. Some link between me and Gumilev and Pasha. Actively helped create counterrevolutionary content… Something on which they could base a case against me. Or strengthen the one against Nikolai Stepanovich. And yet, what corroboration did they really need? Their law wasn’t the foundation of a civil society, it was simply pretext, as easy to shift as a pair of slippers.

As I quietly threaded my way through the halls, I wondered again why Gumilev had picked me to teach at the sailors’ club. We weren’t close, I wasn’t one of his students, there were certainly more masculine poets than me. Was it because I was expendable? Because we didn’t have any connection? Or had he seen something else in me, something more incendiary? Or was it just luck? I remembered how he’d pretended indifference to the sailors’ plight during the siege. He was telling me, Don’t moan, don’t wring your hands. Watch, hang on to yourself.

Up the stairs and down the hall, the route I traveled in my dreams. These halls, these doors, the heaven of my poet’s life. Here was Khodasevich, there Kuzmin, a light wheeze. And Inna… I prayed that anyone who saw me now would wait until tomorrow to gossip about it. One more day, and the dark face of the moon would turn to this earth, and I would be gone. They had an informer here—how else would they have known about Pasha? But I doubted anyone would be energetic enough to call the ravens tonight. Human torpor, that great Law of Laws. One more day, and I would be gone. In Finland, or robbed and thrown overboard by the Wolf into the deep and silent waters of the gulf.

When I got to Anton’s, I silently pushed open the door and I found him just where I’d seen him from the street—at his desk, lantern fluttering, working in a haze of foul tobacco. When he saw me, he stopped his pencil, cigarette dangling from his mouth. Whiter than usual, the color of paper. He stood as if levitating, the smoke still rising.

“Turn off the light,” I said softly.

He doused the lamp.

I walked to him in the illumination from the street. He was just a silhouette, tall and thin. Under my shoes, sunflower husks—up to his old tricks. I pulled him away from the window, plucked the burning cigarette from between his fingers, took a puff and ground it out on the floor. I kissed him, his ashtray breath. He seized my hand, pressed it to his mouth. “Marina,” he breathed into it. “I saw you at the funeral.” He held me as if he thought he might break me, one arm around me, the other hand buried in my hair. “Are you real?” he whispered, his unshaven cheek against mine. “I wanted so much to talk to you that day. It’s been absolute hell, knowing you were somewhere, but not being able to see you. Where’ve you been all this time, at the orphanage? Why didn’t you contact me?”

“Shh… shh… shhh…” I pressed my mouth to his, to stop his questions. What did it matter where I’d been? What mattered was where we were going.

“I saved all your things,” he whispered into my hair. “Your coat, your books… Look.” He handed me a folded piece of paper. The lock of Iskra’s hair. “It was on the floor.” Then he clasped me again, overcome with emotion, hurting me in his awkward grip. “Come back, Marina. There haven’t been any more searches. I think it’s over for now. They’ve made their point.”

It would never be over. Whether it was a matter of weeks or years, they’d be back. And back and back.

He stroked my hair, rubbing his face in it. We sat on the sagging bed in the dim room the color of the inside of a jar. The bedding emitted a lonely, sad smell. I turned the small packet of her hair over and over in my hands. “I’ve missed you so much,” he whispered. The squeak of the bed as he crossed his long legs. I could see his profile as he turned his head to the window. “Every night since you left. I’ve sat in that window. Hoping you’d see me.”

“I have.”

“Sometimes, I think I see you. But it’s the way a woman walks, or holds her head. A word someone says in the street. But you’re always just out of reach, rounding a corner, disappearing into a shop. I’ve been out of my mind.” He laughed, an unnatural, forced laugh. “Like a tormented girl suffering over a crush. My writing is crap. Zhili, razdavili…” We lived, we crushed. “Look what you’ve done to me! I’ve become Semyon Nadson.”

“I’m leaving, Anton,” I said. “And I want you to come with me.”

The big house creaked, stretching in its sleep. “Leaving Petrograd?” he whispered. How bewildered he sounded.

“Leaving the country,” I said.

The bed squeaked. He scratched, turned toward the window. I could see him in profile, his sharp nose, his hair a messy haystack in silhouette. “When?”

“Tomorrow night. I’ve got the money. Everything’s set.” I took his hand, dry and papery.

“Tomorrow? So fast?” He took both my hands. “What about Anvil? The first issue’s scheduled for October. Eikhenbaum’s even contributing an essay.” Pleading with me. “It’s not just a Living Almanac anymore. They’re giving us print. You know what this means? It’s the future of Russian literature. Petrov-Vodkin’s doing the cover.” He had a life, right here, that’s what he was telling me. He didn’t want to go. I hadn’t imagined he’d refuse.

“Think about Gumilev,” I said. “It’s not going to stop.”

I could hear him breathing, a rapid pant. There was a catch in his lungs from all the smoking. “Gumilev was taunting them. Wearing his crosses, talking about restoration. He forgot they could bite.”

Anton thought there was a difference between Gumilev and me, Gumilev and him, Gumilev and the rest. There was no difference. We were all only as good as our freedom to think. “There’s a boat leaving tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ve got enough money for both of us. By the end of the week, we’ll be in Finland, Anton. We’ll be free.”

He sucked in a breath. It rattled as he let it out. He stood, walked to his desk, and slumped into the chair. I could see his body against the window, hands rolling another stinking makhorka. The scratch of the match lighting his face, the slope of the nose, the small unhappy mouth. “We’ve got the Blok memorial coming up. We’re just planning it. Akhmatova’s coming—she’s got a whole new book coming out, she’s writing like mad. She and Shileiko split up—”

“Anton, are you listening to me?” Was I shouting? I lowered my voice. “Blok is dead. We lost. It’s over.”

