Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Seryozha pressed his hands to his cheek, fluttering his eyelashes, and nodded over toward Miss Haddon-Finch, who was doing her best to flirt with the attaché. She looked almost pretty tonight, with high collar and cameo pin, as she tried to engage him in conversation. But his answers were short, perfunctory. Instead, he set out to flatter me, the daughter of the household and presumably a more useful connection. “That dress is lovely, Miss Makarova. The blue sets off your hair. It’s like a painting.”

How I hated a snob. “But it’s not blue. It’s green. A beautiful Irish green.”

Seryozha snickered. Even Miss Haddon-Finch smiled. Mother glanced at me with twitchy-tailed irritation. Stop it.

Getting nowhere with me, the attaché turned his attention to Father, and the two of them reminisced about Oxford. Sibley, too, was an Oxford man, and Father launched into recollections of the year we spent at Christ Church while he was lecturing on international trade law. Seryozha mimed falling asleep in his plate. He ate a potato and asked to be excused. “Sorry—homework,” he said. I prepared to follow suit, but before I had a chance, Mother shook her head. Don’t even think it.

Square-jawed Mrs. Sibley, congenitally cheerful, brought up the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway, which took travelers all the way from Petrograd to Vladivostok. “What an adventure, don’t you think?”

“Two weeks on a train, to end up in Vladivostok?” My mother laughed. “What could be better?” She’d returned to her witty self.

The Englishwoman turned to Father. “Dmitry Ivanovich, surely you would be interested in seeing the vast hinterlands of your country.”

Father smiled, amused at the very idea. “I’m afraid I’m in rare agreement with my wife.” He tapped the lip of his flute to signal Basya to pour more champagne. “However, the Trans-Siberian’s more than a mere outing, Mrs. Sibley. It’s our hope for the future. Siberia holds eighty percent of our wealth—our grain, our ore. Alas, the rail system’s a shambles. Without it we can’t get the raw materials to the factories, food to the front. I don’t have to mince words with you, Sibley. We have everything we need to push the Germans back to Berlin but workable rail stock.” He shook his head before taking a bite of Vaula’s golden trout.

Sibley sprinkled caviar on a blin with a small bone spoon. “I do hope you’ll persuade Miliukov of the urgency. It won’t be difficult to secure our help.”

I bet not. The British would sell their own mothers to keep Russia in the war. The British had declared their support for the Provisional Government within hours of the abdication. They didn’t care who was running things as long as the Russians kept throwing bodies into the machine.

“This new coalition—what’s the feeling about the commitment?” asked Sibley. “The SRs especially.”

“La guerre, toujours la guerre.” My mother traced a plume in the air, as if she could clear the war talk from their minds with the impatient gesture. It was spoiling the effervescence. “We’re educated people. Surely we can talk about—the weather?”

“It’s not our war,” I blurted out.

Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.

Now I was in for it, but I couldn’t stop myself. “We had no say in it. The people want peace. They’re demanding it. It’s why they toppled the tsar.”

Miss Haddon-Finch flushed, red creeping up her ears. “Men serving in other countries are depending on Russia,” she said tremulously. It wasn’t like her to express a strong opinion on politics in our house, but I’d forgotten about her brother, fighting in France.

Mother said to Mrs. Sibley, “Our eldest, you know, is with Brusilov, at the Southwestern Front. Cavalry.”

“And his men favor a fight to victory,” Father said, his eyes leveling at me. “It’s only our local untrained reserves who talk about retreat. Where are you getting your ideas, Marina?”

As if I hadn’t seen the banners, hadn’t noticed the queues.

“The people have no idea what they want,” Father continued. “Remember the signs? On one side they said, ‘Down with the war,’ and on the other ‘Down with the German woman.’” The guests all chuckled. “They just don’t know what’s involved. We have alliances, as Miss Haddon-Finch so kindly pointed out.” The Englishwoman blushed, pleased to be noticed by Dmitry Ivanovich, in whom she placed much more store than in any wet-lipped attaché.

I suddenly saw my father through the eyes of the Ericssons, through the eyes of the women at the pump. The arrogance of him, when it was the courage of those people that had brought him into power. “How can you say you know what the people need if you’re not listening to them? They can’t fight anymore. They need the war to end.”

“Marina, that’s enough,” Mother said.

Father’s fury was apparent in the tightness of his mouth, the way he looked away as he sipped his champagne.

But he would hear me out. “What about our soldiers—fighting without guns, without boots? What about our own hungry workers? They didn’t agree to those alliances. But they pay the price.”

Mother arched her neck in a slow, resigned circle, her eyes closed. All she cared about was that I was ruining her party.

“Everyone’s suffering, Miss Makarova,” the British diplomat replied gently. “France has been a battlefield for three years.”

Father picked up his napkin ring and dropped it gently on the tablecloth, tapping it, something he did when he was concentrating. “If Russia pulls out, millions will die. You want that on your conscience?”

I heard in my voice that horrible tremolo it got when I felt passionate about something. “You’ve seen the queues.” I addressed the second secretary. “The people work all day and queue all night. There’s no bread. No fuel. Boys drilling on Liteiny are barely Seryozha’s age. How much longer can you expect us to hold out?”

“It’s complex,” said Mr. Sibley. “Is this what young people are thinking?”

“Russia will not abandon its allies,” Father said firmly. “A commitment’s a commitment. And I’ve seen your marks for German, my dear. They’ve never been that good.” In Russian he added, “One more word and you’ll take your meal in the kitchen. You’re being insufferable.”

