Theater Square gleamed under a tender frost. Sun glanced off the bayonets of Red Guards, burnished the gold dome of St. Isaac’s in the distance. We watched members of the Pre-parliament arrive at the Mariinsky Palace for the noon session. But I thought the government had fallen. Had Varvara’s imagination gotten the better of her? Gigo stepped in front of one of the delegates, who wore a high white collar and regarded the pale, excitable poet with alarm. “What’s the order of the day, sir?” the mad Georgian asked. The man glanced at the rest of us and his face composed itself into a weary amusement, but he regarded the Red Guards more soberly. “I believe we’ll be discussing procedural issues,” he said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “We may be adjourning early.”

We moved up into St. Isaac’s Square, bristling with Red Guards. They seemed to be coming from the Nikolaevsky Bridge. The cathedral drew up its gold cap like a dowager pulling away from a pack of clamoring beggars.

But the most astonishing sight by far awaited us on the Neva shore. The embankment teemed with people in the sea wind—soldiers and sailors, workers and students. And opposite the Winter Palace—a warship. The Aurora, she was called. The Dawn. Huge, with her three smokestacks and two masts, rows of portholes, her seven big guns leveled at the Winter Palace. I couldn’t get my mind around her presence. A battleship in the Neva. Poised to fire. Would they really do it? Blow holes in the palace’s half mile of Italianate flank? Nothing much seemed to be happening on deck, yet the mere fact of her meant that our naval base at Kronstadt was already in the hands of the Soviet. Kerensky had thrown down the gauntlet and the Kronstadt sailors had picked it up.

On impulse, Genya clambered onto the narrow embankment railing and balancing there, shouted at the steel bulk, his hand outstretched.

Aurora!

let loose your thunder!

                        Awaken all these sleepwalkers

                 Free us

                         From yesterday’s nightmare and all the

                         little tsars.

                                    We’re ready for your fury

                                    Those with ears to hear

                                                 awaken!

He teetered and almost fell, jumped down to finish his poem on solid ground. His seaward lines rolled like waves hitting granite cliffs on a northern shore. Gigo and Zina each took a turn reciting, then Genya pulled me forward. The crowd watched me expectantly, happy to be entertained while they waited for the revolution to begin. I gave them my poem about the massacre at Znamenskaya Square, but I had nothing to follow it with. I had to put something more up into the air. So I began to sing the first song that came into my mind, “Dubinushka.” Little Hammer. “Strike harder, strike harder, da ukhnem!” My singing teacher, Herr Dietrich, would have had a heart attack if he heard what I was doing with all that training, but some listeners tossed coins, which my friends picked up from between the cobbles.

A strange moment, entertaining the revolutionary crowd with their own work songs, receiving their hard-earned kopeks in return. For the sailors in the crowd in their flat white caps and striped jerseys, I began another—“The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” My friend, we’re on a long journey, far from our dear land we go… A blond sailor came forward and pressed a silver ruble into the palm of my hand. His hatband read AURORA.

I wish I could say I still had that ruble, but we spent it on dinner.


In the afternoon, we tramped out to Smolny, a good three miles away, to see what the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was doing about the insurrection. Delegates had converged from soviets all over the country, but the start had been delayed and delayed again and the delegates were getting restless. Gunners stood poised at their machine-gun stations flanking the entrance to the building, exactly where tenderly brought-up young noblewomen once walked when it was a convent school. The gardens teemed with armed workers and rough men in red armbands—Red Guards—who had come on their own to help with the insurrection. Thousands of them were camping out, waiting for instructions. There were too many—we heard revolutionary soldiers trying to send them home, but few left. The tension was thick. Evidently the Bolsheviks had announced they were pushing back the starting time for the congress yet again. We tried to talk our way in, to no avail, and now the sun was going down. I was tired and hungry but I had no home to go to besides the Poverty Artel, and the poets were in no mood to abandon the streets. Genya certainly showed no signs of flagging. We ate in a nearby café, lingered over our tea, then set out again. I drifted along in a fog of exhaustion, Genya’s arm around me the only thing between me and collapse.

The first cannon shot came around ten. We converged on the English Embankment with the excited, slightly menacing revolutionary crowd to watch the firefight. It wasn’t the Aurora after all. Stranger than that—it was the Peter and Paul Fortress firing across the wide Neva, pummeling the Winter Palace. To a native of this mirrored city, it was a sight unthinkable even twenty-four hours earlier. Like the fork running away with the spoon. This is really happening, I had to keep reminding myself.

“The Bolsheviks have to take the Winter Palace tonight,” said Zina, leaning on the parapet, vapor escaping her lips. “They’ll want to report a victory to the Congress of Soviets. That’s probably why they’re holding off the start. But they can’t keep the delegates waiting another day—there’ll be a riot.”

Gigo stamped his feet, put his collar up.

The rapid fire of machine guns added to the great boom of the cannons, a symphony. I shivered and pressed into Genya for warmth. If only we could just go home. I didn’t know if my trembling was from fear or exhaustion, but I couldn’t make it stop. Sweet Sasha asked if I was all right, if I needed to go home, but I shook my head.

Another burst of machine-gun fire—too loud, too fast, too close—made me jump. Above me, my lover’s nostrils flared, drinking in the smell of gun smoke. I could tell he wanted to get closer, to go right up to the cordon. I couldn’t stop seeing Znamenskaya Square, the bodies, and the men with the Red Cross armbands carrying away the wounded. I was in over my head, thinking I could keep up with Genya Kuriakin. I wanted to be like him—brave. I wanted him to think of me as worthy of his love.