He sat in the chair, smoking and pulling on his forelock as he did when he was unhappy. He blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “Have you thought about what it would be like, being an exile?”

I hadn’t given it a thought. “I only know I can’t be here.”

“It’s going to be like being adrift on a raft. We’ll be people fallen out of time. Cut off.” His smoke painted arabesques in the windowlight. “We’ll become ridiculous. Who would we write for? Other émigrés? People on the same small, crowded raft? Soon we’ll be the only ones who can understand our antiquated tongue. Growing old, dying a bit more every day. While all around us, people will be writing in living languages. Who would publish us? We’d be as useless as vestigial tails.” He’d thought about this far more than I’d imagined. “I don’t want to be a French writer, Marina. A German writer, Swedish, Portuguese. I’m Russian—I don’t translate. If only we were painters, or musicians, it would mean nothing. We could walk down the Champs-Elysées. But we aren’t. I can’t leave.”

“But if we stay, what then?” I whispered urgently. “We’ll have journals and books, memorials for the dead, but we won’t be able to say anything. We’ll be speaking in code, for people who can understand us. And there’ll be fewer and fewer. We’ll be exiles in our own country.”

He started to pace, smoking, footsteps crunching the layer of sunflower-seed shells into powder. “What would we do abroad? How would we work? How would we live?”

“We’d find something. There’s always work of some kind.”

“Who do we know in Finland? I hate Finland. What’s in Finland? Trees. I don’t even like trees. They give me hay fever. We don’t speak the language, what would we do, raise reindeer?” He was getting hysterical.

“We’ll do whatever we like,” I said. “It’s not the Transbaikal. It doesn’t have to be Finland. We can live anywhere.”

“A couple of exiles. Foreigners. We’d always be foreigners—subject to suspicion. And here, they’ll forget about us. Unknown there, forgotten here—we’ll cease to exist.” He waved his hands like he was dissipating smoke. Poof, we’re gone.

“If we stay, we’ll cease to exist,” I said. In a pool of blood. “And you know what? If I’m forgotten, so be it.” I sat cross-legged on the sagging bed.

“It’s not the same for you,” he said. “You have English and French and German, you could start over like that.” He snapped his fingers. “What are you, twenty-one? You’re a baby. Me, I’m already going bald.”

He was what, twenty-nine? “Your French isn’t so bad. You’d pick it up fast if you spoke it every day. They have bald people in France. You could set up a press, publish what you like.”

“You know that’s not the way it’d be.” I could see his outline, clutching his hair in his hands. “We’d be broke and friendless, misunderstood by everyone, starving in some freezing room.”

“Just like the Poverty Artel. We’ll still be the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.”

“It would be a desert.” He picked up a thick pile of papers from his desk, and shook it at me. “I’d die without this. In the West, who would I be? Just another Russian crackpot. Ivan the Futurist. A joke. Nobody would understand a thing about new prosody, about our new poets. Nobody needs a lousy translator of Apollinaire in France, do they? I’d be superfluous. The new superfluous man.” He leaned against the window, his lanky frame transformed into just a pair of legs. “Always the extra man. Well, I finally found a place for myself here. I’m known. I’m on the board of the House of Arts now, right along with Chukovsky and Shklovsky.”

He’d come up in the world. Even if it meant Gumilev and Blok had to die.

“I’m from Orel—do you know what that means? A schoolmaster’s son from Orel? I know what it’s like to be circling the outer planets. This”—he gestured to Nevsky Prospect out the window—“this is my place in the world.” He laid his forearm on top of his head, an awkward gesture that was as much a part of him as his stinking tobacco. “We’re going to have a reading at the end of September. Sasha and I are designing the poster. I can’t leave. People depend upon me.”

Pacing, haloed in smoke, he was not talking to me anymore but arguing with himself. “Russian literature depends on us. How can we just leave? What’s going to happen to it if everybody runs for the doors? We’re opening the gallery again, we’re going to sell prints, the concert section’s starting up. It’s going to be…”

Then he remembered me. “Don’t leave, Marina. You’re panicking. This is all going to blow over. You’ll see.” He was running out of arguments.

“It’s not going to blow over,” I said quietly but firmly, and hooked his sleeve as he passed by me. “Anton, stop it.”

“My French stinks!” He waved his arms in the air. “I know you think I’m a coward. But I’m just an ordinary man. Nothing scares you, that’s the problem. You don’t know what life is like for the rest of us. This is my world. This!” I could see his arm shoot out. His voice rising again. “This room, this desk, the hall outside. The canteen. Sasha and Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum. Russian poetry, Russian problems, the Russian mind—that’s my dowry, that’s my bank account. Yes, there’s no more Gumilev, there’s no more Blok. It’s horrible, like having our lungs cut out, but this means it’s up to us, our generation, to keep it alive.”

I smelled his fear, felt his frenzied piling up of obligations and reasons into a barricade, fortifications around his position. He was throwing everything he had onto the pile. As afraid of the unknown as I was afraid of the known. Maybe he was more of a poet than I was. I remembered when Kolya asked me what it was I really wanted, poetry wasn’t my answer. Freedom trumped even that.

