On the other side it was—Goya. Twenty, twenty-five naked women crowded together in a large wet wooden washroom. A hideously fat woman scrubbed her neighbor’s bony back. A toothless granny held up the flab of her stomach to get at her hairless zhenshchinost’. Wrinkled, contorted feminine forms of every variety—hair, no hair… I wanted to run for the door, but I’d already paid my hard-earned ruble, and the dwarf would know what a coward I was. I would never be able to show my face here again.

The sight of them blistered my eyes. I’d seen a hundred paintings entitled In the Bath, where rosy beauties waded knee-deep in picturesque rivers and washed their long hair. Brown soap never appeared in Rubens. This was the thing itself, the squalor of human life. Age and decay. It was one thing to see bent backs under brown shawls, sagging stomachs faintly suggested by full dresses, breasts swinging low under bodices and aprons, genitals quite invisible, and another to see them revealed in their horrific variety. Bodies covered with wounds, with sores, rashes, bruises, welts, and worse. Bandages kicked into a corner. I could just imagine what Father would say, with his concern for public health. And Mother… I couldn’t stop looking at their tragic feet, their twisted toes like the claws of some horrible bird. I could see why Jesus would want to wash the feet of the poor.

Woman. How could one not pity her, with that forked stem, that tube for food and babies? This one—expanded like overyeasted bread. That one—contracted like a fallen soufflé. Emptied out, gouged like clay, clawed, bruised, imprinted with the devastation of gravity and years. I felt every inch the foreigner, visiting not from abroad but from the land of youth and beauty. They stared at me, too, at my smooth, pale flesh with its constellations of freckles, the wide-spaced breasts Genya found so stirring. The flame of my hair above and below. Conspicuous as an albino on safari. I moved to the buckets by the tap in the wall, filled one, and found a place on a bench where I could wash, concentrate on the steaming hot water and not the Rabelaisian sight all around me.

Hot water! Such luxury. I would not have imagined in my earlier life that someday it would make me weep with gratitude. I washed with the small bar of lye laundry soap the dwarf had sold me, imitating the others, squatting with the bucket between my legs, modestly scrubbing, then sudsing my neck, my short hair, rinsing again and again—what divinity, what bliss. I felt sorry for the women wrestling with their long skeins of hair. They must have to run home with it wet and dry it over the stove before they caught cold. Why didn’t they cut it?

But slowly, as I watched them patiently, proudly comb it out, I realized that lives so brutally hard might need such impractical beauty, that this little indulgence—long flowing hair—might be their sole grace note, to be savored rather than suffered.

I knew so little about life.

A cloud of billowing steam escaped from a wooden door. A woman staggered out, lay on a bench, pink as a salmon, steam rising from her skin as from a dish of noodles. It seemed there were more infernos to explore. I gathered my fortitude and my towel and pushed through into the mystery.

Searing steam, fragrant with the smell of green wood, revealed only vague smears of pink and motion, the sounds of rustling slaps as women flailed one another with bundles of birch twigs, leaves still attached. Through the mist, I found an empty place on a lower bench. My fellow bathers gradually materialized out of the blistering fog, like a photograph in a tank. An immense woman encased in fat like a walrus took center stage, flanked by an old woman who looked like a melting candle and a younger one whose shoulders and breasts revealed the shocking marks of repeated beatings—some bruises still livid, others already faded toward green and yellow like a forest floor. On the upper, hotter bench, shriveled old babas sat with backs like question marks, bent from a lifetime of standing over stoves, brooms, children.

A strapping girl with long black braids and full ripe breasts like blue-veined planets emerged from the steam to throw a ladle of water onto the stove. It spat and hissed and clouds obscured the scene. I liked it better that way, though the heat was phenomenal. I felt less glaringly out of place. Just when I’d begun to relax and enjoy the feeling of being clean and safely invisible, the fat woman hawked and spat on my foot. Had she really? I stared at the thick yellow glob of phlegm oozing down my instep. “Burzhui,” she sneered. “I could eat you for breakfast.” The others tittered, waiting to see what I would do.

I’d been to a girls’ school—I knew she would keep it up unless I stopped her. I got up and washed it off with the dipper. “So that’s how you got so fat.”

The women hooted. The fat one narrowed her piggish eyes.

I sat back down. “Watch out for her,” said the woman to my left under her breath, a rangy woman of late middle age, long breasts scarred vertically—from nursing, I imagined. I recognized her. The woman from my courtyard. Put the legs of the beds in kerosene. “She runs a booth in the Haymarket. She’s mean as a bucket of snakes.”

“She lives with all those poets on Grivtsova,” said a voice down the bench. “They’re all crazy as bedbugs.”

I was shocked. I hadn’t imagined anyone knew who we were. No one ever talked to us.

“She take them one at a time or all at once?” said a woman in a felt hat. I would have liked a hat like that—my ears were burning up.

“In that dog kennel they live in?” said our neighbor. “It would have to be all at once. No place for the queue.”

Everyone laughed—even me, although the joke was at my expense.

The girl with the globelike breasts squealed. “Ooh, the blond—that’s my idea of a man.” I wondered if Sasha knew he had an admirer in the neighborhood. I hoped for Dunya’s sake he didn’t. Those breasts could smother him outright.

I slicked my hand down my arm, the sweat pouring. Was I getting dirtier or cleaner? I couldn’t resist licking it, tasting the salt.

“Give me the big one,” said a woman twice the girl’s age. “Prince Ivan. Now that’s a man.”

