“On Vasilievsky Island,” Varvara said, accepting her tea, which was served in a cup and saucer, English style, rather than in glasses. She dropped two cubes of sugar into it. Three. Four. My mother’s good breeding wouldn’t let her stare. But Seryozha kicked me under the table, rounded his eyes.

“Is your father at the university?” Vasilievsky Island could be elegant near the Neva, especially in the vicinity of the Twelve Colleges of the university, which looked across the river toward St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Winter Palace. But away from the river it became more working class, slummier as you moved north and west, toward the factories and shipyards. Mother’s mind was a social card catalogue, narrowing, calculating. Vasilievsky Island. Four sugars! Bobbed hair. Terrible shoes. Widely traveled, lived in Germany, well spoken. Such horrible opinions! Professor’s daughter? I could hear the cards clicking. “Does he teach?”

“Il est mort.” She dropped the words onto the cutwork tablecloth like dropping a rat there, then reached for another sandwich. “Measles. We got it, too, but we recovered.”

“Ah, kak zhal’,” Mother said. What a pity.

Afterward, we retired to my bedroom. Varvara immediately fished a sandwich out of her pocket and wolfed it down. “Where do they get all the food?” she asked. “You have contacts in the country?”

I’d never thought about it. “Maryino…” Our estate near Tikhvin. “But it’s mostly timber. I don’t know… Vaula goes to the shops.”

“There’s nothing in the shops,” Varvara said, trying my bed, bouncing on it. “We haven’t seen butter in months. It’s fifteen rubles a pound if you can get it. We’re eating horsemeat, not minced pork and salmon. Come out of your dream world.”

I flushed. At fourteen, I never really considered where our food came from, not until that very instant. I was not a callous girl. I knew there were poor people, sad people—I wasn’t blind. But the mechanics of our own family, how we tied into the general suffering, wasn’t anything I thought about.

“Women work twelve hours a day in this city. Just a few blocks from here.” Now Varvara was prowling around my room. She opened my wardrobe and began examining my dresses as if she were thinking of buying something. “Old ladies, pregnant women. On their feet. Breathing lint, breathing mercury all day in the tanneries. You really don’t know, do you?” She pulled out a frock, deep green velvet with a large collar of Belgian lace, and held it up to herself in the glass. “Then they stand in the queues.” She must not have liked the effect, for she wrinkled her nose and shoved the dress roughly back into the wardrobe. “And when the shops run out, they’re out. Except for people with the kapusta.” Cabbage. Money. “For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting.”

I could feel tears welling up. Why was she attacking me? She turned her attention to my bookcase, pulled out a small volume—Coleridge. When she saw it was verse, and English to boot, she stuck it back on the shelf. “The police hold the lines back for you people,” she continued.

“Don’t say you people.”

“They take one look at your cook and let her go right in ahead of everyone.”

I tried to make a joke of it. “Maybe next time, we’ll dine chez vous. I’ve never had horsemeat.”

She plopped my white fur hat onto her unbrushed hair. “I’ll make sure you receive an invitation.”


I took her up on it, in that first bitter winter of the war. I knew I was a sheltered girl, spoiled even, but she shamed me for it. For instance, I’d been to England, and Baden-Baden and Venice, but not to the poor districts of my own city—say, the Lines of Vasilievsky Island. But Varvara did it every day, and though Miss Haddon-Finch made me promise not to take the streetcar with all the soldiers, the militarization of the city being what it was, I would be damned if I would insist on a cab and be ridiculed by Varvara again.

We got on the streetcar at Nevsky—it was already filled to capacity with soldiers, and more kept jumping on—and I noticed to my astonishment that not a single one paid the fare. The conductor didn’t demand payment, either. If these officials of the tram system were afraid, who would keep order if something happened? I clung tightly to my book bag, as Varvara had instructed, and tried to see out the windows, which were completely steamed over. It was impossible in any case, we were crammed in so tight. Snow had been falling all day, obscuring the city like a veil.

The tram groaned and squealed across the Neva, and Varvara pushed and shoved our way off near the university. My relief at being free of the rough hands patting me down faded as we began to work our way west past the wide streets called lines, once intended as canals but never dug. They formed long ugly blocks perpendicular to the Neva, and grew worse as we walked away from the university toward the docks in the four o’clock twilight. Men followed us, shoving one another. Some called out, “Hey, sweetie! Hey, darling!” “Krasavitsa moya!” My beauty. “Hey, Red, here I am. Give us a kiss!” Frankly terrified, I tried to swing along at the same pace as my long-legged friend, telling myself that Varvara encountered this every day. No wonder she exuded confidence. Nothing else would seem intimidating by comparison.

We passed a long red apartment house, where dirty children played in the wet snow and women loitered in the doorways, their drawn faces watching us pass in our school uniforms. “That’s a brothel,” Varvara said.

Prostitutki. I thought of Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. The women called out to workmen and university students from their doorways as snow fell on bits of their ragged finery—a worn astrakhan coat, a hat with a drooping feather. A ragged child watched us as if we were queens, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“This way,” Varvara drawled. “That is, unless you want to meet them. They’re stupid as chickens.”

She led me through a dirty courtyard and into a back building, up some dark, sour stairs, then down a hallway to a battered door. She used her key. “Avanti.” She gestured, and I found myself in a dreary room taller than it was wide, dense with old furniture and decorated with pictures in ornate frames—gloomy oil paintings, several lithographs of Volga landscapes.