“Look, look, look,” he said, kneeling before me, taking my hands. “We’ve been through the worst. Everything’s going to take off now. It’s our moment. They’re allowing private publishing again. There’ll be paper. We can sell our books, make a living. Stay, Marina, please.” He sat on the bed next to me, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. In my new state of cleanliness, I could smell him—strong, acrid. “Who’s going to understand your poems in the West? You’re Russian—you’re no Jack London. Out there, you’re just some beautiful girl who thinks she speaks better English than she does. Here, we know you.” He stroked my hair. “We admire you. We want to hear what you have to say. Your verses speak to us, they feed us. We need you to understand—for us. Look at Akhmatova—is she leaving? No. And Gumilev was her husband. But she’s going to stay and live our life along with us. She’s even got a new poem, I heard it the other night—I’m not a fan, you know, but who do they have like this?

How stern she was, how absolute. But I wasn’t Akhmatova. Russia would eat me in a casual bite. Should I let myself be eaten, then, so I could be simpler and more filled with pride? There was nothing simple about the Cheka, and your tears flowed like the Nile.

We sat, side by side. I could hear him sniffling. “So that’s it? Going to shut the door behind you, like leaving the hospital? ‘Thank God that’s done’?” He launched himself back to his feet, punching the air, kicking the chair.

“Shhh, you’re going to wake them.”

“The future’s just opening up. Can’t you wait? You need to be part of it. We need you.” He couldn’t even say I need you.

He was going to stay in the ward and wait for death. Because he was a coward, and because he loved Russia, and lacked the imagination to see how there might be other lives, that the future here might be more full of ravens than he could imagine.

Well, I would eat my bread scented with wormwood. Wanderer, be my name.

68 The Wolf

The boy and I waited for the Wolf on Krestovsky Island, the deserted south shore of the Little Nevka. The islands, where all dark deeds went unpunished. My pocket once again armed, this time with a gun I’d purchased that day from Saint Peter in his lair on Pharmacists’ Island, along with three boxes of ammunition. I’d long ago learned my lesson, made the old thief fire it himself in an overgrown park with a weedy pond, so I could be assured it wouldn’t blow up in my hand. Makar had taken me there. He’d wanted to fire it too. How he admired himself as he weighed it in his hand, his eyes alight in a way that saddened me. I didn’t want to shepherd him any further into a life of crime. As if my actions could have had any effect on such an outcome.

I myself fired a round, and felt unjustifiably pleased to have hit the rusted can at about twenty paces. Not that I was going to fight a duel. If I needed to fire it, it would be in close quarters, say, in a rocking boat on the Gulf of Finland, or on a tumbledown dock on the Little Nevka in just a few minutes.

The boy paced in the tall grass in the last rays of the sun, his hands behind his back, jumping on the balls of his feet. He was half out of his mind with excitement. I’d brought a satchel packed with food, the few things Anton had saved from my room—a comb, a couple of books, my sheepskin coat and fox-fur hat. Brought my new clothes as well, the green dress and the blue. In the hem of the green one, I’d sewn the earrings Kolya had given me, the little emeralds. Esmerelda. That was the girl he loved, the tightrope walker. But the tightropes were higher these days. Two million rubles, half in my bag for the smuggler, the rest stashed away under my clothes—enough to get me to Helsinki, if they even honored our Kerenskys there. I sat with my sheepskin draped over my shoulders, though it was still early fall, the gun loose in its pocket. Crickets began singing in the birches. But winter would come soon enough. Fifteen miles and we’d be in Finland. If it was winter I could walk it over the ice. But I could not wait.

“It’s so quiet here,” said the boy. “Spooky.”

Volodya and Kolya used to play tennis up here on Krestovsky with their gymnasium friends. This whole island had once been the property of a single family, the Belosselsky-Belozerskys. They had owned mining concessions, and all the streets were named for their mines. I watched the last streak of sun fade from the horizon, and we sat in the gathering dark, listening to the water lick the shore, the splash of an occasional fish. The boy chattered away to fill the unfamiliar silence, like the nervous little kid he was. “After we drop you, we’re going to Sestroretsk to meet the Wolf’s brother. I’m gonna be in. Maybe I’ll end up being partners with them. I could do this all the time.” He tipped his head back and howled as he imagined a wolf howl would sound. I clapped my hand over his mouth.

“Cut it out. This is not a joke.” He really was so very young.

Now he looked ready to cry. He lowered his voice. “Sorry.” He managed to be quiet for all of two minutes. “Just think, last week I was selling Pravda and sleeping in a water duct. Now I got two hundred tisich in my pocket.” Two hundred thousand rubles—probably about one hundred prewar rubles, but a fortune for an orphan of thirteen.

“Better keep quiet about it,” I said. “Your Wolf might get ideas.”

“Nyet. Him and me are buddies.” He was pulling up grass from around his feet. “I’m his best salesman. He’d be cutting his own throat, wouldn’t he?”

I didn’t want to disappoint him by saying that the smuggler wouldn’t have to look far to find boys who would do more for less. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re just in it for the ride, understand? Don’t tell him about the money.”

“How dumb do you think I am? Wait’ll I get one of those little stvoli.” A pistol. “Nobody’ll push me around then. I’ll be Nat Pinkerton.”

I couldn’t say I was a good influence on him. I worked my fingers through the sheepskin’s fatty curls. The stories this coat could tell, my old friend. How many nights had it sheltered me? I’d tucked Iskra up into its warmth. I’d wrapped it around my father. A gun once again in its pocket. I’d always thought of faith as a positive thing, but faith was a blindfold—you walked along the edge of a cliff at all times. The crickets thrummed in the bushes, knowing their time was growing short. Overhead, the sound of flying geese heading south filled the twilight. A sea wind rinsed the stones. I was as anxious to be gone as the boy. At last, the stars emerged—first in the east, then scattered throughout the sky. With no lights to outshine them, no clouds to blur them, they seemed more populous than the city itself. How lonely we were by comparison.

