I ducked into a little sitting room, where Galina’s maid sat mending clothes. Surveying myself in the etched mirror, I pushed back my untidy hair, wished I had some lipstick. Compared to Mina, I looked like a washerwoman.

“Nothing to steal, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the maid said.

“I’m hiding from someone,” I said.

She assessed me like a woman appraising a sack of frozen potatoes that would cost a week’s wages, wondering how many were rotten. But finally she returned to her sewing.

We were in a pretty room—like the rest of the apartment, flavored with a folktale motif à la Nikolai Roerich. On the bookshelf stood photographs of Galina in various roles: a peasant girl in braids to her knees and an arched kokoshnik; a gypsy with golden curls; a moody portrait, her black velvet tam barely discernible from the dark background, the light questioning her heart-shaped face. Not as theatrical as the other photographs, showing her as lovely but allowing the flaws to remain, it had to be the work of Solomon Katzev.

What was Mina doing out there? Talking to Genya, stirring things up again? I paced back and forth, hoping she would leave, or—a soft knock on the door. The maid looked up, cursed under her breath. It opened slowly, and my old friend stood in the doorway. Like a hound, she’d chased me to ground. Would she tear me to pieces, or would I be able to get away?

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“Isn’t it evident? I don’t want to talk to you.” I’d backed myself into a corner.

The maid smirked over her mending.

“Do you mind giving us a moment?” my friend, my enemy, asked her.

“The street’s right there,” said the maid, stubborn as a rock. I wondered if I’d found Anton a wife.

I tried to push past Mina, make a break for the hall, but she grabbed my arm, her gaze a purpled gray like a river in storm. “Marina—listen to me.”

I wrenched myself away. Out the window, wind swept the snow up into the blackness, where it peppered the glass like insects on a summer night. A whoop of laughter rang out from the party. Someone had started up the gramophone. A little bell rang. Sighing heavily, the maid folded her mending into the sewing basket and, with a stern cast of eye, left us.

Mina stood with her back against the door. I didn’t recognize her, only those small hands, the little ring on her pinkie that her father had given her on her thirteenth birthday. “Are you going to avoid me for the rest of your life?”

I didn’t want to talk about this, but she was giving me no choice. “You didn’t have to tell him. Did you enjoy that?”

“What was I supposed to do? He came over looking for you. You didn’t tell me what you wanted me to say.” Her lips trembling, she started to cry. As her nose reddened, she started looking like her old self. “I said you were beside yourself with Seryozha’s death, that you’d be back, to just be patient…”

She’d been sure I’d be back. Funny. She hadn’t dreamed that I’d been ready to follow Kolya to the ends of the earth, that I’d already imagined myself traveling with him to the south, living among bandits behind the Denikin lines.

“Was that all you said?”

Her cheeks flamed in her white skin—that beautiful skin—her eyes looked bruised. “I didn’t mean to tell him. I swear. He was just so torn up, and it was a terrible thing to do—you could have at least done your own lying.”

“So you told him about Kolya. You thought that would make him feel better?”

“I was angry. You just do whatever you want and get away with it. It’s always been that way.” She was shouting now. “Take what you want, leave everything else a smoking wreck. Why should I lie for you? Don’t do things you’re ashamed of doing if you don’t want to be found out.”

I drifted over to the tiled stove, smoothed the warm tiles under my fingers as if I were smoothing out a sheet. How clean it was here, the neat household of Galina and Krestovsky. How messy I was by comparison, how incapable of conducting my life. “Is that what you came to tell me? Or to find out what happened with Kolya? How it all turned out?”

She flushed crimson again, suddenly very interested in the state of her shoes.

“He’s gone back south, if you must know.” I could feel my own tears starting, welling up from where they’d been hidden since that day on the English Embankment. “Told me to go back to my poet.”

She sank onto one of the upholstered benches, let her coiffed head fall against the painted wall, closed her eyes, and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t tell him where you were, did I?” She put her hand on my sleeve. “We’re not who we used to be, fine, but can’t we be friends anyway?”

Outside, a bout of gunfire. What could be happening—a confrontation between robbers and Chekists? Life was so precarious now. Mina had betrayed me twice, withholding the news of Seryozha’s death and of my lover’s arrival.

Her gray eyes pleaded. “I didn’t go out of my way to hurt you, Marina. Or maybe I did, I don’t know…”

Yet who did I have who knew me as Mina did? Genya and I were still together, despite my betrayal. Should I hold my friend to a higher standard than I had been held to? In any case, I needed a friend now, clay feet or not. As Genya said in his poem, nobody lived in the air.


Anton spotted us as we came back out to the party together and sauntered up, trickling smoke from his long nose. “Gotten your stories straight?”

“You’re the poets,” Mina said. “I’m only a humble scientist. It’s not my job to make things up.” She took my arm and led me past him. It made me laugh. She really was growing up. But then I saw that she was leading me straight over to the group around Genya. God, did we have to do this, too? They kissed cheeks in greeting and he reached out for my hand.

More gunfire. “What the hell is going on out there?” I asked. “Another revolution?”

Petya, his pilled sweater covered in pastry crumbs, ignored the blasts. They were obviously talking about the war negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, already a month old. “Lenin’s right. We’re going to have to give in sooner or later. Your man Trotsky can’t stall forever.”

“Oh, this again,” Mina said.