I collected my plate, my knife and fork, and stood with what gravity I could still muster. “I’m afraid you must excuse me then.”

In the kitchen, the servants looked up from their tea—Vaula cutting a cake, Basya with her feet up, waiting to clear and bring out dessert, Avdokia mending my nightshirt. Clearly I’d interrupted a juicy bit of gossip, probably about us.

“I’ve been exiled,” I said and put down my plate among them.

“At least it was a short walk,” said Basya. Avdokia frowned. Vaula tried not to laugh.

SUCH FREEDOM, TO WALK alone in the evening with friends, unhampered by parental rules, participating in the serious discussions that had become daily life in the city. Everywhere people were arguing, voicing opinions, joining committees, trying out lines of reasoning, flexing political muscle. We were talking about the war as we drifted across the Field of Mars in the enchanted, unearthly northern spring twilight. “The Germans will bring back the tsar,” said Pavlik. “They’ll reverse everything we’ve achieved.”

In the half-light, it was still bright enough to see the color of the girls’ spring coats. Also the heavy length of Pavlik’s eyelashes. The trees smelled fresh and the square glowed, the long yellow buildings dizzying in perspective, an uninterrupted pattern of columns and windows. Seryozha lagged behind, thinking his own private thoughts. Here on these broad parade grounds, we’d sent Kolya and Volodya off to war. Here we’d buried 184 martyrs of the revolution just two months ago, a solemn day. I would never forget the sight of those coffins next to their resting places, imagining the student in one of them. And our parents walking in procession with members of the Provisional Government, everyone singing “You Fell Victim” until your heart would burst.

“That’s a spurious argument and you’re a capitalist dupe, Pavlik, like all the Defensists,” Varvara called over her shoulder. “If we stop the war, the German workers will win their soldiers over, just like we did, and the kaiser will fall. We have to stop the shooting, and bring them over to the revolution.”

I wasn’t really in the mood to argue tonight. The beauty of the evening made me think of my fox, my real lover. If he were here, we wouldn’t be talking about the war, wasting the spring twilight. We’d stroll in the fragrant air, our footsteps matching, and stop to kiss on the bridge over the Winter Canal. We’d be in bed before the hour was out. What I would give just to press my forehead to his, drink in the honey smell of his skin once more.

“What do you think of this new Bolshevik?” asked a girl from our school, Alla, trailing behind us. Recently, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had returned from exile, and his April Theses had just run in the Bolshevik newspaper Rabochy Put’. “They say he’s against the Republic.”

Varvara sighed, as if Alla had woken up in the third act of a play and asked for a précis. “First, he’s not new,” she replied. “And second, he’s not against the Republic. He’s against a parliamentary republic, a bourgeois republic. Your papas, thinking they speak for the people. He wants a soviet republic—by direct representation.”

“What we need are free communes,” said another Herzen boy, Markus, an anarchist. “Lenin talks about the ‘withering away of the state,’ but the essence of the state is that there’s never a good time to wither.”

“The Bolsheviks will do it,” Varvara said, sticking her chin out.

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Markus said.

They were two of a kind. They stopped to light cigarettes together, sharing a match. I thought he would be perfect for her, but she’d scoffed when I suggested it. “Anarchist utopian.”

We crossed at the Trinity Bridge over the black water of the Neva, passed the brooding bulk of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the art nouveau Kschessinska Mansion, now the headquarters of the Bolshevik Party. The ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska had received it as a gift from her lover Nikolas II. I wondered where she’d gone. Paris? The tsar himself was under arrest, somewhere in the Urals with his family. Oddly, since his abdication he’d quickly become irrelevant. Nobody clamored for his head on a pike. Aside from a few aristocrats who might secretly dream of restoration, no one thought about him anymore. Varvara examined the windows of the mansion, probably hoping to catch sight of Lenin’s big bald head.

Our destination loomed into view—the vast, rickety hall of the Cirque Moderne, the radical venue for speakers of all left-leaning political stripes that spring, and a magnet for students from all over the city. Where once the Stray Dog had been Mecca, now it was this old wooden hall on the Petrograd side of the river. Pressing inside, we joined the thousands already listening to the orators in the cavernous smoky gloom. It smelled like bodies, wet wood and cheap tobacco, old boots. About five dim bulbs lit our way as we clambered up into the rickety tiered benches surrounding the stage on all sides. We had to climb nearly to the ceiling. I imagined what the woman who’d worried about the loges at the Mariinsky would think of this. I could tell that Seryozha was nervous as we squeezed in among the university students, workers, soldiers, retirees, and wounded veterans. Pavlik climbed in next to me.

Down in the very center of the hall, a common soldier, stocky, square-shouldered, was addressing the crowd, speaking about the war in the name of his comrades. “Show us what we’re fighting for,” he shouted up to us all. “Is it Constantinople? Or a free Russia? Or the people on top? They’re always asking us for more sacrifices, but where is their sacrifice?”

If only my father could hear this. If only he’d listen more to the Russian people and less to his friends in the British embassy and the Kadets and industrialists. Where are you getting your ideas, Marina? Pavlik handed me a chocolate, smiled. He really was very sweet. How infinitely better this was than wandering the lengthening evenings thinking of how little Kolya cared for me. He never responded to my letters. My brother took out his notebook and sketched the soldier, and the next one who ventured to speak.