Finally, the sound of a motor. Not sails after all. Coming not from the sea but up the Little Nevka. I lit the lantern. The motorboat pulled up to the dock. The Wolf, in knitted cap and leather coat, manned the tiller, while another man hunched over on some crates, smoking a pipe. The Finn brought it up neatly to the old dock, jumped off, tied it loosely to the post.

“Got the babki?” he said. Little cakes. The money, the dough.

“Who’s that?” I wanted to know.

“None of your business is who,” said the Wolf.

“I don’t know him. Maybe he’s Cheka,” I said.

“Maybe he’s Joulupukki, the Yule Goat,” said the Wolf. “It’s my boat. Give me the babki.” He held out his hand, snapped his fingers.

I took out an envelope, that brick of paper notes, and counted out half, put it back in my bag. The rest of my money was neatly secreted in a pocket under my dress, money he didn’t need to know about. “That’s half. You get the rest when we land.”

“I thought you had more people,” said the smuggler.

“No, it’s just us,” I said.

“Just you,” he said. “Not the kid.”

Makar protested, rising to his knees. “We had a deal—”

“I changed my mind.”

“But you promised!” I could hear the tears in his voice. He might be a streetwise orphan, but he was still a child.

“I promised nothing. Now beat it. Get back to work.”

“But you promised!”

“Did I tell you to beat it? Maybe you’re hard of hearing.” He pulled out a nasty-looking knife, a blade about six inches long. “Can I help clean out your ears?”

Suddenly I felt the boy’s hand plunge into my pocket and before I could stop him he’d pulled out the stvol. He was up, pointing it at the Wolf. “Want to clean out my ears, asshole? Go ahead. Try me.”

Oh God, was he going to ruin this? “Give it to me, Makar. It’s mine. Don’t do this. It’s fine. We’ll take you, I promise.”

But he wasn’t listening to me, he had eyes only for the Wolf, who’d wounded his pride. “Come on, fucker,” he said, laughing. “My ears, I’m not hearing very well.”

“You’re dead, Makar,” spat the smuggler. “Nobody pulls a stvol on me.”

I was going to lose my captain, my ship, my chance to get away. All of it because of this newly sprouted little man. “Just put it down,” I urged the orphan. “Everybody calm down. It’s going to be okay.”

Makar clearly didn’t know what he was going to do next, hopping from one foot to another, giggling. And neither did the Wolf, standing with his hands half up. He obviously could not believe one of his own street boys would produce a firearm and train it on him. It still all might have sorted itself out, except that the man on the crates lurched for shore, or maybe just for cover, and the movement startled Makar. He fired, striking the Wolf in the shoulder. The tall ginger-haired thug came at him with the knife, and the boy kept firing until both men lay dying, and the woods were full of sound.

The noise radiated out and out, rolling across the water. The faces of the men, pale in the dark. Startled, eyes open. I blew out the lantern.

I wanted to vomit. I only hoped the strange man was one of the Wolf’s colleagues and not another citizen hoping for escape. I waited in the dark for my senses to return to me. I waited for shouts, for running footsteps, arrest. I wanted to run, but where? Back to Petrograd? No.

Makar sat next to me in the darkness. “He was going to cut me out.”

Was that an apology? “You didn’t have to shoot him.”

“I didn’t know what the other one was going to do.”

“Give me the gun.”

It was hot and I could smell the sulfur. By touch, I reloaded it from the box of ammunition in my other pocket, the cylinder almost too hot to handle, then I returned it to its home. Luck has not been your friend. So what were we going to do now?

Makar was crying. “We were going to be partners.” This poor crazy kid. His big chance just a fantasy. Nobody likes having to look at themselves in the spotlight and see the gull, the fool. What the Wolf didn’t know about the human heart. I felt like crying myself, but I patted his leg. We had to pull ourselves together. We had to think.

“What’s in the crates?” I asked. Trying to sound practical. “Go look.”

He stumbled over to the boat, shook a crate. “Vodka, I think,” he sniffled. “He shouldn’t have tried to cut me out. He shouldn’t have done that.”

I couldn’t begin to count the ways this thing was going wrong. All of my hopes had been pinned on the ginger-haired man now dead or dying on the dock. After a while, I relit the lantern, gazed down at the victims. The Wolf on his back, his pale eyes staring. The blood-soaked shirtfront black in the faint light. The other man lay draped, half in, half out of the boat. He didn’t seem like a smuggler, but how did a smuggler look? He wore city clothes, a black coat, shirt, dark pants. Dark hair. His cap had come off along with the top of his head. No satchel, no luggage.

Makar was already searching the dead men. From the smuggler he produced a lighter, some cigarettes, gold coins that flashed like fire between his fingers and disappeared. He held out my bills, which I took and replaced in my bag. He wrestled and rolled the Wolf out of his jacket, put it on. He took off his mismatched boots and slid the man’s sturdy ones over his bare feet. They were enormous. He took his belt and cap and grinned, as if he hadn’t just killed two men. “Pretty nice, eh? I never had a leather jacket before.” The Wolf’s knife he also kept.

“The other one. Who is he? Does he have a labor book?”

