33 Speculation

I KNEW WHAT BEEZNEEZ Kolya was conducting out there. Every morning the citizens of Petrograd woke to see blood in the snow where some speculator had been shot by the Cheka overnight, caught hoarding or dealing in contraband. Dressed in black leather, with Mausers at their hips, bands of Chekists raided buildings all night long. Not the Poverty Artel—we were too poor for hoarding—but in the front building, when the electric lights came on after midnight, everyone knew a raid was about to occur. And I’d found a hidden space off the mansion’s laundry room piled high with barrels and boxes, rugs, art in frames. It was strictly illegal—all art belonged to the people now, their national heritage. Perhaps some of my parents’ things, too.

Before the last of the sun’s frosty light dropped into the gulf, footsteps sounded on the bare parquet. I hid behind the door, but it was Kolya, balancing two full bags, one on each arm. He unpacked them gleefully, like a child, showing me cheese, butter, potted meats, a dusty bottle of Napoleon cognac under a red wax seal.

“Manna, my dear. Hallelujah.” He made the sign of the cross, priestlike, over a can of deviled ham.

“The Cheka has permission to shoot speculators on sight,” I said.

He pinched my cheeks as one would a fussy child. “Lucky for me, their eyesight isn’t too good.” He pulled at a lock of my hair, let it fall. “I wish you hadn’t cut it. I miss it long. Was it always this red?”

“Mother hated the red.” I watched him open the brandy, breaking the seal, tucking it under his arm, pulling the cork. “She thought it was vulgar. When I was little, she used to have Avdokia rinse it with rosemary and walnut shells to try to darken it.”

“Didn’t want to be upstaged,” he said. The cognac unstoppered, he went looking for the glasses. They were still by the bed where we’d left them the night before.

He sliced a fat piece of ham and held it out to me. I opened my mouth for him to feed it to me instead. I would have liked to be one of those dogs who can’t eat if not fed by the master’s hand. As I ate, I wondered what it would be like to live with him, to follow him out into his mysterious world. It would be like walking through the looking glass. What lay on the other side of his life? Abandoned houses, villages, woods, gypsy camps? Was it true that there were men who could not love the way a woman loved, completely, devotedly? Akhmatova wrote,

No, I will not drink wine with you—

You’re a naughty one.

I know your ways—you’d kiss

Any girl beneath any moon.

I dreamed about fish swimming in dark currents under the frozen Neva. I was visited by the ghosts of the dead mansion, dressed in the fashion of the 1830s, watching us, watching me. I dreamed of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine, and they became mixed together with Katya and the tough and the Red Guardsman from Blok’s poem, all at a masked ball in an open square like the Field of Mars, in the swirling snow.


The next night Kolya didn’t return though the hour grew late. I had no way to gauge the time once darkness came, but I imagined it was at least midnight and still no sign. I lit the lamps, waited. Paced. Imagined him dead. Shot, robbed, arrested. But no, surely he’d been delayed with one of his customers, some old gent who had opened a bottle of wine hidden for months in a dusty cellar, accompanied by treasured cigars. A school chum, someone from the university he stumbled across on Nevsky Prospect. In a city like this, it could be anything. Arrest, interrogation.

Or a woman. The thing I should not have imagined was impossible not to. The female body sang for him, and, as they say, a great violinist can play any violin. If I can’t have caviar… but he did have it. Absurd to think he could go from our bed, so thoroughly torn and abused that I had to completely remake it each morning, to someone else’s. We already made love four times a day. But what of his need for admiration, for desire? It drove him before it like the wind. Yes, he could be with some poor lovely Former he was “helping.” Just beezneez.

“Are you even a soldier anymore?” I’d asked the night before. His unit was down in the Ukraine—or were they? The Ukraine’s Rada, its parliament, had just signed a separate peace with the Germans while the Bolsheviks were still negotiating to end the war.

“It’s uncertain,” he said. “I’m still in touch with my superiors.” He arced his head from side to side, neither yes nor no. “Let’s say I’m a useful fellow.”

Yes, I imagined he was. Sitting in someone’s parlor—desperate Former People struggling to maintain their dignity—examining their objets d’art, a Fabergé egg, a jeweled dragonfly. They would speak of old times, friends in common, parties they’d attended—Oh, you were there?—pretending that nothing so low as commerce was taking place. While he eyed the dark-haired daughter, or the mistress of the house… the oval portrait on the yellow wall followed me with her eyes. You, too?

Well, they couldn’t eat their silver, their art. Wasn’t I grateful for the money he had left hidden behind the tiles in my father’s stove? What good were our Repin, our Bakst, Vrubel’s portrait of my mother in such times? You could not stoke the tin stoves with them. You could not get passage to Finland with their beauty.

I drank wine and out of sheer perversity imagined every violent fate that might have met him, then became terrified that it had really happened, that my ugly thoughts might actually become reality. Please bring him back, I prayed. But he’d always flown back before, eager for me, shortly after dark. Was he tiring of me, my neediness, my unquenchable passion? My body ached for him.

He returned in the early hours of the morning, stinking of vodka, reeling like a circus clown. Sank down upon the settee and attempted to take his boots off, failed. He held one foot up for me to help him pull it off, but I ignored it. He let it fall with a thud. “The city’s a ruin,” he said, removing a cigar from inside his jacket and cutting off the tip, lighting it. He puffed blue smoke into the air. “I fell over a dead horse tonight. Almost broke my damned neck. A dead goddamn horse, right in the middle of Bolshaya Morskaya.”

“Write to the mayor. Tell him dead horses are bad for beezneez.”

