Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Seryozha set up very straight. Avdokia, behind my father and out of his view, crossed herself.

“We will not be raising any Vadims, my dear,” he said crisply, packing his pipe from a roll of tobacco he kept in his pocket. “Your brother has shirked every responsibility except for his own pleasure since the century turned.” He lit up with a flourish, puffed self-righteously, and sat back, gazing at her with the hard, cool expression he normally reserved for legal adversaries.

Mother sat very still, very erect, her mouth in a thin straight line, smoothing the cover of the album in her lap, a soft green calfskin.

But Seryozha heard the threat of the Bagration school quite clearly. “I can do better,” he said. “Two more years at Tenishev, and I’ll be out of there—it’s not so long, really. I guess I can stand it.”

“You guess?” Father’s eyebrows peaked.

“I mean, I will.” My brother stood. “Really, I will.”

Father let him stand there awhile, fixing him with his butterfly-pinning stare. “Give me your solemn word—as my son—that you will stop shaming your brother and the men who are out there dying for our country. I won’t have it.”

“I’ll go every day. I swear.” Wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Good.” He shook out his paper with a snap. “Avdokia, I’d like some tea now.”

A BITTER COLD BUT windless day, a light snow sifting out of the fog like confectioner’s sugar. After school, the three of us were on our way to see a new Vera Kholodnaya picture. We passed a bread line outside a bakery—every day they seemed to get longer. So many sad, tired people, weary shoulders drooping, waiting for their daily loaves. The city had become a waiting room—the part not already a barracks or a hospital. Ever since the offensive broke in September, a gloom of hopelessness had fallen over the city. Strikes had become a regular feature of life.

Varvara stopped to talk to a woman near the head of the queue. “How long have you been standing here, Grandmother?”

The woman gave us a keen assessment with her small colorless eyes. “She asks how long we’ve been here, the little missy.” The women standing around her laughed. “Only since eight this morning, sweetheart,” she said sarcastically. “Nichevo.” It’s nothing.

“Worse every day,” said a sweet-faced woman in front of her in a badly knitted rose shawl. “Soon I won’t bother going home. I’ll just bring a cot and a stove and a chamber pot and have my mail forwarded.”

“It’s the Jews,” an old woman said. She pulled something from her handbag, held it out to us. A pamphlet, worn and badly printed: THE JEWS ARE PROFITING FROM YOUR BLOOD AND SWEAT. THEY BOUGHT OFF THE DUMA! SHUT DOWN THE JEWISH DUMA!

As a Jew, Mina turned away, disgust and a trace of fear on her face. I, too, felt the assault. Father was a member of the Duma—a legislative body of limited powers dominated by businessmen, landowners, and aristocrats. It was hardly a “Jewish Duma,” and shutting it down wouldn’t do anyone any good. But neither of us said anything.

Varvara held up the leaflet and shredded it slowly before the woman’s eyes, letting the pieces fall like big, untidy snowflakes. “What garbage.” She sniffed her glove. “Protopopov’s stink is all over it.” The emperor’s reactionary minister of the interior, a well-known anti-Semite. “The government waves the Jews in your faces to distract you. Can’t you see? They don’t want you to think about how the war’s going. It’s the government that’s sending all the food to the front, and the hell with us. This line wasn’t here two years ago, was it? It’s all going to the war.”

The women glanced about them uneasily. To have someone speak like this on the street was dangerous for all concerned. But Varvara persisted. “Yes, your husbands, your sons. For what? Do you know what this war is about? It’s a big land grab. The tsar and the king of England, the kaiser—all cousins, squabbling among themselves. Dragging us along behind them. Ask yourself, who’s making the money here? Nobel, Putilov, Westinghouse, Dinamo.” The big factories, manufacturing munitions. “They’re the ones who want this. They don’t care how hungry you are.”

These women were actually listening to her. It did my heart good to see that old harridan chewing her cheek in fury.

“You want to shut down the Duma?” my friend scolded her. “Fine, shut down the Duma. Cut your own throats while you’re at it.”

The woman in front of the anti-Semite, a blond housewife with dark circles under her eyes, spoke up. “They say he’s got syphilis, Protopopov. That he’s completely insane.”

“Protopopov’s not going to stop until there’s no food left in the country,” Varvara said. Funny, Father had said the same thing just the night before.

The old hag chimed in. “They say the Germans are giving the Jews a million rubles to get us out of the war.”

“I’m leaving,” said Mina, her gray eyes burning behind her glasses. “I’ll see you at the theater.”

But Varvara barely heard her. She was just getting started. “The Germans don’t have to pay anybody. Are you joking?” she shouted. “We’re losing the war all by ourselves!”

Behind her, a raw-boned baba with a mottled face leaned in. “I heard the grand dukes are sending all the gold to Germany—in coffins of dead prisoners of war. For when Germany wins the war.” I hadn’t heard this one yet. The rumors never ceased to amaze me.

The old Jew hater revved up again. “If only the tsar would come back from the front. He doesn’t know what’s happening here.”

“He doesn’t?” Varvara spat. “With police spies everywhere? Nothing happens in this country he doesn’t know about.”

With the mention of police spies, the women quickly dropped their gazes and clamped their lips together.

Suddenly, a woman shouted back to the queue from the bakery’s doorway. “They say there’s no more bread. They’re completely out.”

The women pressed closer. “Sure they are.” “Hoarders!” “Thieves!”

“They’ve still got food!” “Speculators!” “If we had a fat wallet, they’d find some!”