He checked the man’s pockets. A few rubles, a lighter, a bag of cheap tobacco. No labor book. No papers. Nothing to indicate whether he’d been an innocent man whose life we just ended, or a smuggler, or both. All of my volition had drained from me. I felt as weak as an invalid. Nevertheless, we had to get rid of the bodies. Two splashes, we didn’t even bother to weigh them down. “Sorry,” I said as the passenger sank into the little Nevka.

Breathe. Breathe in calm, breathe out chaos. Breathe out wanting to throw that kid into the Nevka.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or grab him by the throat. “Do you know how to drive a boat?”

“How hard could it be?”

We examined the vessel. One bullet had gone through just below the oarlock on the starboard side, but the bottom seemed untouched. The motor? I lifted the lantern but it was hard to tell. Well, I couldn’t go back to Petrograd and I couldn’t stay here. I’d said my goodbyes, I’d sat on my luggage, so to speak. I climbed into the boat and the boy followed me. Now I was grateful Anton hadn’t come. Panic was a disease that spread faster than cholera. He would be accusatory by now—This is what leaving gets you—on his way to venomous hysteria. Makar was still a child, he would follow my lead. He held the lantern, peering over my shoulder as I explored the boat’s mechanisms.

The tiller jutted out from the frame. The skiff’s motor had a kind of spool and a handle—a crank of some sort. The petrol tank was easy to identify, and a flat metal tongue poked out from under the spool. I shifted it from left to right, but nothing happened. I felt like a monkey looking at a gramophone. If it had sails, I could get us to Finland. Damn this kid, and that dead bastard Wolf. All the boy wanted was respect, how hard would that have been, just to include him? They’d both be alive, and we’d be on our way.

The boy knelt in the bottom of the boat, holding the lantern so I could see the motor’s levers and spool and not my own shadow.

Please, Theotokos, help this poor sailor. I grabbed the knob on the spool. Clearly, it was designed to be spun. “Well, here goes.”

It only rotated a half turn, but when it sprung back it cracked my knuckles hard enough to break them. I yelled as the motor sprang to life, the spool racing around like a fishing reel. How noisy it was! The boat lurched and strained against the rope.

“Slip that off,” I said, trying to ignore the fiery pain in my hand. I held on to the boy’s belt as he leaned out and slipped the rope from the mooring. Then we were chugging out into the dark channel of the Little Nevka, the motor spluttering and stinking. He looked down into the water as we left. “We did have a deal, motherfucker.” And he spit into the slow current.

“Kill that lantern,” I said.

He did as he was told. I took the tiller and headed west.

The sea roughened as we left Krestovsky Island and entered the gulf, waves slapping the bottom of the small skiff. “Hey, is it supposed to do this?” Makar grabbed the sides.

“It’s fine,” I said, hoping it was true.

The wind was cold. I was happy for my sheepskin and my hat. I turned north, trying to follow the shore. We struck something, there was an ugly scraping against the hull.

“What’s happening?” Makar cried. “Watch out!” But there was nothing to watch out for on this moonless night, that was the point. I had to do it by feel. I pulled off the rock or whatever it was, turning out deeper into the gulf. All I could see were stars, thick above us, and the dark mass where the trees were pasted against them on the starboard side. As I steered away from the hazards of the shore, I noticed the tree-line shadow diminish. When I came experimentally closer, I watched it rise up again. If I could just follow the line of darkness, I could navigate without running up on anything.

There was a bit of a chop, but it wasn’t terrifying, except when a wave lifted and dropped us unexpectedly, and the boy cried out. I found that by turning the lever to the right I gave the engine more petrol; turning it left slowed us down again. Better to go slow, save fuel, and arrive closer to dawn when I could see the shore better.

There was also the problem of the dead smugglers. And the boy. The liability of him was becoming more clear, and in any case I couldn’t take him to Helsinki with me.

“I never had a leather coat before. It’s so warm.” The Wolf’s pelt, with its blood and bullet holes. “Can I steer?”

I tried not to think bad luck boy. If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be out here tonight, trying to steer by a dark strip against a vast sky of stars. But there was no such thing as luck, only fate, which could not be outrun. “Come over here, then.”

The boat shifted. I heard him fall to the deck. “Careful!”

I wondered if he could even swim. He crawled to me on hands and knees, and I slowly moved over on the bench, gingerly balancing our weight, helping him settle himself. With him and me in the stern, the boat rode differently, nose up, striking the water more forcefully, I could feel the roughness in the tiller. “This is how you steer.” I put his hand on the stick, and my uninjured one—the left—on top. “It goes the opposite of how you think. If you want to go left, push right.”

I guided our hands until he could feel the boat turning, then guided them back to the center. He laughed, as excited as a child. “Look, I’m doing it!” Captain Kidd.

As we bounced along the waves, wind in our ears, I studied the star-filled sky, located the Great Bear, or as they said in the West, the Big Dipper, and counted the five spans from its head and foot up to Polaris, the North Star, as Aristarkh Apollonovich had once taught me. North, off to the left above the line of trees. We were heading west-northwest. “See that star all alone, about halfway up above the trees?”

“Sure,” he shouted back. “Or maybe the one next to it.” Smart-ass.

“See the Great Bear?”

“Sure, they teach us all about that at the Higher Orphan Academy.”

So I taught him the rudiments of navigating by constellations, the certainties of the night sky. Though he was skeptical, he needed me, and the comfort of believing in me outweighed his doubt. I taught him to recognize the Great Bear—“They thought bears had tails?” It didn’t inspire confidence. I taught him that the night sky was like a big wheel, and as the night wore on, the stars would turn, all but Polaris. I drew the wheel on the back of his tiller hand, then traced its turning, like opening a doorknob, then poked the center of the wheel. “That’s the one we steer by. The North Star.”