He stuck his cigar between his teeth and tried pulling his boot off again. “Marina,” he said cajolingly. “Marinoushka.” Drunkenly, he held his leg up with both hands, wagged it at me. I pulled off the offending footwear and tossed it into the fireplace, watched him scramble on hands and knees for his burning sole. His soul. Who did he think I was? “What the devil’s gotten into you?” he asked, retrieving the smoldering object, brushing off the ash and embers.

“I thought you’d been shot. Anything could have happened. I hate just sitting, wondering whether you’re dead or alive.”

“Then you should be happy.” He grinned, teasing me, and touched my nose with a sooty forefinger. “So what’s the temper? I’ve been out seeing which way the wind’s blowing. Making my daily bread.” One boot on, one boot off, he poured himself a small glass of vodka, lifted it to me, and drank.

I sniffed him, his face, his collar. His hands. No trace of perfume. Nothing but cigar and vodka, maybe herring. “And you were mugged by a distillery.”

“An old friend of mine gave a little party.” He fumbled with the other boot and finally got it off. “Seems that she’d invited a poet. A great big boor spouting Bolshevik nonsense. Drunk as a cobbler.” He unbuttoned the top few buttons of his tunic as if it were choking him. “God I hate poets. They should all be long dead, leaving us their words but not their stink.” He grinned. “Especially this one, this ox, walking on her couch with his dirty boots, bellowing some dreadful love poems about some girl or other, some tramp who didn’t come home.”

Oh God, wasn’t there enough torment in this world? Genya, drunk, suffering… because of me. Kolya disgusted me, my own desire for him disgusted me, and yet—God!—this was me, not that brave, plucky girl so proud of heating water on a little stove.

“Stupid sap,” he said, staring at his cigar. “In a state like that over some little whore.”

“You bastard.” I snatched the Havana out of his mouth and tried to throw it, but he grabbed my wrist and slapped me across the face so fast I barely knew he had done it.

I held my hand to my cheek. The burn of it. The surprise.

“Oh God,” he said, realizing what he had done. “Marina.”

I began to scramble for my clothes, my woolen hose, my boots. I could hardly see through my tears.

“Stop, stop,” he took my boots from my hands, put them back on the floor. “Marina, oh God.” He sank to his knees, lay his head on my thighs, his tears soaking me. “I’m jealous, I admit it. I loved seeing him suffer. A big handsome devil like that. A Bolshevik! Oh, he’s going to go far in this new world of ours.”

How drunk was he? He was crazy! “I’m here with you, Kolya! Can’t you see that?”

“Yes, that’s just what I thought. I wanted to tell him, ‘I know where she is. She’s with me.’ Really work him up. Maybe he’d jump out the window.”

I could hardly take a breath. “But you didn’t.”

“No. Of course not. A man like that could kill you with his bare hands.” He walked to the table on his knees and poured more vodka into his glass, sat heavily on the floor. “But you’d been his. This admirable fellow, this poet… and who am I? What am I? So I went out and got drunk.”

I sat down with him and rested my forehead against his. We two impossible people, in this impossible life.

“I do love you so, Marina,” he said. He had never said that word before. It worked its way under my skin, through the cage of my ribs, under my breastplate. It buried itself inside me like a jewel sewn inside a smuggler.


The next morning, I woke to noise somewhere in the house. I had been here long enough to sense the change. Rattling, men’s voices. Kolya came in, dressed and composed, a far different man from the one he’d shown me the night before. Nowhere could I see the vulnerability, the madness. This man was sober, efficient, all business. “We’re clearing out,” he said. “You’ve got to get dressed.”

I rose, looking for my clothes. “Where are we going?”

“Not you. Me. My men.”

“What men?” What was he talking about? I was with him now. There was no way back, no second plan. “Your regiment’s gone. They’re in the Don, with the Volunteers.”

He spoke softly, apologetically. “These are my own men, Marina.”

“Why can’t you take me, then? You have to. I don’t care where we’re going. You can’t leave me again.”

He knelt on the bed, pushed me back flat onto the quilt. “Go back to your poet,” he whispered in my ear. “You’re safe with him—though God knows I hope he doesn’t drink often. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Or go back to Vera Borisovna’s. But you can’t stay here and you can’t come with me.” Making me look into his eyes, see the seriousness there.

“I can’t go anywhere. There is nowhere else. Please.” I pressed my face into his tunic, my tears streaming into the wool of his jacket. “You have to take me.”

He held me at arm’s length. “It’s too dangerous. But I swear to you I’ll be back, no matter what.” He wanted me to agree, but I wouldn’t. “I adore you, Marina.” Kissing my hands, my neck. “Ever since you were a bratty little girl—you threw a snowball at me at a sledding party. In the Tauride Gardens, remember?”

He’d been talking to Klavdia Rozanova, with her perfect blond braids and her ermine muff. I’d been trying to knock that snotty look off her stupid face. My aim was just bad.

He crushed me against him, my face buried into the fragrance of his chest, his clothing. “I’ll be back. I swear I will be. Look.” He fished something out of his pocket. A box, its velvet an ancient, rusty black. I wouldn’t touch it, so he set it between us on the bed. Pushed it toward me. Against a dark blue satin lining—a bit pilled—lay a jeweled stickpin, a yellow stone surrounded by diamonds, the kind of thing a wealthy dandy might have worn in a silk lapel in the 1830s.

“If you ever need money, take this to the market on Kamenny Island. Ask for Arkady.” He pinned it onto my camisole. “Don’t take less then ten thousand. It’s a canary diamond. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s topaz.”