With studied casualness, looking around again, I retreated to the history room, where I located Great Russian Discoveries in the Arctic and the Pacific 1696–1827: Accounts of Nautical Expeditions to Siberia and Russian America by F. G. Popov—another volume unlikely to find a buyer. I prayed there would be something in it for me that was not about treachery.

Inside, in Genya’s big, barely legible scrawl, a poem:

Who sentenced me

          to this jail?

The vandal

the thief

                          she jokes with fools

over salmon and wine

Leaves me to

                      yowl

with the cats.

Burn

                      the house down

                             with your arson-prone hair

                                          and fly to me, fly!

I’m drowning in air like a fish

               flip-flopping on deck.

Pity my lips.

In the agonies of waiting

                         they froze and fell off.

If you see them,

please send them back.

Pity my lungs

That can’t even whimper

Air does them no good

Kiss me alive again.

Madness is you

Somewhere that’s not here.

Sweeping the room once more for any suspicious loiterers, I stuck the poem in my pocket. Madness was me, just about anywhere.


In the hushed, scented precinct of Madame Landis’s boutique in the Nevsky Passazh, Mother and Madame were locked in discussing the minutiae of hats: the nostalgic virtues of yesterday’s styles—broad brims, egret plumes, veils—versus the utilitarian casquettes, turbans, and tricorns of today. Tricorns! The fashion of revolution secure on bourgeois heads. I kept touching the poem in my pocket. I am drowning, too, Genya, in this endless drivel and perfume and imposture. I had to see him, feel his solid form around me, talk honestly to someone.

I glanced at my watch and feigned surprise. What an actress I was becoming. “It’s almost four? I almost forgot—my friend Veronika’s family is leaving for Odessa. I told her I’d pay a call. Mama, take the tricorn. That’s the best.”

“So many leaving,” Mother sighed. “Soon we’ll be rattling around by ourselves, like buttons in an empty drawer.”

“I’ll be back by dinner,” I said, patting Tulku’s elegant little head.

“Remember we’re going to Viktor Vladimirovich’s.” Tripov’s. In the face of Father’s increasingly long working hours and the growing unrest, the all-night debates at the Pre-parliament—the new Duma—she expected me to be her evening escort.

Freed, I dashed down the glass arcade of the Passazh and out into the rain, crossed Nevsky Prospect, and dodged a tram, the angry driver ringing her bell at me. I raced behind the Gostinny Dvor department store toward Haymarket Square. In the absence of police the number of robberies had been rising all fall, and I looked a perfect fool in my bourgeois finery. But if someone wanted to rob me they’d have to catch me first. I pounded up Grivtsova Alley in my heeled shoes, up those wretched stairs two at a time, knocked, and tried the battered door. It opened, but it was only Anton, reading on the divan, a coat thrown over him as a blanket. He pretended not to recognize me. “Is it rent day already?” he asked, turning a page. “I don’t have it. Check back on Friday.”

I finally found Genya at a corner table with Zina and his other friends in a workingman’s café on Gorokhovaya Street, the greasy windows steamed over. Loath to go in dressed as I was, especially with Zina there, I tapped on the glass with the edge of a coin. When he saw me, he rushed out into the cold without his coat, wrapping himself around me in an enormous embrace. His jacket smelled of the café, greasy pirozhky and rough tobacco, cabbage and tea. “Look at you. You’re making me jealous of all those English diplomats. I’ll kill them one by one, dump them in the canal. You won’t be able to move a boat there’ll be so many of them.”

I could feel Zina staring through the restaurant window, seeing him with the Enemy in full regalia. I linked my arm in his. “Let’s take a walk.”

We strolled along the Catherine Canal in the miserable October drizzle. Gone were the colors: the pinks, the golds, the blues. The scene had washed out into gray. The bare trees brooded in expectation of winter. “I missed you,” he said. “Why can’t your mother do the spying? Or the old nanny or somebody? Nobody would suspect her of passing secrets.”

“She’d be perfect, except she never tells what she knows. You’d have to dig it out of her.”

Soon this canal would start to freeze. Winter on the way. I clung to Genya. Even coatless, he exuded warmth, and I sheltered in his lee like a skiff at anchor. Three young girls passed us on the embankment with their bags and books, heading perhaps to the ballet school at the Mariinsky, their gait marked by the duckwalk of little ballerinas. They crossed over the bridge, giggling at us, two mismatched lovers, my head tucked into the hollow under Genya’s jaw.

In the shelter of our bodies, our hats, I pulled off my soft suede gloves and rolled a messy cigarette, which made him laugh. With my elegant clothes, my cropped hair, and my hand-rolled smoke, I was neither old nor new but caught in midtransformation. He rolled his cigarette far more deftly, and we leaned together with our elbows on the balustrade, smoking.

“Come back to the Artel with me,” he said. “I can’t stand being with you like this.” He spat a tobacco flake.

I rubbed my face against his sleeve. I would have loved to go back to the Artel and make love with him, but I could just imagine coming back rumpled and stinking from sex to encounter Vera Borisovna dressed and perfumed and ready for me to accompany her to Tripov’s salon. “I have to get back in a minute,” I said. “I shouldn’t even be here. Someone might have followed me from the milliner’s.”

“I hope you’re getting something worthwhile,” he said miserably, his arm heavy around me. “Sometimes I think it’s just Varvara trying to break us up.”

That made me laugh. “Why would she do that? She adores you.”

“She tolerates me,” he said, his eyes the same color as the gelid green water. “But she’d rather not share you with anybody.”