I taught him to count the distance from the bear’s foot to his ear. “Can we call it a wolf?”

Better the wolf should be up in the star-filled heavens than pulling a knife on us here in the boat. I saw a theme emerging in the poem of our voyage. “Why not?”

Thank God we had the stars, a clear night. I never thought I would have to do this in earnest but the sky proved true, and there was Polaris halfway up the sky, above the starless line of trees. “If you can find it, you’ll never be lost.” A funny thing for me to say, who was more lost than anyone.

“It’s like that statue… the guy on the rock, down by St. Isaac’s. Just sits there, doesn’t change.”

The Bronze Horseman. “That’s Peter the Great.”

“Yeah. Let’s call him Peter.” Peter. It’s what we called Petersburg. My own fixed star, which lay farther and farther behind us.

“Now look to its right. Farther up, see the upside-down M? That’s Cassiopeia, the queen on her chair.” We were going to devolve back to the first men, who told their stories about the stars. “The Wolf chases the Queen around the North Star.”

“Peter, you mean.”

“So sometimes you’ll see the Wolf upside down, and no Queen, because she’s beneath the horizon. Sometimes you’ll see the Queen and no Wolf. But Peter will always be there. He’s the ringmaster.” Call him Kolya. “Steer a little to the left.” He began steering right. Just like the Bolsheviks. “The other left.”

He corrected course. “Maybe the M’s Marina.”

Marina, running from the wolf, in an endless circle around the ringmaster? I preferred the other story. “See the space where there aren’t stars? That’s the shoreline, the trees. Keep Peter where he is and we’ll follow that line until we get to Finland. Keep the trees about there, so you can see the stars.”

“You just figured this all out?” His voice awed that someone could observe something so simple and find a way to use it.

“Steady as she goes.” Cradling my damaged hand, I crab-crawled forward and settled in against the crates. Immediately the ride smoothed with the extra weight in the bow. I sat back against the crates and watched the Milky Way, imagining riding that celestial road. The sky was immense and far away, and we were very small in a tiny boat, navigating like ancient men had always done.

“What are you going to do when you get to Finland?” he shouted out over the engine’s clamor.

“Got an old friend in Kuokkala.” Maybe. I hoped Makar wouldn’t want to come with me. I didn’t want to be responsible for this unpredictable orphan who had just killed two men and stolen their boat. “How about you?”

“Maybe I’ll sell off that vodka and go back to Petrograd, be the new Wolf.”

He made me laugh. In less than an hour he’d gone from panicked weeping to planning to take over the Finn’s bizniss. “Don’t forget the brother in Sestroretsk. They might recognize the boat and come after you.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he called back, his voice full of swagger. “Fuck the Wolf. And his brother.”

I fingered the ammunition boxes in my pocket as Makar spoke into the wind, feeling his way along the handholds of his imagination. “You know, the Wolf wasn’t going to let me in on anything. Son of a whore just wanted me to be his donkey, sell scumbags in front of the Little Brick. Now his suppliers can talk to me. Or maybe I’ll go to his competitors—even better. That guy you called Saint Peter, he knows things. He can’t even walk. He could use a partner.”

“You be careful.” How could I tell him what I knew about the big man with the salt-and-pepper hair? “That is a really bad man.”

But who could tell what would happen to Makar. Maybe he would end up being the new king of Petrograd—what did I know? Maybe he would become a commissar of foreign trade. I was through with predictions.

“First thing, they’ll try to knock me off,” he shouted. “I’ll need a gun.” He was already planning how to take over the Wolf’s business. “I come back wearing his coat, I’ll need more than talk, you know?”

He wanted my pistol, that’s what he was saying. “No. You’re asking for trouble.”

“I’ve got money now. I’ll go back to Saint Peter.”

What do you want, Marina? Maybe I had a deal for him. “What if we get there—if we get there—I let you have it. The boat, the gun, the whole thing. Just do me a favor when you get back.” If the boat held, if the gas held, if fortune favored.

“You know I will,” he said. “Stvol or not.”

I thought of Anton, alone there, unprotected, with his ideas about the future. “There’s a man, a poet, his name is Anton Chernikov. He’s one of the eggheads at the House of Arts. Tall, pale, dark hair, grumpy. They’ll be hosting a Blok evening at the end of the month. Find him, and just… be his friend. Will you do that for me? He’ll need a friend, even if he doesn’t know it. Give him a little money, check on him from time to time, agreed?”

“He’s your boyfriend?”

“No. My boyfriend’s the one whose flat we just robbed.”

He started to laugh and I joined him, as the Wolf chased me across the sky.

I leaned against the crates of vodka, gazing up at the stars, thinking how Kolya would feel to see our flat, what I’d done to it—all that was left was the red-and-pink wallpaper. He’d certainly know my answer to what he’d proposed. If he’d loved me less selfishly, I’d be aboard the Haarlem tonight, instead of risking my life out here with the unpredictable Makar, a good chance of drowning before we ever reached Finland.

“Marina, something’s happening. The trees are gone.”

I sat up. I could see stars all the way down to the horizon. A light blinked on shore. I knew where we were. Lisy Nos. The Fox’s Nose. Right across from Kronstadt. If Pasha had run, this was where he would have come ashore. “The coast comes to a bend here,” I shouted. “Turn right. Steer toward Peter. And stay away from the shore.”

We were out of Neva Bay and into the Gulf of Finland, the deep water. When the shoreline turned west again we’d be at Kuokkala.

