Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Radek raised his hand for silence. “But Comrades, even now, your German brothers are organizing!” Fiery faith burned in Radek’s small intellectual body, his hand outstretched, his round glasses catching the light from the smoky lamps. “They’re striking in factories from Hamburg to Munich! They want the war to end! Now it’s up to us to show them how socialists fight. Shoulder to shoulder, for the workingman. For the future!”

Cheers from the soldiers and sailors, the workers, the women in head scarves, the children and old men. I could feel my energy returning, my hope.

I imagined myself with a rifle, marching with these comrades. I’d hunted at Maryino. I was a pretty good shot—though, truth be told, I’d always felt ashamed to see a pheasant’s or duck’s bright eye cloud over, the way its beauty vanished in an instant. But these Germans had to be stopped.

“We must defend our revolution!” Radek said. “Not just in Russia but in Poland, in Latvia, in Germany and France and America! Down with every capitalist master! To arms, Comrades!”

Shouts and cheers echoed the diminutive speaker. People pounded Radek on the back as he left the stage, probably on his way to another such meeting.

A haggard-looking Bolshevik, tall and bony, took the stage. “The German soldier—what is he? A conscript. He’s tired, he’s hungry. His brothers are rebelling at home. With our example, he may just lay down his arms and join us! That’s what made our revolution here. You cannot pit a conscript army against free men and women, fighting their own cause!”

“Long live the revolution!” Genya shouted.

An old, white-bearded worker leaned out from the second balcony and in a surprisingly loud, clear voice shouted, “Is it true the Soviet’s packing up and heading to Moscow?”

The hall erupted into furor. The perfect acoustics of the Alexandrinsky Theater—which would let an actress’s sigh be heard in the third balcony—filled with cries of “Yes, what do you say to that?” “Bourgeois lies!” “It’s the truth!” “Shut up!” “You shut up!”

The gaunt comrade onstage held out his hands to quiet the crowd. “I assure you, citizens of Petrograd, the Soviet has no intention of abandoning you! We will fight to the last man! Some vital portions of industry are being evacuated to keep them from the invaders, but the Soviet isn’t going anywhere.” He stopped, leaning forward and pressing his hands on the lectern. “Ask yourselves, where are these rumors coming from? The bourgeois press! To whose benefit is it to promote chaos and counterrevolutionary hopes? The bourgeoisie! Therefore, the Soviet has declared the bourgeois press suspended until further notice. The Cheka will be especially vigilant about resurgent counterrevolutionary activity at this crucial moment. This is a warning to the bourgeoisie!” He slammed his fist into his hand to punctuate each syllable. “Do not give aid to the enemy of socialism!”

“Round ’em up!” I heard here and there around the auditorium. “Up against the wall!” “Shoot ’em!”

This warning to the Former People worried me. I pictured Mother, mustered out of her cluttered room in the middle of the night, marched through the city streets in the snow, shoved onto a train, and taken away to a camp in the forest, or in the far north. But what could I do? It was true—some of the bourgeoisie were plotting for the arrival of the Germans. They couldn’t wait to take back what had been wrested from them and recover their former privileges, their former arrogance. My mother was probably polishing the silver. But a camp?

The full moon had risen, and deep drifts of snow threw back a light so bright, it felt like a setting in a play. I tucked my arm tightly under Genya’s. Anton walked on his other side, hands shoved deep in his pockets, his face like a thundercloud. We found the rest of the Transrational Interlocutors huddled around the Catherine statue, smoking and debating in the bitter cold. We all decided to retreat to Sasha’s new room close by, just off the Fontanka.

Genya and I allowed ourselves to fall behind, not speaking, just contemplating the size and gravity of what was about to happen. The war was coming to our door. In a matter of days, tanks and troops would be marching right up this embankment. Our shadows traced a complex calligraphy on the snow as we walked.

“Come on, you two!” Zina called back at us. “It’s no time for lovemaking!”

“We’ll catch up,” Genya shouted ahead.

Instead of following them, we walked out onto the Chernyshevsky Bridge to watch the moon, huge and coldly white, rising over an empty city, the frosted walls, the sky unsmudged by chimney smoke. Ice glistened on the chains of the bridge’s towers as we leaned on the parapet, his familiar solidity in his thick, patched overcoat which we slept under at night. Our friends walked ahead of long shadows poured black against the white snow.

I studied the big handsome face rising above me, the crooked nose, the pugnacious chin. Everything good about Russia was in that face—which I had betrayed, which I had stamped into the mud. I leaned into him and turned to watch the moonbathed west. From somewhere out there, they were coming, with their tanks and bloodied bayonets.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’ve decided. I’m going to sign on in the morning.”

I could see the determination on his face, the defiance in his jaw, but there was something else there as well. Unhappiness. Did he think this was a way out? Getting himself killed by the Germans? “You don’t have to. You heard… they’ll be here soon enough,” said I, who had just been imagining taking up arms and marching to the front myself. How ridiculous! “We’ll take those defense classes at the district soviet. Two hours of compulsory firearms practice.”

“No.” His eyes looked dark in the moonlight. “We have to stop them before they get here. There’s no time for practice. I’m going.”

I stroked his cheek, my gloves catching on his whiskers. Genya, a soldier? He was so tenderhearted that if he found a spider in the Artel he would take it out into the hall, cradling it inside a cup. “You couldn’t kill a chicken if you were starving.”

He grabbed my hand. “I’ll do what I have to do. You think I’m afraid? I’m not afraid.”

