Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I knew I should go, but it had been three months since I’d seen these rooms. Who could have blamed me for nostalgia? The nursery was as it always had been, but dustier and ice cold. Here we had learned our letters, shared secrets, played endless games of durak. Here I had cast the wax that long-ago New Year’s Eve. I knelt by the old rocking horse, pressed my nose to his, wrapped my arms around his wooden neck and horsehair mane. “I wish I could take you.” The horse forgave me, he was filled with such love. Why hadn’t some Red Guardsman taken him for his own children? “Be brave,” I whispered to him.

My bedroom, by contrast, was a scene of devastation. Pictures askew, anything made of fabric gone: clothing, rugs, the bed just a skeleton of springs. But Seryozha’s watercolor of the Finland shore still hung on the deep pink wall along with the poets’ silhouettes he had so painstakingly cut with his fine-pointed scissors. I took them down and piled them on the bare bedsprings. My jewelry, long gone. The little drawer of the vanity table empty. But the photographs under the glass remained untouched. I pulled them out and stacked them on top of Seryozha’s pieces.

Father’s English bedroom had been even more thoroughly ransacked—clothing gone, wardrobe gaping. The dresser top lay bare of the beautiful toilet set that always rested there, the bone-handled brushes and combs for head and beard, tiny nail scissors, powders and pomades to tame his crinkly hair. Did I dare look into Mother’s room?

I turned the door handle but found it locked. I knocked. “Hello?” Could she have lain down and turned her face to the wall? I began to beat the door with the heel of my hand. “Mama? It’s Marina. Avdokia? Open up.”

I heard the tiny click, the latch turning, like a sound from a grave. In the gap, Ginevra’s frightened face. She pulled me inside, locked the door, and embraced me, patting me, touching my hair, my cheeks. “You’re here… I can’t believe it.”

What a sight! Furniture had been squeezed into every last inch of space—a tumble of chests, chairs, and trunks like in an antiques shop. The nursery piano! They probably couldn’t move the Bösendorfer. Three mismatched beds were lined up against the far wall. Mother, Avdokia, and the English had probably retreated to this bedroom so they could devote all the wood to one stove. In her ornate canopied bed, Mother sat propped up on pillows, her white hair a disordered nest. She was fumbling with something in her hands. At first I thought she was knitting, but there was nothing there. “Mama, where’s Avdokia?” I was afraid to approach her.

“She’ll be back. She’s off selling a few things,” Ginevra said. She hugged me suddenly, awkwardly. She was never very physical. “Oh, child.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and her face withered like a cut bloom. She motioned for me to come out into the hallway. She was only twenty-eight, but she looked forty. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak.

“Is it Papa?”

She shook her head.

A great hand wrapped itself about my throat. Volodya?

She shook her head again and started to cry.

Seryozha. Oh God.

She told me that it had been in the battle for the Kremlin, the first week of the Bolshevik insurrection. Moscow had been more prepared to fight the takeover than we had been and the Provisional Government had pitted the cadets against the Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers. Thousands of them. Boys, defending the city against seasoned men.

“We had a letter.” Her voice was as empty as the hallway, with all its staring doors. “Please, Marina, you’re hurting me.” I hadn’t noticed that I was gripping her arm, digging my fingers in. I let her go. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She scurried back into Mother’s room, shutting the door behind her. I stood in the hallway, my mind a howling waste.

After a time, she emerged and held out an envelope to me, her back against the door, as if I might rush at her. Bagration Military Academy. Beautiful stationery, bearing the Romanov eagle. I pulled out one big, creamy sheet. I had never hated anything so much in this world.

Dearest Sir and Madam,

It grieves me to inform you of the death of your son, Sergei Dmitrievich Makarov, in the battle for the Kremlin, October 28, 1917. He fought hard and honorably, as befits a Russian soldier. You can be proud your son died heroically, in defense of the rightful Government. He was a fine soldier and a fine young man.

With my greatest sympathies, Captain Yuri Borisovich Saratov

He’d been dead since October. I stared down at the page as if I expected the letters to rearrange themselves and spell something else. “Does Father know about this?”

She answered quietly, holding my hands. “Dmitry Ivanovich was going to give himself up for arrest, to go in with the ministers, but this changed his mind. He said he still had work to do.”

This was how you saved Russia, Papa? “You could have at least sent word.”

My governess sighed as if she could expel all the sorrow and guilt in one single breath. “No one was allowed to speak to you.” Tears dripped from those watery English eyes. Her nose was red and runny. She blotted at herself with a wadded handkerchief.

My mouth felt full of the metallic bitterness of dirty kopeks.

I was alone now. Absolutely alone. What good was all our knowing, all our love, our secrets and shared memories? A fanged animal lodged in my throat. I tore at my neck, trying to let it out.

Ginevra caught at my hands. “Marina, don’t… for pity’s sake…”

I would find Father in whatever high-ceilinged drawing room he was in, talking so importantly about Russia’s future, and I would kill him.

“Ginevra?” Mother appeared at the door, barefoot in a white nightgown—a frightened ghost. She saw me but gave no sign of recognition, only fear and stupefaction. The Englishwoman pushed between us.

“Come, Vera Borisovna. Let’s go back to bed.” She ushered my mother back into her room.