Now the boat rocked heavily on the swells, rolling in sideways. We wallowed in the troughs, not enough to capsize us but enough to upset our skipper. “This is making me sick,” Makar said. “You steer.” But I couldn’t stand up.

“Just zigzag a bit,” I shouted back. “Try not to let them come at you sideways.”

He did as I asked. The small boat still rose and fell, but more like a horse at a canter, not wallowing in a sick-making way. “You know a lot,” he said. “How come you know so much?”

“Because I’m old,” I said. “You’ll catch on. Maybe you should go back to school. You could go to the Rabfak.” The Workers’ University.

“Eh. Schoolteachers and me don’t get along,” he said.

“Read books. And talk to smart people. That’s school too.”

“Your friend—he’s smart like you?”

“Very smart.” Smart enough not to have come. Anton would have been suicidal by now. The death of the two men on Krestovsky would have been enough to have him running for home. He knew himself, I had to give him that. He knew his limitations, as I never did. I thought to mention that if the boat flipped over, the boy should cling to it, but I figured that would panic him more than help. He had pretty good instincts, except for the quick trigger finger.

The rocking was pretty rough, though, even with him zigzagging into the swells. How far was the shore? I imagined five hundred yards. Less. I could swim that—I hoped. Kick off my boots, lose my sheepskin, and hope there were no odd currents. Appear naked on the shore of what might be Finland or might still be Russia, newborn. Perhaps one of those crates of vodka would float.

“Look,” he said. “Is that it?”

A light, way up ahead, a couple of streetlights, a small town. A lantern moving on shore. Sestroretsk, it had to be. “Cut the motor.” Someone waiting for the Wolf, gazing out to sea.

“How do I do it?”

Oh damn. Carefully, I crawled back, keeping my weight low and in the center, rejoining him in the stern. I didn’t dare touch the motor’s spinning reel. My right hand still throbbed with pain, but I managed to light the lantern, keeping it low, beneath the sides of the boat, shielding it from shore. I pushed the throttle all the way left. It slowed and sputtered but wouldn’t quit. The motor could be heard a quarter mile.

Makar pointed to a square button, a piece of metal painted red. “What’s that?” A wire connected it to a cylinder. I pressed and held it—and merciful Virgin, the engine shut down.

Without the motor roaring, how silent it was. Just the swells and the beat of the waves. “Find an oar,” I said quietly. By the low lantern light I picked up the other, placed it in the starboard oarlock. “Put it in the lock and for God’s sake don’t drop it.” The wind had fallen off. It had been of our own making. Makar took his oar and dropped it into the port lock. He missed, but managed to grab it before it fell. “Sorry.”

“If you have to let go, remember to pull it into the boat first,” I whispered. “I’m going to turn us around now, so don’t row until I say so. Coming about.” I pulled on my oar, turning the boat in the cold and the spray. Then we began rowing, propelling ourselves backward, stroke by stroke. Now I was the one closest to the lights on the shore, my right hand twanging. I wondered if I could really swim to shore if I had to. We were ridiculously off rhythm. If he kept pulling after the waves lifted us, we were going to get nowhere.

“Ti MORryak, ti kraSIvi sam saBOYu…” I started to sing, low. “You sailor, you are so handsome, and only twenty years old… Sing with me. Love me with all of your soul…”

“I don’t know it.”

It was such an old song, I thought everyone knew it. But he was an orphan, he knew street songs, the songs of the besprizorniki. In a low voice, I taught him “You, Sailor”—he picked up the refrain right away, the sailor’s part. Across seas, across waves, now here, but tomorrow there.

We approached Sestroretsk, dipping the oars quietly, and now I was thankful for the swells, the breaking of the waves on shore. We were close enough to hear a dog bark across the water. Silently now, we pulled. I found a star I could keep the stern of the boat trained on, dead opposite Peter. I saw someone on the dock with the lantern, but they could not see us. It was only after the lights were very small that I dared speak again. “Be careful here on the way back,” I said.

“Across seas, across waves, now here, but tomorrow there,” he sang.

“We can turn the motor on if you like.” Though my hand hurt just thinking of it.

“No, this is nice,” he said. “How much farther?”

“Not far. A few miles.”

“I’ll row. You go sit down, and watch Peter and Queen Marina.”

I handed him the port oar, making sure he had it firmly before I let go, and crawled back to the crates, where I could rest and watch Polaris. He started a new song, an orphan’s song about how everyone hated him, how he would die alone.

I crammed my fox-fur hat deeper onto my head, wrapped my coat tighter, listening to Makar sing, lulled by the rhythm of his rowing.

It was nice like that. I felt free. Just a few last hours in this boat, neither Russia nor Finland, neither past nor future, not here nor there, just me and the kid on the black, star-dotted water. I could hardly imagine how I might remember this hour in the years to come, how I would tell this story.

“Think you’ll stay in Finland?” the orphan asked.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do in twenty-four hours,” I said.

If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said Buenos Aires wasn’t far enough. But the reality was beginning to set in, the gravity of what I’d done. Never to see Russia again. Everything I knew and loved, behind me. I just pray I’m buried on Russian soil, Avdokia had once said. I didn’t think she got her wish. And I certainly would not see a Russian grave, not Tikhvin Cemetery, not Novodevichy with Iskra.

Russia was a book whose cover was closing, and ahead lay the scent of wormwood and the bread of exile.

I suddenly saw them, our great poets, like a forest of tall trees, just as they’d been the day of Gumilev’s requiem at Kazan Cathedral.

