29 Fait Accompli

HOW STRANGE TO FIND myself in such a politically thrilling moment without any inside information or pressure from either Varvara or my father. I was free to decide for myself. The Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now leaned Bolshevik, though Anton and Gigo declared themselves Anarcho-Khlebnikovist. In the upcoming elections, the SRs were the frontrunners, representing the interests of the peasants and the less programmatic socialists. But there were lists for everything and everyone. Mohammedans, the Jewish Bund, Old Believers, rural proprietors and landowners, a feminist League for Women’s Equal Rights. There were cooperativists, Cossacks, Ukrainians, Germans, Bashkirs. Everyone had a list but the Theosophists. There was even a Kadet list, led by Paul Miliukov, back for another try at leading the country, along with Terekhov and a few others I recognized, but I saw no mention of Dmitry Makarov, either as a Kadet delegate or as one of the arrestees.

“And what is your platform?” Zina demanded of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovists as she singed her split ends with the burning coal of her cigarette, adding the stench of human hair to the already smoky miasma. A blizzard had threatened all day, and this evening, its first tentative flakes fell past our window.

Gigo, seated cross-legged on the coveted divan, leafed through the pages of his tattered, three-hundred-page futurist novel in verse. “We of the Anarcho-Khlebnikovist Party oppose governments and zoos of any kind.”

Anton steadied a walnut on the table and placed a chisel he’d taken from Sasha’s bag into the crevice, as if he were performing surgery. “Down with all parliaments.” He brought the hammer down on the chisel and neatly split the shell in two. Half went skittering off the table. “No congresses, zemstvos, or queues. No more choirs. No sing-alongs.” Sasha picked the half walnut up off the floor and tossed it back to the editor. “Free the periodic table!” Anton said. “We demand free air. Free poverty for all.” He extracted the meat with his pencil. “Vote list minus two.”

“Free the feet of the women of the banya,” I said from the stool where I sat posing for Sasha as he painted a cubist portrait of me onto the door. “Free their bunions, their fallen arches.”

“Free the women of the Terrestrial Now,” Sasha said, painting my nose in. “Free their lips and their adorable backsides. Free their freckles. Free the blondes, brunettes, and redheads. Free Vera Kholodnaya!”

Sitting at the table, Genya screwed an empty half shell into his eye socket like a monocle. Gigo’s mother had sent the sack from Georgia, and walnuts had become our main source of nutrition. He screwed in a second shell. “In the land of the blind, a blind man shall rule.”

“Free the alphabet from its unspeakable bondage,” said Gigo from the divan. “Free the ya. Ya before A. The last shall be first.”

At Genya’s side, Zina burped and sighed, fist under ribs. “These walnuts give me gas. I hope to God whoever wins gets some food into the city. I’m inflating like a dirigible. One night I’m going to explode.”


Only the Bolsheviks were surprised when the SRs won the election. No one else could have imagined it would turn out differently. Although we in Petrograd could fool ourselves into thinking we were an industrialized nation, the factory proletariat was a sprinkle of salt in the vast bowl of kasha that was Russia, a dollop of sour cream in that great vat of borscht. “The vanguard of the working class” could not carry the day in a country where most people still plowed behind a horse and wove their own clothes and bast shoes. In that Russia, revolution still meant “Land and Freedom,” the SR slogan.

Though I could not vote, being only seventeen, I had my favorites. I liked the wide embrace of the SRs, their historical roots, but it was also true that they didn’t have their eyes on the future. The bulk of the SRs were Defensists, wanting to fight the war to the end. They were old-fashioned populists of the last century, fighting old battles, while the Marxists were coolly working their program like mathematicians, organizing the proletariat and, even more important, the soldiers. They were the future.

Though they lost, the Bolsheviks made a good showing—they won a quarter of the vote throughout the country, and they proved overwhelmingly popular in the big cities, among the industrial workers, in the army, and in the fleet. What would happen now? Only the Bolsheviks would get us out of this war.

At dinnertime we descended on the Katzevs en masse. Dunya swooned at the sight of Sasha in the doorway with an armful of flowers shaped and painted from squares of Izvestia and Pravda, an adorable hint of blue paint clinging to his shaggy forelock. As for me, a different girl entered that apartment from the one who’d cringed with them under the tabletop the day the soldiers burst in. Different even from the girl I’d been when I’d returned from Maryino. Now I was a free woman, on my own, with my lover, coins from a street performance jingling in my pocket. My hair was rough, my clothes becoming worn from heavy use. I’d gone from windowsill pussycat to something of an alley cat.

Solomon Moiseivich greeted us from the divan, folding his Novaya Zhizn—and holding out his arms for an embrace. “So you’ve become a bohemian,” he said, kissing me three times. He wore his Bukhara cap and a caftan. Now Sofia Yakovlevna came in from the kitchen, and I reveled in the unfeigned pleasure on her face. “I wondered where you’d been hiding yourself.”

But Mina seemed less thrilled as she glanced up at us from her pile of homework. “Right on time,” she said sardonically. “Could you smell dinner?”

“All the way from Grivtsova Alley,” I said and pinched her upper arm. Don’t be like that.