The women crowded forward as someone inside struggled vainly to lock the doors. The women beat on the metal, shouting, “We want bread!” “Hoarders!” “Scum!”

I thought that we should leave, too. Something was about to break. Women put their shoulders to the door, ten of them, twelve. They heaved against it—one, two, three—and finally burst into the shop. In a moment, they dragged the owner out, a tubby, bald man in an apron, bellowing and threatening, waving his meaty arms to try to free himself from the crowd of babushkas. “There’s nothing, I swear on my children’s heads! You can’t squeeze blood from a rock!”

“Yes, but you can squeeze our blood!” a woman cried out. “Speculator!” Someone hit him over the head with her handbag, and they began to claw at him. It was terrible. The poor man could hardly help it that he’d run out of bread. Others who’d rushed inside wrestled a big bag out into the doorway, tore it open, and began scooping flour into upturned skirts and aprons, into purses and hats. There was flour after all! There was flour—and sugar, too! Here were more women, more sacks, everything covered in flour. Women hunched over, scurrying away with their prizes. How stupid, how credulous I’d been for having believed the man when he said he had nothing, for having worried about him! For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting. He had been holding back flour for the rich, who could pay double, quadruple the price, just as Varvara had said. A speculator! In wartime!

The melee spread out as the infuriated women broke into other shops. “We want justice!” “We want bread!” Varvara was out of her mind with excitement, shouting, “Bread and justice!” I knew she thought of this as a righteous demonstration of legitimate anger. Maybe in the abstract I might have thought so, too, but right now it was becoming a dangerous mob. I pulled her into a doorway where we could watch without being arrested if the police started rounding people up. Varvara’s burning eyes memorized the scene. She trembled like a warhorse, thrilled and alert at the mayhem. I could feel how she itched to run out among them, breaking windows and flinging flour and dry goods into the arms of the crowd.

Constables soon arrived, sorely outnumbered. The women moved around them. One grabbed a woman and punched her. Right in the face! In broad daylight. I clapped my hand over my mouth and shrank back deeper into the doorway as other women surged to her defense, grabbing him, tearing at his uniform. He’d lost his hat. Another constable knocked a woman down, then kicked her again and again with his heavy boot. I was paralyzed. Could this be real? Could this be happening in my Petrograd? I clung to Varvara in the doorway. “We should go.”

“You go,” Varvara said, her eyes glittering. “This is history. We’re watching history.”

Then I heard the clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobbles, and eight mounted Cossacks burst into view, plowing headlong into the crowd. The women screamed and scattered, running in all directions. The sound—hooves, and blows, and the cries of women… right here on Liteiny Prospect, where my mother bought flowers. This was the reason the people never protested, I realized, watching the Cossacks strike human flesh—unarmed women—with their cudgels. This was the reason people put up with so much. This was the whip at the end of the arm.

At last we fled, the two of us slipping around the corner into a courtyard, then into the courtyard behind that, unshoveled, an uneven rut of a path leading us through. I rarely went this far off the main boulevard. After a few courtyards, I didn’t even know where I was anymore. We came to a dead end in a tiny ten-by-ten courtyard, where a pasty-faced woman lounging in a doorway with a young girl drenched us in her laughter. Something hit a wall behind us. We didn’t turn to see what it was. We turned and scrambled back until we found an opening onto a quiet side street—no one running, a dog sniffing at a pile of snow, a horse pulling a wagon piled with rags.

Varvara hugged me, twirling me off my feet, kissing my cheek, as if we’d just passed a school exam. “They’re not sitting still for it. Oh God, did you see?” I thought of the baker’s bloody face. The way the policeman kicked that woman. Had Varvara incited it all, ramping the women up about that ugly pamphlet? Her delight frightened me. People had been hurt! Why was she dancing around like a lunatic?

We found Mina sitting alone in the third row of the theater, eating Jordan almonds out of a twist of paper. “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said, moving down in the row.  Now she eyed us more closely. “What happened?”

“It was a riot,” Varvara said. “You should have stayed.”

I sat with my friends, facing the flickering screen, but I didn’t even notice Kholodnaya’s performance. I was still vibrating with the violence I had just seen—not a shooting in a detective kinofilm, but right in front of me, blood and flour and the music of smashing glass.

One didn’t have to get very far from Nevsky Prospect after all. The war was coming to us.

OUTSIDE THE TAGANTSEV ACADEMY, a sleigh waited. In the low passenger seat, a young officer sat with a rug across his lap, snow piling on his astrakhan cap and the shoulders of his steel-blue army greatcoat. We were accustomed to the sight of young officers waiting for senior girls. The horse stamped, the bells of its harness cheering the dull, powdery air. Small puffs of vapor rose from its dark nostrils. I froze in place on the steps. Varvara collided with me, and Mina dropped her book. This was not just any officer. That rosy, well-shaved face with its frosted-over moustache did its best to maintain its casual air and not burst out laughing.

I didn’t let myself run to him. I had waited enough—he could wait for me now. “What are you doing here?” I called from the steps.

He unhooked the bearskin rug. “Thought you might like to go for a spin. Join me in a cup of hot chocolate. A soldier’s dream of home.” The horse stamped in the cold. Who else would know it was my favorite color of horse—dappled gray with dark, intellectual eyes? The driver on his high seat dusted himself off. I could feel the girls behind me whispering. It would be all over school by tomorrow. Did you see Makarova with that officer? I had never inspired any gossip, it was about time I did. Let them talk about me for a change.