The place smelled of mold. Two dusty windows facing the yard provided a bit of illumination. In the red corner, an icon of St. Nikolas the Wonderworker hung behind a smoky blue icon lamp. And a portrait of our emperor, Nikolas II of All the Russias. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The emperor presided over Varvara’s home. We had a few icons, but never that.

“I know,” she said, following my astonished gaze. “I can’t believe it myself.”

A woman in rusty black silk sat in a chair so quietly that at first I didn’t see her. She gazed out the window, a book in her lap. That it was Varvara’s mother was obvious—she bore exactly my friend’s features—the high bridged nose, the sharp cheekbones, the black eyes—but with all the life drained out of them. Her mother didn’t turn her head, or acknowledge us in any way. I wondered if she really was a countess—hard to know given Varvara’s sense of humor. A maid came in, wearing a dirty gray apron and carrying a battered samovar. She had one white eye. We sat at a small table and allowed this pitiful creature to serve us tea weak enough to be mistaken for dishwater in etched tea glasses delicate as frost on a windowpane. She rolled as she walked, like a sailor. Varvara passed me a small sugar pot filled with little tablets. “Saccharine,” she said. “It’s sweet. But don’t use too much.”

She dropped the little pill into her tea, and I followed suit. Fascinating. Already a new world. The woman served some bread and hard cheese that tasted of nothing at all. That eye haunted me, like the vulture eye in Poe’s story. I loved the old man… The maid brought Varvara’s mother a glass of tea as she sat in her chair by the window. “When I was a girl,” the mother suddenly said in a cracked voice unsteady as the round wooden table, “my mother had a French laundress—Marie. And all she did was press pleats. Only pleats.” She imitated a laugh, like paper crinkling. “Now all we have is poor Dasha. Comment tombent les puissants…”

Varvara snickered, and her mother turned to her with the impossibly sad expression of a Byzantine saint. “That hair,” said her mother. “You look like a guttersnipe.”

“I am a guttersnipe,” Varvara said.

Her mother sighed and addressed the portrait of the emperor, or perhaps the saint. “You see what I must endure? Death will be a blessing.” She went back to contemplating the ruin of her life out the dirty window.

“Tell Marina about your matched team of white trotters,” Varvara said. “The countess was always particular about her horses.”

“Orlov trotters,” her mother said, her voice like leaves blowing across an empty square. “Polkan and Yashma. They were smarter than people. Which doesn’t take much.”

After another pale glass of tea, the servant brought out supper. The countess did not join us for a rotten cabbage soup with bits of some sort of chewy, gamy meat, but was served separately on a table before the window, with a napkin as a tablecloth and a small vase with a silk flower in it. Varvara nodded at me as I ate. Horsemeat. This beast in my mouth had once pulled a wagon. I chewed and chewed, the gristle preventing me from thoroughly masticating it. Finally, as discreetly as I could, I spit out the rubbery bit in my napkin.

Afterward, Varvara asked if I’d like a tour of the flat. It surprised me that she wanted to show me more of this squalor. Very seriously, she began with the windows, introduced in turn as left and right. The table. A narrow wardrobe holding her few clothes. Her bookcase, overflowing with historical and political texts, dictionaries in German, English, French, Latin, and Greek. The divan on which she slept at night—“Ma chambre”—over which she’d hung pictures carefully cut from journals. I made out Engels, Kropotkin, a wood engraving of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—which seemed in rebellious confrontation with the two Nikolases in the red corner. A small kitchen, in which we disturbed the servant at her own tea.

She indicated another door as “La chambre de ma mère” but did not, thank God, open it. I worried there might be a coffin hidden inside.

The conveniences were at the end of the outer hall, shared with the neighbors. “I’d recommend leaving that to the imagination.”

After that, my friend was eager to go. I approached her mother, mustered my best dancing-class curtsy. “Thank you for having me.” Varvara glared at me. Her mother returned my gesture with a reluctant nod of the head. “It’s good to see some people still exhibit a modicum of breeding.”

We walked quickly away from her building in the stunning cold and darkness. Varvara strode at double speed, still angry at the curtsy. We had to hook arms together against the stinging wind, the hard bits of snow jabbing our faces. I didn’t know whether to apologize for not believing her when she’d said she ate horsemeat, or express my sympathy at the way she had to live. I felt ashamed of my new warm coat, my white fur hat, my parents, our big tiled stoves, our bathroom, and that I never once thought them extraordinary.

We walked in silence down to the Nikolaevsky Bridge, where I could wait for the tram to take me home, although I planned to get off at the first stop and find a cab. The streetlights revealed nothing but snow falling and the rough white surface of the Neva. “So now you know,” she said.

What should I say? I’m sorry that you’re poor? “If only your father had lived.”

“Oh that.” Her breath was white, the snow building up on her black tam. “That’s just a joke. My father’s very much above ground, sad to say. Count Razrushensky—you’ve never heard of him? Union of the Russian People?” An archreactionary group, part of the Black Hundreds. The nemesis of liberals like my parents. “The People’s Will tried to assassinate him in ’06. Failed. Too bad. Bet your mother’s heard of him. She kept giving me those looks.”

The wind whipped around us as we arrived at the tram stop. It was hard to see anything now in the darkness, and the cold was punishing up here on the river. We clung to each other for that small bit of shelter. “But even if he’s reactionary, surely he would help his own daughter.”