Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“Where did you go?” he asked. Mina told him everything.

I tried to think of something I could tell him, but all I could see was Kolya’s greedy face and naked body in the bed on the English Embankment. “Genya, I’m not who you think I am. I’m…” and my throat closed up on me. I always saw myself as a good person who occasionally did bad things, but I saw now, that was a misconception. “I’m not careful. I make a mess of everything. You should throw me out. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Where did you go?” he roared. Bull nostrils flaring. “Who were you with? Tell me!”

I looked down at my hands. They didn’t even look like mine. “I have a lover. I haven’t seen him since I met you.” I felt like my face was on fire. I wished I could just tear it off. “He came back. I was so wild after I left Sergievskaya, so low. And I heard he’d come back. He knew Seryozha. I wanted to see him. Not to make love to him, just to see him. Just to feel known, do you understand?”

“No, I don’t,” he choked with a sob. “You don’t think I know you?”

I shook my head. “Forgive me. I’ve lost everything. My whole life. I thought it would make me feel better to see this man from the old days.”

“And did it?”

Did it? “For a while.” But now I’d ruined my life for it, for three days. Go back to your poet. Would a man who loves you send you back to your lover?

“You should have stayed with him.”

“He left.” The air felt like glass. Broken, sharp, unbearably bright. “He’s a criminal. A speculator.”

“And you went to him.”

“Yes.” I couldn’t stand to look at him. It was like looking into the sun.

“Don’t you care about me at all? What am I to you? Just this big buffoon you can lead around by the nose?” He had started to cry. “Was it that poem I wrote? I thought you’d like it.”

Oh, if only lightning would strike me right now, so that I would not have to live through this moment.

He shuffled to the window, rolling his forehead on the cold glass. “Did you ever love me?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, letting the quilt fall from my shoulders, glad there was something I could answer with absolute confidence.

“Do you love me now?”

“Yes.” From the pain I was feeling, I knew I did love him, not incandescently, not feverishly, craving his skin, unable to think about anything else. Why must there be only one kind of love? There had to be better words, ten or fifteen, a hundred. Love was such a mixture of things, each love with its own flavor and spice. I wanted to both reassure him and warn him. For him I had love, tenderness, pity. Attraction and admiration, friendship and trust. As opposed to what I felt for Kolya—animal passion, ecstasy, history—and a spoonful of black hatred as well.

“Do you love this other man?”

I nodded, barely moving my head, just tucking my chin. I would not lie to him now.

He roared and turned over the table, lamp and papers crashing to the floor. He wanted to hit me, I knew it, but he couldn’t do it, so he threw chairs and broke things instead. “No. You can’t. It’s not possible!” He picked up a chair and brought it down onto the table. It flew apart, leaving him with just the chair leg, with which he battered the overturned table until he fell to his knees, sobbing.

Was I just as Anton had described, some sort of succubus draining the life from this strong, beautiful man? “I went home to my mother’s, but she won’t forgive me. I had no choice. I’m sorry.”

“You could find a brothel,” he snapped. “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”

Would that be my next stop?

“Am I not enough for you?” he said softly. “You think I’m a bad lover?”

Of all things. Pity brought me to him, put my hand on his shoulder. He knocked it away. I leaned my face against his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t hit me. Under my cheek, a great sob. He grabbed me and held me, kissing me, pushing me down on the floor, hands in my coat, needing to make love urgently, his desperate fingers. This body, this borderline, this rocky shore. He needed to erase Kolya from this body that had been his. He tore at my dress, planting his mouth on mine as if he needed the very air from my lungs. Ripped at my bloomers. Was this love? Was it hate? Was he weeping or was it I? We made violent love on the dirty wooden floor among the debris of chairs and sunflower-seed shells, clutching, weeping, until we were drained. “Don’t leave me, Marina,” he whispered.

I lay on the floor, half under him, shells embedded in my back, his smell of green and wood, my hair a tangle, his like ruffled shocks of wheat. What was the body, this bloody field of stones? So many battles fought here, so many good men lost.

ONCE AGAIN WE WALKED together, breathing our breaths into the frozen days, my head in its thick scarf coming up to his rough wool shoulder. In an unexpected way, we had become more of a couple than we had ever been—considerate, protective. We spoke in low, intimate tones. But we had lost the joy, the spontaneity. What was between us felt fragile, clear, and breakable as a ship in blown glass. We had entered the formality that leads husbands and wives to call each other by name and patronymic. Yet I learned that a strange kind of trust arises after betrayal that no one ever talks about, that comes with the knowledge that one’s lover is willing to be hurt—to absorb pain, to carry it—for the sake of love. And that one was capable of hurting someone—deeply. And that it was not the end. You can live that way, you can go on.

In Galina Krestovskaya’s apartment, we pale young poets of Petrograd warmed our cracked, chilblained hands by the stove and prepared to invoke the Muse—while ignoring the lingering smells of a decent meal recently consumed. Where Seryozha’s death had placed cotton in my ears and a fog before my eyes, my disgrace had stripped my senses bare, and again I heard, I saw.

Anton began. His poem investigated the possibility of the ya, the I, the ego. It was woven with clever half rhymes and strings of sound, unintelligible at first hearing. And yet its meaning bobbed along like a buoy in rough weather, sometimes above the line of waves, sometimes below. He’d said no more to me after his outburst, but his disdain for me and concern for Genya were always simmering under the surface.