“I know you’re not. But I think you’re trying to get yourself killed.” I pulled my scarf up around my mouth and nose, my eyes tearing in the cold, the tears freezing onto my eyelashes. “I thought we were all right. That we were past all this.”

His eyes blazed, I could see the whites in the moonlight. “This isn’t about us. Does everything with you have to be about love? There are Germans out there, real Germans. They’re not thinking about love. They’re thinking about crushing the revolution. You heard Radek. They have to be stopped.”

But I knew, deep inside, this was not only about what Radek said.

He put his arm around me, heavy, warm even through all the layers of our coats. He peeled the scarf from my face and kissed my cold lips, rubbed his stubble against my cheeks. His smell of sweet straw. “Would you really want me not to go?” he whispered in my ear. “To let old men fight for me? Would you respect me more?” He searched my face, begging me to understand. Begging me not to.

I pushed him away. “Seryozha went down to Moscow to prove he was a man.”

“I’m not Seryozha,” he said, his face suddenly steely. “He was a wonderful boy, but I am a man. Can’t you see? It’s war. And I need to get out there before they’re at the door. Our door, Marina.”

My eyes stung, my cheeks burned, the hair in my nostrils froze. I gazed at his heroic face over the striped scarf—my beautiful boy, my sufferer. I embraced him, I buried my face in his coat collar, that poor ragged coat that was going to the front. I should have sold Kolya’s diamond and bought a sheepskin for him. What was I keeping it for? Memories of that betrayer? But it was too late to repent, to act. There was no more time.

I THOUGHT WE WOULD go back to the Poverty Artel, but now that he had made his decision, Genya wanted to go on to Sasha’s. On a backstreet near the train station, the place was already blue with smoke and ripe with unwashed bodies when we got there. It was a room of two windows, and an easel took up half the space. Someone had found some spirits, made with God knows what—in compliance with Bolshevik asceticism, all the vodka shops had closed long ago.

“You’re looking rather sober, young sir,” Anton said to Genya as we came in.

“We thought you’d never make it,” said Zina, sharing the one chair with Oksana Linichuk.

“I’m going,” Genya said, shoving himself between Anton and Petya on the bed, forcing them to make room for him. I stood by the door. Why did Genya want to distance himself from me like this? Was he ashamed of me now?

“Going where?” Petya asked.

“The defense of Petrograd.” Genya took the jar from Sasha, who sat on a box with a girl from the art school, and drank deep. “You heard them tonight. They need us out there. I’m signing up in the morning. Who’s coming with me?”

The poets on the bed and around the low-ceilinged room exchanged glances like children caught in a prank after the schoolmaster asks the guilty one to come forward.

“I’d rather shoot myself in the head,” Anton said, his elbow on Arseny’s shoulder. “The Bolsheviks couldn’t organize their way out of an intersection. If it gets down to a fight, I’ll take my chances with the anarchists or the SRs.”

Gigo, on the floor, brushed back his shining black hair from his eyes. “Death and I are bound to meet, its dark wing cooling my fevered brow,” he said, quoting his own poetry. “And who will weep for me?” Gigo’s last woman had ditched him for a Red Guard, whose rations were better than a Georgian translator’s. “I’ll go, and you women will curse the day you missed loving me.”

“I’m in,” Sasha said.

This was too awful, the poets and artists of Petrograd ready to trot themselves out into the fields to be killed. “You’re all crazy. We need you here. The district is organizing something,” I said.

“You go to the district,” Zina said. “I’m going to defend the revolution. Count me in, too.”

“Anton’s got a point,” Nikita Nikulin said. “Look how the Bolsheviks have bollixed it up so far. ‘No war, no peace?’ That was a good idea.”

“Well, they got it half right,” Oksana said, low in my ear.

“Listen.” Genya stood and opened his great arms in the small room as if he were spreading revolution single-handedly, as if it were grain he was casting to the whole world.

       When the enemy comes

Will you watch him

      crush the skull of your newborn

      against History’s cold wall?

                     Will you cower beneath blankets with

      your spines unstrung?

                     There’s not time for lint-pickers,

                                boot-lickers, liquor-misters.

                       Let’s go!

                       before History

                                flicks you away like clots of snot.

                       Step out, lace those boots,

                       Pull up your tattered underwear.

                               The train, Red Dawn,

                                      is waiting at the station.

Sasha removed a bottle that looked like some kind of artist’s cleaning fluid from his trunk, mixed it with water from a pan on the stove, and poured the concoction into another jar that he passed around. Each of us proposed our own toast.

“To history,” Gigo offered.

“To a little less history,” Oksana replied.

My brothers and sisters, the Transrationalists—would we ever be together like this again? Everything was ending, just as we came to know it and count on it. The alcohol proved oily and chemical. I could feel it chewing the lining of my stomach. I did my best to match their gaiety, but couldn’t stop thinking that Genya might be dead soon. Gigo, Sasha… I was drinking with ghosts.

“Marina, I thought you were the brave one,” Zina taunted me. “Are you really going to stay behind, like an old housewife?”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your Joan of Arc moment,” I said. I couldn’t very well explain what was really going on—that Genya didn’t want me there to be his comrade, his brother-in-arms. He was desperate for a woman who would wait for him, worry about him, imagine his suffering, as he had waited for me during those nights and days I’d been away with Kolya. He needed his dignity back and this was to be my penance. And I would do it. Damn what Zina thought of me.