The negotiations had bogged down into a stalemate. Trotsky, as commissar for foreign affairs, refused to agree to the German conditions. He insisted that Germany must not be allowed to annex Poland or Lithuania and that Russia would not pay it any reparations. Lenin wanted to accept German terms and get it over with.

“Lenin’s a defeatist,” Genya said in his big bass voice. “Trotsky’s playing them like a fisherman. Wearing them out.” He kissed me on the top of my head, wrapped his arm around me.

Mina sought my eyes. See? You have Genya.

“You watch, a few more weeks, the kaiser’s going the same way as Nicky—right to the autocrats’ zoo. We’ll go visit and feed them peanuts through the bars.”

It was what everyone was hoping for—a revolution in Germany. They were so close. Five hundred thousand metalworkers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January. A million German workers were demanding peace without annexations abroad and democracy at home. Surely it was only a matter of time before the kaiser toppled.

“We’ve shown the world just what this war is about,” Zina said. “Reparations and annexations, for the Triple Entente as much as the Central Powers.” Upon the ascension of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky had outraged our allies by publishing the tsar’s secret treaties with France and England, revealing their plans to divide up the spoils of Europe when we won the war. “The German workers won’t take much more of it. They’re the ones paying with their blood and their labor.”

Petya took Lenin’s view. “You can’t underestimate the Germans. They’re not going to give in, workers or not. We’re a wreck and everybody knows it. They can roll right in anytime they want to.”

I noticed Dunya with Sasha over on the far side of the room, holding hands, laughing. She was wearing that soft, rust-colored woolen dress decorated with Seryozha’s sunflowers. She saw me watching her, and her smile saddened. She touched the patch. I wondered if her parents knew she was here.

“You’d better pray we don’t give in,” Krestovsky called out from his leather chair, his fringed lamp. “If you thought the tsar was bad, just try the kaiser. Trotsky should never have published those treaties. We might have gotten the English back as allies, finished the war, come out ahead. Now look what a mess we’re in.”

“Those treaties proved that both sides are the same,” Genya shouted over the heads of the others.

Across the drawing room, very straight and tall, wearing a black leather jacket with snow still clinging to her shoulders, stood a familiar form looking about—Varvara. After the way she had dismissed me that day on Vasilievsky Island, I had assumed I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I couldn’t imagine what Varvara would want, that she would willingly enter such a lavish establishment as the Krestovskys’. And where did she get that jacket? She looked just like a Cheka officer.

She saw me with Genya and Mina, grinned and hurried over to us, then took my hands in her cold, bony ones and kissed my cheeks. She glowed at Genya, grabbing him by the upper arms. Beamed at Mina. “You’re all here. My God, I’ve been looking for you all over town.” Her hair was wet. She was breathing hard. “I had to tell you. At four o’clock… there was a call to Smolny. From Brest.” The poets drew closer—Krestovskaya, Anton, Sasha, and his friends. “The war is officially over!” She embraced me vigorously and kissed me three times.

“They accepted Trotsky’s terms?” Oksana asked.

Krestovsky rose, threw his book onto his chair. “You’re sure?”

“I was out at Smolny. We got the news this afternoon. By tomorrow it’ll be in the papers. But I just had to let you know first.” She took my hands again. “You’ve given up everything for this. I wanted you to know.”

“Peace,” said Galina Krestovskaya. “I can’t even remember it.”

Mir. Even the word sounded strange to my ears. Four long years of war. I thought of those hospitals, the soldiers’ fetid dressings, the windows that wouldn’t open, the wounds that wouldn’t close. They would all go home and take up their plows. We might even have decent bread again. And Kolya would come home.

I shoved that thought away.

“What were the terms?” Krestovsky asked.

Varvara looked into the faces of the crowd that had assembled around her. Her voice changed when she spoke again. “Comrade Trotsky’s decided that nothing would put an end to the German demands. Who did they think they were negotiating with, another imperialist state? ‘No annexations,’ he said. ‘No indemnifications.’ The German people want to end it, too. It’s just the German General Staff—they can’t accept that their world is finished. So Comrade Trotsky ended it. This afternoon, he walked out of the negotiations. No war, no peace.”

“What the devil does that mean?” Anton said.

“It means we’re out of the war, but we agree to nothing,” she said. “If the Germans dare to attack us, a peaceful Soviet Russia, their workers will rise up and they’ll lose from the rear. They can’t risk it—don’t you see? Either way, they lose.”

“Genius,” Zina pronounced.

Krestovsky mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. “The Germans will never let it go at that.”

“You can stop worrying about the Germans,” Varvara said. I could smell her leather jacket as the room warmed it. “Nicky started it, but Leon Trotsky just put it to bed.”

Genya moved to the center of the room. I could feel his excitement. “Here’s to Comrade Trotsky! Urah!” This is how I liked to see him, that huge energy, freed of wounds, my sins forgotten. Perhaps more had ended than just the stalemate at Brest—perhaps ours had as well.

Gunfire splattered the night. So that’s what we were hearing—celebration! The war had ended! We began to sing “La Marseillaise”—not the worker’s version but the original. In a minute, Galina bustled in with her maid, the actress holding up two bottles of champagne, the maid bearing a tray with wine glasses. “After four long years, let’s have a proper toast.” She gave a bottle to her husband to open. He at first returned her enthusiasm with an expression of dismay when he saw the label, then resigned himself to her gesture of largesse. Opening the foil, becoming caught up in the fun as he popped the cork and filled the glasses. She began passing them around. “Does everyone have a glass?”