Anton had had enough. They weren’t taking the Winter Palace fast enough for his liking. “I’m going back,” he said. “Let me know in the morning how it turned out.”

I could go with him. But I would not leave Genya. I wanted to see what he saw, go where he went, to prove I could, to myself as much as to anyone.


We didn’t return until early next morning. We stumbled in, laughing, bumping into the furniture as we tried to shed our coats and boots, stoke the fire. “Anton, wake up.” Genya kicked his bed. “They did it! While you were here keeping your fleas warm.”

I laughed. I was drunk—on wine and on our insane bravery. If I hadn’t been so tired, I never would have done it. Never would have had the nerve. But I was standing strangely outside myself. We had gone into the Winter Palace, had drunk its wine, had plumbed hell itself and returned.

“We got inside,” said Zina, bouncing on her heels. “All of us. Genya first.”

The soldiers were first, breaching the firewood barricades, hundreds of soldiers pouring in, and then Genya was up ahead, waving for us to follow him. Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Yes, but it had been wonderful, strange beyond imagining, to enter the violated palace.

“It was fantastic. Pure madness,” Gigo said, turning a chair the wrong way around and lowering his slight frame into it.

“You should have been there,” Genya said, wrapping his arm around Anton’s neck where he sat up in his cot. The editor reached for the clock. It was around five. He groaned and let it fall to the floor.

I sank onto the divan, remembering all those corridors. The fine paintings, the Malachite Hall. Ballrooms used for barracks, dining rooms for offices. Everyone was lost—the soldiers, the cadets; people shot at each other out of sheer nerves and confusion. A revolutionary soldier dropped a grenade down a staircase—why? My ears still hadn’t stopped ringing.

Anton shoved his friend’s heavy arm from his shoulders. “Then you got drunk to celebrate?”

Sasha pulled up a chair to the messy table. “The soldiers broke into the tsar’s wine cellars. We heard they lost a whole battalion down there. They sent another in after them and they disappeared, too. They won’t be coming out anytime soon, either.”

Genya reached under his jacket and pulled out three bottles. Sasha produced four more.

Zina goggled. “So that’s where you were.”

We’d gone down just to see it. Now I would never get the picture out of my head, that Blakean hell: drunken soldiers bashing the necks off vintage bottles, lying on the floor as their mates poured wine into their open mouths. The cellars went on and on, a labyrinth under the palace, and the soldiers turned into animals before our eyes, like Odysseus’s men on Circe’s isle. The drunken men were more frightening than cannon fire. I slipped in the spilled wine and fell, cutting my knee. Genya and Sasha grabbed bottles and we departed, fighting our way back upstairs against a tide of descending celebrants. I looked at the tear in my stocking, the jagged sore, but it seemed like someone else’s leg. I still couldn’t feel it.

“Wine?” Genya held an old bottle against his forearm like a sommelier. It was a Madeira, 1848.

“A good year,” I said.

He handed it to Sasha, who began working its cork with his penknife, as Genya continued his story about our adventures conquering the Winter Palace. “We found the meeting room where the ministers were holed up. The Red Guards were just marching them out when we got there.”

Actually we hadn’t seen them. Genya was painting a picture now. We came upon the room by accident, wandering among soldiers and looters grabbing plumes and statuettes, clocks and miniatures, the Red Guards trying to stop them. These things belong to the people! Shots firing, people running, smoke. We passed through ruined chambers that had been used as barracks. Suddenly we found ourselves in a dining room, rather plain compared with the outer galleries, its long table scattered with pens and pads bearing the scribblings and drafts of proclamations. The ministers had been trying to find a course for themselves and the country up to the last moment, when the Red Guards had arrived to arrest them. Waiting for the inevitable. What a fitting finale it was for the Provisional Government. True to form, they’d conferred to the very end. Talk, that was their forte, while they waited for someone else to act. But I wondered what had happened to one dignified gentleman in particular, a man with a reddish-brown beard and eyes like my own. I prayed he’d listened to Varvara, but I doubted he did. Perhaps going down with the ship seemed more noble than what had occurred that night on Furshtatskaya Street.

Finally Sasha got the stopper out of the bottle. Zina found glasses of varying sizes and degrees of cleanliness. We poured and toasted the revolution, the sailors, and, finally, poetry. I thought of those hundreds of soldiers swilling priceless wine as if it were kvas. Some bottles probably dated from the reign of Peter the Great. Then I shook myself. Who had tears for vintage wine when men were still dying in a war nobody wanted? Let them drink. I raised my glass, the oval of Madeira like a fine red fire.

Genya held his hand behind his back. “Guess what I found,” he said, his eyes shining but a bit blurred by drink.

“The Orlov diamond?” Anton ventured, squinting against the smoke spewing from the stove.

“The tsar’s truss,” suggested Sasha, sniffing the wine.

Genya brought his big hand around and displayed on his palm… an ordinary fountain pen. He grinned, triumphant. “Kerensky’s pen.”

“How do you know?” Anton asked. Despite his blasé air, he was intrigued. He grabbed it, tried it out on a scrap of paper. There was still ink in it.

Genya snatched it back. “It was at the head of the table, wasn’t it?” He held the pen before my eyes. “With this pen, I swear I’m going to write the most revolutionary poems the world has ever seen.”