Sage nods all around. Clearly they knew whom she was talking about. Prince Ivan. I imagined how Genya would laugh.

How strange, though… they knew us. They had ideas about us. Here we thought we were living in a world of our own making. It never occurred to us that it was a fishbowl, that others saw everything, drew conclusions, too. We lived in a real world where our futurist experiments meant nothing, where nobody cared about Victor Shklovsky.

“One more bastard in the courtyard by summer—you heard it here first,” said the rangy woman, elbowing me goodheartedly. “Take my word for it and kiss those pretty girls goodbye.” My breasts.

Unlikely. It wasn’t easy to make love in the Poverty Artel, four or five people listening to your every breath. “In the future,” I said, “there won’t be bastards. People won’t even know what that means.”

The way the women stared, I wished I hadn’t spoken, that I’d just enjoyed the sweating and let them think what they liked. Now I had to explain myself. “Children won’t be the property of fathers. All children will be the same. The whole property basis of marriage is obsolete.”

“Intelligentka,” one said with a laugh. “Vote list number three!” another called out from the steam. List number 3 was the Bolshevik slate in the upcoming election.

Their disdain was a challenge. Who was a burzhui now? “Kollontai said that for a woman, love should be no more important than drinking a glass of water.” Something I remembered Varvara quoting.

“What, are we men now?” the spitting walrus demanded.

“Who drinks water anyway?” said a woman in the steam, her words punctuated by the slap of birch twigs. “Too much trouble. Pump and boil…”

A tiny babushka on the bench above me patted my shoulder. “I’ve been married three times. I’d rather have a glass of water.”

“I’d rather have a drink of vodka than a man,” said a blond woman combing her hair. “Though I hardly remember either one.”

“I’ll take Ivan,” said the woman in the felt hat. “And he can bring the vodka.”

“Actually, he’s mine,” I said. “But you can have one of the others. How about the tall skinny one? He could use a girlfriend.”

They howled. They all knew which one I was talking about. “He’s the craziest one of all,” said my neighbor. “I have to keep the milk covered when he goes by.”

I wondered if Anton knew that he’d been passed over by the wives of Grivtsova Alley.

“He goes with whores,” said a woman sitting on the bench across from me. Her thighs looked like they’d been eaten by mice. “I’ve seen him up the street.”

My big ears knew a piece of ripe intelligence when they heard one.

“Who else would take him?” said the woman from my courtyard. “He’s so sour, he scares the vinegar.”

“He’s got that limp,” said a woman savagely slashing at herself with a birch flail. “Must be why he’s not in the army. But the others—what’s their excuse?”

The birch twigs thwacked disapprovingly, making it hotter. The green scent permeated every inch of the room, whose walls I hadn’t yet seen.

The girl with the braids threw another ladle on the stove. Instantly the heat redoubled. The women disappeared. Suddenly the girl was right in front of me. “You don’t believe in love?”

I was grateful for the change of subject. “When women have to trade on love, it’s an offense to love. Worrying about who will take care of us—that’s not love, is it? In socialism, marriage will be untainted by commerce.”

“Zhili-buili,” said the blond woman above us. “You’ll see what’s what when you get a couple of kids.”

Thwack…

“Without a man, who’s going to take care of you?”

“Lenin,” said the fat woman, and everyone laughed. She folded her giant arms across her breasts. “You’ll see. Couple of kids, your man’s out of work, you’re coughing up cotton like half these sad sisters. Stand in the queues after a day on the factory line, then let’s see about your lya lya fa fa. You’ll be the one sobbin’, ‘Where’s that Lenin now to take care of me and my brats?’” My interlocutor nodded sagely with her three chins. “Wait and see—a man’s never there when you need him.”

Laughter rose around me. Yes, they were right to laugh at me. Seventeen years old—who was I to lecture women about anything? No husband, no children. An intelligentka, I’d never worked a day in my life. The room started to spin. My neighbor and the girl with the braids caught me before I fainted, helped me stumble out the wooden door, laid me down on the bench, and threw a pail of cold water on me. “She’ll be all right,” the older one said.

I lay staring up at the wooden beams in the ceiling, thinking about the women in the steam and those washing at the taps. In ten years, fifteen, this would be me, no longer carefully tended and fed and ministered to by dentists and doctors, hairdressers and dancing masters. This woman washing herself had lived on bad bread, horsemeat, and fish soup. She lifted children with that back, walked miles on those arthritic feet. Women like her were invisible to men like my father, who never noticed who did his laundry and cooked his dinner. He never thought twice about who painstakingly stitched his suits, wove his scarves, fashioned his shoes, though he’d been so sure he knew what was best for them.

Soon enough my beauty would vanish. On Grivtsova Alley or someplace just like it, I would lose my looks, my health, everything I’d ever taken for granted. The realization shook me. How stupid I was. I was not from another planet, I was not a visitor here. This was also my fate, my future. My own curved back, my bruises and sores that would not heal, my sagging breasts, missing teeth, poverty. My suffering, unless the Bolsheviks were able to construct a just society—and how fast could they do it?

Oh, to give these women their beauty back. Or if not that, then something—nobility, some recognition of their struggle. I was a poet, that was something I could do. This woman had once been young, maybe even beautiful. Her disproportionately large hands spoke of years of hard labor. Were they not as dignified as my smooth ones? More. I loved the pleasure she took in soaping her gray hair in hot water, her eyes closed, savoring. What were all my opinions and ideals worth compared to this one woman, no longer young, washing her hair in a public banya, humming under her breath?