I was still standing in the hall when my governess returned to the door. “Don’t go, Marina. Come talk to your mother.” She faced the figure now sitting on the edge of the bed, the quilt around her shoulders. “Vera Borisovna! Look who’s here. Look who’s come to see you.” She waved me closer. I saw that the last months had turned my mother into an old woman. Her beauty hadn’t disappeared, but her flesh was thinned, her bones sharpened, her lips chapped and pale. Her eyes, so much like Seryozha’s, consumed her face. Ginevra tucked her back into bed, drawing the bedclothes up around her, plumping her pillows.

My family had disappeared—brother, mother, father. Here I thought their lives had continued without me, but there was no home anymore. Not for any of us.

“Are you able to get some food for her?” I asked.

“Avdokia trades things. And Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help.”

Kolya was here? Kolya, taking care of her? “He’s been here?”

“He’s saved our lives—you don’t know,” she went on, tucking the lace-edged sheet over the edge of the blanket. She was back to her resolute, tranquil demeanor. How could she have calmed down so fast? But her tears had been for me. Seryozha had been dead for months. She’d had time to get used to his death. His death! She went on talking. “We can’t get a thing out of the banks, what with the teller strike. Nikolai sold some of the paintings, and told us to hide the money in the stove, her jewelry. Thank God he got to us before the last sweep. They took everything.” We watched my mother, her hands fiddling again. I could see now that she was working a tangle of thin necklaces, trying to get them apart. “We’ve heard from Volodya. He’s joined the Volunteer Army in the Don.”

Seryozha was in the ground in Moscow. Volodya was fighting against the revolution. My lungs couldn’t expand. They’d been frozen solid.

My mother looked up from the tangle of chains. “Where’s Tulku?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She still hadn’t noticed I was here, but she wanted her little greyhound.

“Avdokia’s taking him for a walk, dear,” said the Englishwoman. She turned to me, whispered, “They shot Tulku during the first search, poor thing. He growled at one of the Red Guards and the man shot him the way you’d swat a fly. Frankly, it was just as well. We couldn’t have kept feeding him.”

Why was she talking to me about a dog? I had to get out of there while I could, while I still had the strength.

My mother turned to me, her eyes big and uncomprehending as a squid’s. The heat was unbearable in here, the closeness, the lavender, their helplessness. My brother was gone. My sensitive, anxious brother who had never wanted to climb beyond the first branch of the maple that grew in the Tauride Gardens. Even then you’d have to hold him on. Killed defending the Kremlin. I pictured the dead in Znamenskaya Square, a blond head, the cap fallen off. I put the letter in the bag with Seryozha’s pictures and my papers and left the flat before I turned to stone.

BIG FLAKES SIFTED ACROSS the windows. Down in the courtyard, a woman pumped water, and a crow picked disconsolately at some kind of rag. The same snow was falling in Moscow, deep, deep over his grave. Falling as it had in the snow globe music box Avdokia would wind for us, gnarled hands turning the key and shaking the encased wintry scene—St. Basil’s, a troika rushing. Seryozha in his nightshirt, I in my flannel gown, Volodya pretending he was too old for such things but watching all the same. “That’s you three,” she would say, pointing to the horses pulling the troika. It had played “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” little tinkling bells, over and over. Warm from our Sunday night baths, we would watch the snow fall together. Moscow seemed a magical place then, not a backdrop to murder.

Moscow.

           Crow among cities

                        I curse your churches

40 times 40

           their funeral bells

                        I curse your Kremlin towers

Spasskaya,

            Blagoveshchenskaya

                        Borovitskaya…

Blackhearted Rus

             You barrow,

              You sow.

                         Devouring your piglets one by one.

How would I live in a world without Seryozha? A world surrounded by strangers, a world that could kill a little boy in his nightshirt? The sky grew dark. I prayed he hadn’t been lying about being happy at the military academy. The snow swirled, a silent answer. You are all erased. You live to be erased. No one will be remembered by anyone. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—I wasn’t that hard to find!—but let me go on thinking he was alive. I’d laughed and run around town, spouting verses on bridges and singing on street corners, when he lay—where? I hadn’t even asked. All I could picture was a sad mound of snow by the Kremlin wall, one of its twenty towers looming above.

The tiny music box played over and over in my mind as I remembered Seryozha manipulating his Pierrot and Columbine paper puppets, making them jump with a tug of the string. Come with me; we’ll live on the moon. His little voice, playing both parts. Yes, I’ve always wanted to live on the moon.

Me, too, Seryozhenka. I’d like to live on the moon, somewhere cold and shining, with no humans at all—just us.

I could hear them, the racket in the hall, and in they came, talking all at once, shaking snow from hats and coats. Someone lit the lamp, dispelling the calming shadows, the gentle dark. Shouting, laughing. Something had outraged Genya, something about Red Guards. Now they saw me.

“Why were you sitting in the dark?” he asked me. He pretended to fall on me, a joke, caught himself at the last minute, one hand braced against the wall over my head. He leaned down to kiss me. I turned my face away. “Are you on strike like the Red Guards?” He tried the other side. “Fishing for more rations? Higher wages?” He righted himself. “What’s with you? How’d the job search go?”

I stared out to the windows facing ours in the courtyard. People making dinner for their children with what little they had. Families. How fragile it all was.