“Who else would have them?” one of the women called out and the others laughed.

I couldn’t run around Petrograd looking for them. Instead I stopped in at the one place where I was certain someone would be home. From the hall, I could hear lively hands playing ragtime on the piano. Shusha’s skills had certainly progressed since spring. I knocked hard and Dunya answered the door. She was wearing a rust-colored dress with an embroidered sunflower on the pocket—Seryozha’s handwork. I burst into tears.

She threw her arms around me, pulled me inside. The smell of soup, of kasha embraced me as ever. Shusha jumped up from the piano—“Mariiiina!”—and hugged me hard. “Did you hear me? It’s the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’! Mama just got it for me.” She sat back down and began again.

Now I saw Mina—she’d been hidden behind a heap of books like a barricade. She rose and kissed me. “She can’t stop playing it. I could kill her. Look at you—you’re a peasant now.” She tugged at my braid, which I hadn’t bothered to put up before I ran out of the house.

My friend looked older, prettier, in a crisp white blouse and necktie, her hair worn in a fashionable coil instead of its old-fashioned crown. A studentka. I realized with a surge of panic that she’d begun university. I’d come home too late. But I refused to mourn. I was back, that was the thing. If Genya was still in Petrograd, if he still wanted me, that would be enough.

“Marina!” Now I saw Solomon Moiseivich on the divan with his foot up on a stool. “I’d get up but gout’s got me. I thought it was the province of kings, but Fate says, ‘For you, Solomon, we’ll make an exception.’”

Sofia Yakovlevna bustled out from the kitchen. “Marina! Welcome home, welcome back.” She wiped her hands on her apron, and then gave me a squeeze and a kiss. “We were wondering whether you’d come home. Your letters didn’t say. Look how healthy you are! Brown as a nut. Where’s your brother?”

“Yes—how’s my favorite assistant?” the photographer inquired.

They didn’t know. I looked again at Dunya’s dress, thinking of how he’d sewn those flowers. “They sent him to Moscow, to a military school. To become an engineer.”

“You’re joking,” Mina said.  She pushed her glasses up on her nose, the better to study me. I shook my head.

Solomon Moiseivich rounded his eyes at his wife, speaking whole treatises in that single glance. “Well. Engineering’s a good trade.”

“I’m sure Dmitry Ivanovich has his reasons,” Sofia Yakovlevna said quickly, then patted my shoulder. “Sit down, Marina. I’ll get you a glass of tea.” But a note of worry hung in the air.

I took a chair next to Mina. “So you’ve started without me.” I picked up one of her heavy books—chemistry. I would not cry. I was home, that was the important thing. “How is it?”

“Lots of work.” She shrugged, pretending it was all such a burden, but I could tell how proud she was. “Rumor has it they might cancel the term because of the food shortages. I’m trying to get as much done as I can.”

I laid the book back down on the pile. “It’s that bad?”

She nodded. “People are leaving every day. Going south. Going abroad. We were wondering if you’d even be back.”

“Did you deliver my letters?” I asked under my breath.

Mina smiled, showing her pretty small teeth. “What do you think, that I’d stand in the way of true love?” She tugged at my long braid again. “Actually I didn’t even need to deliver them. He comes by with his friends—at dinnertime, naturally. Dunya’s got a crazy crush on the painter.”

“Oh, so I’ve got the crush.” Dunya threw a wadded-up paper at her. “Tell her about Nikolai Shurov.”

Mina’s cheeks blazed.

I could feel myself go pale in equal measure. “What about him?”

“He came to town is all,” Mina answered, studying her smooth hands, the little sapphire ring she wore. “I ran into him at the pharmacy.” She shrugged again. “He’d gone to your parents’ looking for you.”

A sudden tightness in my throat, down to my solar plexus. Why should I care, when I had Genya? But on some level I still did. Look at her face. Had he made love to her? No, he wouldn’t have. Though he couldn’t resist an admiring female, even if she was chubby and wore glasses and talked about integers and valences. And she had beautiful skin, and her gray eyes were shaded by long, white-tipped lashes. In fact, she wasn’t even fat anymore. She looked… pretty.

She gazed toward the hall that led to the kitchen, where her mother had returned to her cooking; to her father, reading on the divan; to her sisters; then back to me, pleading with me not to say anything more.

I lowered my voice. “Is he here in Petrograd?”

“No,” she whispered. “He went back to the front. That was months ago—in July, before the offensive.”

I could feel my eyes stinging. He’d been here, while I was out in the country mowing weeds.

“Do you mind?” she whispered, touching my sleeve. Her bottom lip trembled.

“No,” I said and tried to smile. What was done was done, and anyway I had Genya. In just a few minutes, I would see him. The hell with Kolya.

“I told him about Genya. Was that right?”

“Of course.” A soothing thought. He deserved that, for leaving me alone for all those months. Did he think I would wait forever?

Sofia Yakovlevna asked us to clear the table for dinner. I knew I should leave—not impose myself on their hospitality—but Genya might be coming, so when she asked me to dinner, I agreed with alacrity. I was going to see Genya. And Kolya? Kolya was the past. Ancient history. I telephoned home, told Ginevra where I was, that I’d be home later. I was in no hurry to see Father, and had seen enough of Mother and my governess to last a decade.

We sat down to eat, dragging Solomon Moiseivich’s footstool into place so that he could keep his foot up. It was so good to see the whole family again. Mina told me about all the people who had come to pose for photographs since I’d been gone—Tereshchenko and the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet both! Kerensky himself had come the day before yesterday. “Talked without stopping,” said Solomon Moiseivich. “He’s due for a nervous collapse, if you ask me. But the picture turned out well.”