Yes, it was true, she was possessive of her friends. But she was also completely dedicated to the cause, far more than I could ever be. Memorizing the names of English coal barons and American envoys was hardly agitating in the factories and the barracks. I hoped she’d be proud of me. I’d finally proved useful, shown her I wasn’t just a romantic poseur with my lovers and poetry, irrelevant in the wider crisis.

“I need you more than the Bolsheviks do.” His big hand lay on my bare neck. His hazel-green eyes reflected every feeling—Genya Kuriakin would be the worst spy ever. “I’m going crazy. I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I can barely breathe. I draw pictures of you naked and kiss them—it’s pathetic. I can’t hold out much longer. Are you sure we need to do this? Is it making any difference at all?”

He wanted reassurance, revelations, disclosures. But something in me was surprisingly secretive. I wanted to keep these worlds apart, the dark life I was living on Furshtatskaya Street and the bright one Genya and I had. I didn’t need to prove my loyalty to him in any case. Only my love. I considered lying, telling him I hadn’t found out much of anything, but then what would be the point of our suffering? “I’ve heard some things that could make a difference. But don’t ask me to tell.”

“You don’t trust me?” He gave me a hurt look, like a little boy’s. “I’m the Bolshevik.” Then he realized he was yelling and tried to contain himself. “You think I’m going to write it on a placard and hang it around my neck?”

I cradled his cheek in my cold, ungloved hand, warming my palm on him the way one might put one’s socks on the radiator. “I have to do this my way.” We stood shoulder to shoulder, watched the sluggish water flow under the Stone Bridge, where once People’s Will terrorists had planned to blow up Alexander II. This long and torturous history.

“You’re right. You’re doing the right thing,” he said, his arms coming around me, his chin resting on my head.

“I’m afraid he’ll find out,” I whispered.

He held me tighter, trying to build a wall of himself around me. “He won’t. And so what if he does?”

I could only shake my head. My love, so kind, so tender, but he had no family feeling, and no divisions within himself, where I had nothing but. How I could make him understand how it felt to be caught between who I was—my history, my class, my family, the barynya I’d been raised to be—and the revolution, what I hoped for Russia and for myself? I was between two stools, as we say.

26 October

EVERY DAY I WENT out to update the Republic and Great Russian Discoveries and to test the mood of the city. A certain pressure was building in my sinuses, a tingling in my hands and the soles of my feet. Tides of people, restless, flowed from corner to corner, looking for news, reading the proclamations and appeals plastered on every wall. They asked the workers and soldiers to stay home and support the government. I bought a pamphlet with stamps we used for small change—WILL THE BOLSHEVIKS BE ABLE TO HOLD THE POWER?—written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He was of the opinion they’d be able to. Throngs filled every corner, soldiers arguing with students, workers with carters. I bought all the socialist papers and read them one by one under my dripping umbrella. They all said the same thing, that the soldiers’ section of the Soviet demanded that if the government couldn’t or wouldn’t defend Petrograd, it should either make peace or make way for a soviet government. Rabochy Put’ said the northern soviets had sworn to defend Petrograd’s soviet against the government if that were to become necessary.

The time was coming. I could smell it in the air.


Eleven o’clock on a foggy, drizzly morning, the 24th of October. I stood on the street corner waiting for a tram. I’d been suffering from a toothache and had made an appointment with the dentist. Ginevra volunteered to accompany me, but Mother had persuaded her to stay home. I felt sorry for my governess, stuck waiting for our departure for London. I wished I could warn her: Make your own plans, and quickly, but that was impossible.

The mood on the damp street that day was surly and a peculiar nervous intensity clung to the crowds. Only the bourgeois newspapers were on sale. No Rabochy Put’, no Soldat. So Kerensky had done it, had closed the socialist presses. An opening salvo. A wall poster warned THE SOVIET IS IN DANGER! I read as I waited. GENERAL KORNILOV IS MOUNTING COUNTERREVOLUTION! THE PEOPLE SHOULD PREPARE TO DEFEND THE SOVIET. It was signed, THE MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE. The big Bolsheviks, in other words.

The dentist, a small fussy man in a second-floor office overlooking the Kazan Cathedral, had his own opinions. In fact I wished he wouldn’t have been quite so excitable as he plied his sharp tools and drill. “I think Kerensky’s trying to goad the Bolsheviks into violence.” His thick glasses magnified his eyes, which looked huge and slightly deranged. “They can’t possibly hold power, so it’s an invitation for the generals to come in and take over. But my wife thinks it’s just incompetence. The result’s the same either way. Black Hundreds. Pogrom.”

But why couldn’t the Bolsheviks hold power? The Soviet had the troops, and the workers… anything was possible.

With the metallic taste of cocaine running down my throat, and my jaw swollen and numb, I returned to Nevsky Prospect an hour later to notice a change, people swarming the newsboys, grabbing up their wares. As I got closer, I saw why. They were selling the Bolshevik papers again. While I’d been reclining in the dentist’s chair, the presses had been liberated. Kerensky had just lost a critical fight. I pushed into the crowd, not worrying about my jaw. I wanted to get one of those papers before they sold out.

I scanned Rabochy Put’ under my umbrella, but was disappointed to find nothing about insurrection, just a big dull article by Lenin about the peasant question and an editorial by Kamenev making the usual threats, which could have been published two months earlier. Although I did note that Kamenev, author of that letter in Novaya Zhizn, was back in the fold. I was learning how to read between the lines. So the MRC senior leadership had buried their squabbles. That had to mean something.