Meanwhile, Gigo bestowed a bag of walnuts on Sofia Yakovlevna. “With my compliments,” he said. Genya handed her a loaf of bread we’d all pitched in to buy and followed her into the kitchen. She was like catnip to all the boys, with her soft bosom and kind round face. I helped Mina clear off the table—chemistry volumes, journals, notes in her small, neat hand—and felt a tiny pang of envy. Was I still jealous of her being at the university? I played with the feeling as you would toy with a slice of lemon, deciding whether it was too sour to eat. A little, I decided, but I wouldn’t have traded places with her. I was a poet among poets now, living the revolution. I couldn’t have stuffed myself back into that book bag, that lecture-hall seat.

I went back to the kitchen to see if I could help. Sofia Yakovlevna had Genya stirring the soup while she cut up more vegetables, doubling the recipe to accommodate the unexpected guests. Seeing me there, she caught me by the sleeve and pulled me to the sink, where she could talk under the cover of running water. They still had running water—imagine. “So are you happy, Marina?” she asked.

I turned to watch Genya solemnly stirring the soup as if the future of mankind depended upon it. “Very happy,” I said.

Worry argued with hope across her face as she washed a dish, a knife. “Will you marry?”

“Marriage isn’t revolutionary,” I said.

She sighed and wiped her hands on a towel. I could tell she was about to say something, but she just shook her head and smiled.

Six Transrationalists and seven Katzevs gathered around the big table, passing bread and garlicky pickles as Sofia Yakovlevna ladled up the borscht. All here, all together, everyone I loved. Except for Seryozha. I’d been writing to him faithfully, telling him what was going on here, but all I had to go on was the name of the institution, the Bagration Military School, and the address in Moscow. Maybe they’d censored my letters. Maybe the postal system had broken down, but I never received a response. The papers said there’d been fighting in Moscow, where the anti-Bolshevik forces were more organized, but after a week, their cadets, too, surrendered, and now the city was coming around to the new way of life.

Looking around the table, I was amazed at how we’d all grown up this year—Shusha, Dunya… Mina was wearing lipstick, her hair in a soignée chignon. Genya sat beside me, and Solomon Moiseivich beside him. They’d fallen into conversation about the elections. Genya was furious about the Bolshevik loss. He attributed it to the fact that the lists, drawn up months earlier by the Provisional Government, didn’t properly represent the new coalition between leftist SRs and the Bolsheviks, which he was convinced would have won. But the Bolsheviks still didn’t have the numbers. “They’ll have to restage the election,” he insisted. “We didn’t get rid of landlords to be ruled by ignoramuses in bast shoes genuflecting to painted boards.”

“The SRs got the majority,” Mina’s father said. “It’s the will of the nation.”

“The Bolsheviks have to reach the villages if they want to win in Russia,” said Aunt Fanya.

“The hell with the villages. I’m sick of the villages. I’m so sick of them I could scream.” Genya’s deep-seated hatred of peasants, stemming from his childhood on the Volga, always caught me off guard. He was otherwise such a loving, enthusiastic man, so his hatreds seemed all the more shocking.

Zina, seated across the table, was quick to jump into the fray, pointing her spoon at Solomon Moiseivich. “The advanced proletariat is the revolutionary class,” she said. I hated the way she spouted stock phrases, like a child reciting her lesson. I could take that behavior from Varvara—she’d actually read Lenin and Plekhanov and Kropotkin, Das Kapital in German. Zina just memorized slogans.

“If it wasn’t for the Petrograd worker, there wouldn’t have been a revolution at all.” Genya swept his arm in a gesture that barely missed his water glass. “The worker made this happen. Without the proletariat, the peasant would still be asleep in the haystack scratching at his lice.”

Just the mention of lice made me itch. Gigo ignored all the fulminations. He was doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his napkin for Shusha.

“It’s a peasant country,” said Solomon Moiseivich thoughtfully. “You can’t make a revolution without them.”

“But who should lead?” Genya said, letting his heavy hand fall to the table, making our dishes jump. “It’s got to be the most advanced. The head has to lead.” He poked himself in the forehead, hard enough to drive a nail. “The revolution’s the future, and there aren’t any plows in it.” He rested his arm across the back of my chair, and I saw how Mina blanched to see this familiar gesture. So each of us had something the other had missed.

Mina’s father sipped his tea with an indulgent smile. “There will always be plows, sinok.” Little son. “Someone has to bring in a crop. Unless you’re going to eat Bolshevik handbills.”

“Now there’s a field of plenty,” Mina said.

“I’ve lived out there.” Genya’s voice rising, his former good-fellow expression gone. “None of you have lived like that. The peasant doesn’t care about socialism. Land and Freedom? Once the peasant gets his land, he’ll consider himself free, and the hell with you. Just you watch.”

I waited for the echo of his voice to die down before I said, “You have to agree that the peasants should have the land. Without the soldiers, there would have been no revolution, and they’re all peasants. God knows they’ve waited long enough.”

He turned to me, hurt and surprised. “They only want to be the next landlord, don’t you see?” He backed away from the table to give his gestures more room. “They all have capitalist aspirations. The workers are the only ones who will protect the revolution.”

Sofia Yakovlevna watched me, and the expression on her face had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with my new life—to wit, Genya. Is he always like this?

“Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it,” Anton said from the foot of the table, where he perched on a footstool between Dunya and Shusha, enveloping them in a haze of cigarette smoke. “Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends.”

“Finally, a man to make some sense,” said Uncle Aaron, the old-time anarchist. “I’m with Mephistopheles over there.”

“The workers are no geniuses,” Anton continued, dropping ashes into his soup. The younger Katzev girls watched, horrified and fascinated.