A pounding interrupted us in mid-meal. I jumped, recalling the day that revolutionary soldiers burst in to search the flat. But this time Dunya raced to answer the door. In a moment, she returned with Sasha Orlovsky, and behind him, my own sweet Genya. Did I fly? Or had he crossed the room in one step? I leaped into his arms, and we kissed in front of God and all the Katzevs.

Anton Chernikov squeezed past us. “Oh, look. The rusticated cousin returns.”

I breathed in Genya’s scent, like fresh mown grass and the harsh makhorka tobacco he smoked. Everyone was watching, but this was more important than finishing dinner. I breathlessly thanked the Katzevs, and together we ran down the stairs as if the building were burning.

Out in the street, we floated above the city, cartwheeled over people in shoes and coats. We walked sideways along pastel buildings glowing in the twilight. We used the trees for toothpicks. “I heard Father threatened you with the police.”

His laughter, rich, huge. “And let me tell you, the Red Guards came right away. How dare I shout love poems at such an important man?” He tugged on my braid, pulling me closer. “This was what you looked like at nine, isn’t it? God, I wish I had been there.” He cupped my face in his palm and kissed me. I didn’t know if people walked around us or if they simply had vanished. “How was it out in the boonies without me?” he whispered. “Horrible and dusty and ridiculous? Were you ready to die of boredom?”

“Every day. Twice sometimes.” I rubbed my cheek against his hand. “They had to keep the knives out of reach. Take me home, Genya. While they’re all still at Mina’s.”

Haymarket Square seemed strangely empty this evening, the stalls closing up early, though the weather was fair. Was there some new curfew? We crossed the luminous Catherine Canal at the Demidov Bridge and raced up narrow Grivtsova Alley, the tops of the buildings still in light, up the dark stairs two at a time. Today we would make right what had gone wrong then.

Inside, the Poverty Artel smelled of turpentine and smoke. A section of wall was in the process of being painted, cubo-futuristically, over the tiling of newspapers. I took off my coat. So this was what it usually looked like—unmade divan, unmade cot, chairs piled with papers and paint, ashtray overflowing, sunflower-seed shells crunching underfoot. He bustled about, pulling the sheets up on the divan, picking up clothes from the floor. “Forget about that,” I said. I pulled him down next to me, took the clothes from his arms, and tossed them back onto the floor. So much time had passed between us. I didn’t care how dirty the room was.

I could feel a hesitation on his part, a new shyness. “What is it?”

He gazed at me, worry in his hazel eyes under the shock of tawny hair. “There wasn’t anybody else, was there? Out there?”

Oh, was that it? I tried not to laugh. “Who? The twelve-year-olds? Or the old uncle with the beard halfway to his knees?”

He laughed, but the uncertainty remained. It had to be slain, this dragon of time and distance. I took his hand and kissed it, slowly, biting the knuckles each in turn, then kissing the palm until he groaned. I planted my fat lips on his, and our kisses began in earnest, his big fingers fumbling at my buttons, his floppy hair longer than ever, falling into his eyes. I pushed it from his face.

“I swore I wouldn’t cut it until I had you back,” he whispered into my neck. “I would have grown it as long as a Sikh’s.”

I raked my own hair free of its braid, pulled it apart so that it flowed over my back and shoulders, and he buried his face in it as if it were a wonderland. The room was cold but I took off my dress and tossed it aside, helped him out of his old jacket, his shirt. He looked at me so uncertainly. Why? The beauty of his body was Atlantean, his smooth wide chest hairless, so large, so different from Kolya’s pelt of chestnut fur. How warm he was. I pressed my cheek to the muscle right over his heart to listen to the blood surge inside him. It was like a Niagara. With my finger, I traced the dip above his rib cage. He was big and bulky and warm, his heavy arms laced with sinews like a ship’s rope. He tried opening my corselette, fumbling to work the buttons far too tiny for him—or was it that his hands were trembling? I pushed him away so I could unfasten it myself and let him see me, my breasts and shoulders dotted with summer freckles, his expression better than any mirror. I opened his worn trousers and slid my hand in. He groaned. He was huge, and ready—so that wasn’t what was making him shy.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“You won’t,” I said. I didn’t care if he did. I produced a condom, hoping it wasn’t too small, but he managed to roll it down over himself. Would he think I was a trollop, a jade? Would it break? I’d take that chance. I wanted him. I pushed him back onto the gritty sheets and lay over him, my hair a crimson tent.

Oh, the bliss of that hour. It had been months since I’d slept with Kolya. Before the revolution. We made love and it was far more serious business than it was with Kolya. We were naked in our feelings, stopped and started again, then lay wearily in each other’s arms as the last light faded from the room. I felt as though I were rocking on a barge, on the Volga with my bargeman-Keats, the river so wide you couldn’t see both banks.

Finally the Interlocutors returned, banging on the door. “Open up!”

“Go away!” Genya shouted back.

More kicks from the other side. “Pigs,” we heard someone shout. We grunted like swine, making ourselves laugh.


Genya insisted on escorting me home, arm in arm in the dark. I could feel the uneasiness of passersby now, a tangible wildness in the air. I thought of Vaula’s warning, how things might have changed since I’d been gone. Yet seeing Genya, who would have the nerve to disturb us? The lights reflected in the canal for us alone. We crossed at the Bank Bridge, with its gold-winged griffins glinting, so close to the flat where Kolya and I… I pressed into Genya’s side. All that seemed like another century.

When we turned onto Furshtatskaya, our flat was lit up like an ocean liner. I knew they were waiting up for me. We kissed a long time, my lips swollen and raw, my body still tender, my hair a cloud of tangles. After that, I felt I could face anything.