I was glad of the dark, that Makar couldn’t see my face right now.

Abandoning Russia. As I had abandoned everything.

I gazed up into the bristling stars, rocking in the waves and the pull of the oars, and wondered if somewhere there was another nursery on another Furshtatskaya Street, where another three girls stood over a different basin of water, and other wax was poured. I wondered what my fate would look like in that other world, whether I’d still be rowing here with Makar, the dead bobbing in my wake, the living going on nobly, holding up the domes of the cathedral without me.

As I fled, to hide in the West, shucking my burden, dodging the blows.

The oars slowed. Makar was tiring. Just as well. No point in arriving before dawn.

“Sing us a song,” he said. “It’s nicer that way.”

What should I sing him?

How about “Do Not Awaken My Memories”? Varvara’s joke that evening outside Belhausen knitwear factory, where we had distributed her illegal pamphlets so long ago. She’d lost her way, trying to steer a straight course by a crooked star.

All my songs died in my mouth, tragedies of parted lovers and faithless ones, women seeing soldiers off to war. How could I sing them now? I would have to break into the vodka and drown myself. All of our songs so bitter. Ironic—how I had once loved to pose as the melancholy girl singing Russia’s soulful tunes. I’d gloried in them—before I myself had felt the sorrow that had given them birth. Now that I felt them truly, I was unable to bring myself to sing them. They were too sharp. They would shed too bright a light now that I had been that woman watching the road, and also the faithless one, had known love’s flashing steel, the spear of longing. I was still bleeding from it.

Fleeing Russia, I was more Russian than I’d ever been.

But why should I allow my grief to rob me of my songs? I argued with myself. These songs were mine. I paid for them. I would own them as I pleased.

Quietly, unsteadily, I began to sing “The Wide Expanse of the Sea.” The splashing of oars matched my voice. “The sea stretches wide, the waves they roll far… Far from our land, far from our land we go.”

I thought of the lucky people somewhere, who’d lived their lives unbroken by circumstance. They must look in the mirror and, seeing themselves old, feel a jolt. Bewildered when grandchildren paged through their albums and laughed at the photographs, the old-fashioned clothes and hairstyles. Those people had become exiles without even knowing it. But I would not be surprised. The doors were already swinging shut, my clothes going out of style on my back.

And I would never return to my own native land, back to the one place that had ever mattered, the fixed point around which my whole life revolved—the House of Arts, that fraternity of the Word, the ship on the Moika Canal. Anton, my friend, lover, editor, in his window. Don’t go, we need you… It would all take place without me, the autumn season at the House, the Blok memorial and all the memorials to come… the new issue of Anvil would have a poem of mine, but after that—nothing. I would never see them again—Kuzmin and Chukovsky, Mandelstam, Inna Gants. New poets would arrive and they would never know my name. And how long until the ones I knew forgot me? Remember that girl who lived on Slezin’s floor, Anton’s girlfriend? Whatever became of her? I would disappear like a rock falling into water, as if I were already dead.

Eventually, inevitably, the stars turned in their great circle, and the shore began its shift, the line of trees not just to the east but also ahead. “We’re almost there,” I told the boy. “Let’s stop here, take a rest.”

I found the anchor in the bow of the boat and gently dropped it, the rope playing out until it caught and held.

Rocking on the swells, wrapped in my sheepskin and scarf, I thought about what Anton had said. Was it true, my life as a poet was over? If so, it was already done. I was cut off and already withering, severed from the living Russian language. Events would take place this fall without me, the writers coming together, that family of art, and I would be alone, more alone than I’d ever been in my life. Without lovers, friends, family, child, country.

When Iskra was coming, the midwife made me say goodbye as if it is your last day on earth. Forgive them.

I said goodbye. To the poets who knew me, and to the generation whose names I would never know, and who wouldn’t know mine. Goodbye to Russia, my native land, Mother Blackearth, with your orphans and your lunatics, your poets and rivers and graveyards. And Petersburg, to your waters and your graces and your sins. Goodbye to the kind ones, who kept my nose above waterline, to those who loved me, the living and the dead. And goodbye to you, my dearest, my fox, my folly, and my fate… I forgive you. We could not be other than what we were. I loved you more than anything, my dear, except freedom.

The boat rocked on. The boy was quiet, sleeping or just thinking his orphan thoughts of fame and manly triumphs. The stars burned on, the sea air rich with the salt of the seven continents, bitter with every tear that had ever been shed, bright with every slice of starlight.

I’d said goodbye to so many things in these last years. But whatever Anton said, whatever Akhmatova thought, they were wrong about this: I would remain a Russian poet to the end. Not her most faithful child, certainly no pillar for her cathedral, but hers nonetheless. Her own blood and bone pitched outward into the world—not a pillar, but a seed. I would float on the waters, carrying her songs, and sing them wherever I washed ashore.

One by one, the stars blinked out. Gradually the sky paled, the celestial ink fading to gray. Ahead, the beach at Kuokkala emerged from the formless dark, its pinkish sands just discernable against the line of trees. Small waves rushed in, striking the land with a soft hiss. And strange joy arose in me, an unexpected lightness. I had imagined nothing but grief, perhaps a noble stoicism. But I could feel my sails unfurling, catching the light of early dawn. This stateless tramp, this seed, with nothing to my name but a couple of dresses, a pair of earrings, a wad of Kerensky bills of uncertain value, and ten thousand lines of Russian verse.

I shook Makar awake. “It’s sunrise. Time to go.” The boy stretched and yawned as I hauled in the anchor.