Genya’s new poems thundered more emphatically than ever, in inverse proportion to our careful silences with each other. The poem he recited urged the people to be men and not children, not to examine their leaders for feet of clay, for all feet were of clay. The revolution could not live in the sky, the poem said, only in the mess of blood and fire and earth. He challenged the reader to embrace the heat and the darkness and the smoke and let it transform him, let it temper him hard. It was his wish for himself.

For my part, I found a place to stand in the details of daily life. I returned to the precision of rhyme and meter. I found it soothing to sit on the divan, day after day, working out rhyme schemes, counting loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls. I had never been so technically accurate. The two university students, Oksana and Petya, liked the repetition, the clarity, but Anton of course hated them. “All its energy is in chains,” he complained. “Where’s the sound?” But Seryozha’s death was silent as an owl flying through snow. Kolya’s departure was the nicker of horses, a swish of runners. And Genya and I—the sound of breath being held, the tinkling of icicles.

Sitting in the tobacco fug, discussing each poem in turn, I watched lovely Galina Krestovskaya drink in our words like claret, sometimes gasping or applauding a good line, at other times nodding as Anton analyzed us. We were her little geniuses, her personal nest of golden cockerels.

Krestovsky, in his usual leather-backed chair, a balding man in a coat and tie, big-nosed and bespectacled, read a Nat Pinkerton novel, a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was resigned to our presence as he had been to his wife’s redecorating the flat in the fashionable primitive style of the Diaghilev set designers.

My poem centered on women pumping water in the courtyard of a Grivtsova Alley apartment building. Exhausted, complaining, they shared gossip as they stood in the frozen puddles, then carried their water upstairs, two, three stories, slipping on the icy steps. It was called “The New Ice Age,” told in tightly patterned stanzas as intricate as a watch.

Oksana began the critique. She enjoyed the repetitions and tight metrical schemes, the rhymes. Zina burst in, her button eyes afire. “But it’s counterrevolutionary. You’re saying the Bolsheviks are incapable of keeping water going in the buildings, when you know it’s the landlords who won’t make repairs.”

“Are we critiquing content?” Petya asked Anton.

“Of course the landlords won’t make repairs,” Krestovsky called out from his lair. “Nobody’s paying rent. So who’s going to fix your water? Jesus Christ?”

Galina cast her luminous eyes to the figured ceiling, embarrassed at her husband’s unfashionable views.

“Well that’s the bourgeoisie for you. Money for wars but not for water.” Genya sat on the windowsill, his dirty boots defiantly resting on the satin of the seat below. He’d become more Bolshevik in the last weeks, more intentionally rude, as if he had to prove to himself he wasn’t going to be pushed around by bourgeois morality, least of all his own.

“I’m depicting actual life,” I argued. “As we’re living it. Should I pretend it’s already paradise?”

Zina flushed even darker. “But you’re saying life is worse under the Bolsheviks.” She looked pleadingly to Genya to back her up. Before, Genya would have been the first to chastise me, but now he let me be.

“I’m not ‘saying’ anything,” I said, defending myself. “Are you suddenly a symbolist?” Hers was the kind of criticism that often split our group into factions, whether content should be criticized or not.

“Those women should be glad to be pumping water in a Soviet Petrograd,” said sixteen-year-old Arseny to my left. “It’s their water now.”

Krestovsky burst out laughing from his chair in the alcove, and I had to slap my hand over my mouth not to join him. Did Arseny’s mother fetch his water?

“But they’re not glad,” I said simply. “I want those women to be able to look into the mirror of this poem and recognize themselves.” I rubbed at a blister on my right hand, where I’d burned myself boiling water on the primus stove. “Not some sentimentalized notion of ‘the people.’”

“You could write about the landlords not fixing the water,” Zina said. “They’d still see themselves, but it would also make a statement.” Her eyes flicked to Genya, but he just leaned back against the window frame and gazed over his shoulder at Sergievskaya Street.

Oksana came to my rescue, her gray eyes huge and dark-circled under her fringe of frizzy blond hair. “Not every poem has to be instructive to be revolutionary. To depict the life of common people in the contemporary context is itself revolutionary. This is poetry, not advertising.”

Zina stamped her small black boot on the Krestovskys’ parquet. “There are no sidelines. Poetry is part of the fight.”

“You’re all missing the point. The babas and their water aren’t the issue.” From the piano bench, Anton broke in, wearing that supercilious expression. “It’s the form that’s the problem. You’re trying to make a Red Guardsman waltz in hobnailed boots. Da dum da dum da dum da dum. The revolution is in the lines, or it isn’t a revolution. The poem is timid. It’s strangling in its corset.”

I resented what he was saying, but he was right. I was seeking solace in iambs and anapests, clever rhymes. I had become reactionary, not in my politics, but in my poetics. The trouble was that I could not write energetic modern lines, because I had no energy. These controlled intricacies reflected exactly my spirit’s limitations.

After the discussion, Sasha and other artists began to drift in—actors, students, dancers—knowing there would be snacks and perhaps liquor. Our hostess, graceful, blond, and green-eyed in a gypsy scarf, flitted from group to group, her bracelets jingling, happy to be at the center of such an advanced artistic coterie, while Krestovsky played chess with Anton.

I was speaking quietly with Oksana when two familiar faces entered the archway of the salon—Dunya Katzeva and her newly glamorous sister. What was Mina doing here? Dunya smiled at me, but she was searching for someone else, and her smile broadened when she saw him. I stepped behind Oksana and searched for Genya. Had he seen Mina come in? No, he was safely across the room, explaining something to Petya and little Arseny. I excused myself and threaded through the clusters of guests into the hall, but Anton’s quick eye had caught my exit. Mina’s arrival had not escaped him, either.