Moscow. I laughed. A sob really. He couldn’t go to Moscow. People died in Moscow. They became someone else. I stroked his face, handsome and forlorn, the wide mouth, the crooked nose, the bony brow over those dear eyes. “You don’t belong there. Don’t go. I have no right to ask, but please stay. Let’s try again.”

His expression begged me to understand. He was being pulled in all directions. “Petrograd’s done for—you can see it as well as I can.”

“No.” I burrowed into his coat. I wouldn’t see.

“She’s got friends down there, a film company. They want us to write a kinofilm. We’ve got tickets, permits.” He pressed his cheek to my head, pulled my shawl down, ran his fingers through my hair. “I’ve thought of you so much. I do nothing but write and think of you. I’m going mad.”

“I should never have left that night. I should have fought you, claw and knucklebone.” I held on to him, speaking fast and low. “It’s horrible without you. You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you.”

“Come to Moscow,” he said. “The poetry cafés are filled to bursting. Everything’s alive down there. Petrograd’s had it.”

“And live with you and Zina?” I laughed but it was more of a cry, a choke of despair.

His face closed up, like one of those trees whose leaves shrink at the slightest touch. “Look, I have to go.”

“Genya, I love you,” I said, still clutching his coat.

He grasped my gloved hand, tore off the glove and kissed my palm. I could feel the tears on his face, his scratchy beard. But then he gave it back to me, my hand, my useless hand, and he was pushing through the crowd toward the platforms. I couldn’t breathe. I needed air. I staggered back through the hall toward the doors of the station and stood in the cold colonnade, sobbing like a child.

It was several minutes before I remembered Arkady von Princip. I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief and braced myself to go back in and finish the job, checking the package in my pocket. My fingers touched nothing but cloth.

Impossible.

I checked the other pocket. I had put it in deep, hadn’t I? I checked myself all over. My mind flew to the possibilities. Don’t think. Pickpockets worked these halls like peasants picking cherries. Don’t. I could not imagine the value of ten passports, visas, and railway permits. In these times? A million rubles? People died for a loaf of bread now. A hat, a pair of boots. Maybe I dropped it when I saw Genya, when I ran.

I shoved my way back into the hall. Oh God, Theotokos preserve us. It hadn’t been that long. Who would notice a little package wrapped in newspaper? Who would stop in their hurrying to trains and pushing through the crowd to study the floor?

Anyone.

For an hour I searched, my tears blurring the view of the dirty floor littered with sunflower-seed hulls and cigarette butts, hairpins and sputum, a glove, a page fallen from a book, a baby’s shoe, scraps of paper, but no package wrapped in Znamya Truda. I scanned the crowd, looking for suspicious people, people too interested in others, especially those without baggage, and—yes, a girl in a black coat, my own age. I saw her reaching into a man’s coat. “Hey, you!” She looked up, startled, and the man clapped his hand over his pocket. She hurried away into the crowd. “Wait! Stop that girl!” I fought my way through the throng, following her hat, her pigtails, but I couldn’t catch her. It was like a terrible dream where you run through mud or a flood. That figure, always moving away, always vanishing.


Light lingered on broad, quiet Furshtatskaya Street and the slushy melting snow as I returned to the flat. What was I going to do? I should go up to Kamenny Island and tell him, I lost the package. Why did you ever send me? You who know so much, you should have known better. But what was the point of trudging up all that way to deliver bad news? He would find me eventually. He would find me and kill me. I hated to go home, but what choice did I have? I vowed I would never leave the apartment ever again.

Everything looked worse—the dirty courtyard, the warming staircase that now stank of rotting fish and mold, the women in the kitchen drinking tea from Mother’s Limoges coffee service at the table on which Vaula had once rolled out her huge sheets of pastry dough. They stared at me as if I had a goat balanced on my head. I was used to having to walk the gauntlet of barbed remarks, especially once we began cooking meat. But blessedly, nobody said a thing. Not even the hard-faced blonde spoke, or the tall gaunt one, nursing her baby at a flat pap. Even the Red Guardsman’s woman, chopping a carrot, said nothing.

A strange smell permeated the hall as I walked back toward Mother’s room, a floral scent unlikely but familiar. One of Mother’s spiritualist friends? I knocked wearily on the door. Avdokia opened up quickly, glanced down the hall, and waved me in with great urgency. “Thank God,” she said. Slava Bogu.

The wall of scent hit me. Mother stood near the table by the window, her hand over her mouth. She looked as if she’d seen her own death. A great heap of blue hyacinths buried the tabletop, their scent replacing all the air in the room. Hyacinths, each petal sighing its secret Greek sigh—alas.

47 Kommunist

THE SPRING RAINS BEGAN. I jumped at the slightest sound. A week went by, and still I didn’t know how things stood with the Archangel. The flowers breathed their terrible message. I know where you live, they said. And, You’re alive only by my pleasure. “Don’t ask me anything,” I said when Mother questioned me. I developed a throb in my temple, a flutter in my eyelid. My knitting-factory cough returned. We got rid of the sheaves of blooms, but there was no way to get rid of the scent. I smelled it in my hair, on my clothes, as if it were searching me out. Oh, how I would have loved to ask Kolya what he was thinking when told me to go to Kamenny Island and find that man. I felt like he’d slammed my fingers in a door. If he ever came back, I would ask him: This is how you take care of a girl you love?

I wrote a poem about the dreariness of spring, that which had been buried brought to light again. I wrote about lovers in a train station. I wrote about Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos by her lover Theseus. I wrote about a photo album with silver hasps sold on the streets of Petrograd. And I wrote about the tragedy of Hyacinth, the plaything of the gods.

I kept thinking of Arkady’s fingers, so quick, so deft, touching the hyacinth petals, taking the diamond from my hand without my knowing it. If only I hadn’t lost his merchandise… I was sure there had been something, some interest. I would have enjoyed getting to know a man like that, but now… there was only dread.

Every day I peered out to see if anyone was watching the house, and every day I saw someone who might or might not be one of Arkady’s people. A woman walking a dog outside in the parkway kept glancing at our building. A man, his hat dripping with rain, stood in the lee of a still-leafless tree, smoking. But ultimately I saw no one who set my nerves on edge, and I simply had to get away from the apartment or go insane. I quickly left the courtyard passage and walked away under the umbrella I had borrowed from Mother. Oh, it had been so long! The air smelled like spring, like softened snow, and dirty puddles, and water dripping from the icicles.

As I walked out toward the Fontanka, I peered at passersby and listened for footsteps behind me, but all I saw were slow, hunched, miserable citizens, their faces turned to their damp, brooding thoughts. That’s when I noticed a figure crossing Liteiny. What was it that caught my eye? The gait, the pace. At a time when everyone had slowed to a wheezy shuffle, the brisk movement stood out—someone with somewhere to go. A tall girl in a black coat, moving like a hare through a forest, her umbrella rising to avoid those of other people. “Varvara!” I ran into the street, the hem of my wet coat slapping against my legs. A tram screeched as I raced in front of it. “Varvara!”

She turned. Her expression was grim, and her face looked puffy and swollen. She had a cut under one eye. But when she saw it was me, she broke into a grin. I embraced her with my free hand. We kissed cheeks three times. “Thank God, someone who doesn’t want to beat my head in.”

“Assuming a lot, aren’t you?” I laughed.

She kept her arm around my shoulder and we resumed walking under overlapping umbrellas out to the Fontanka Embankment, then down, past the shabby facade of the Sheremetev Palace, where they said Akhmatova lived now.

“What happened to your face?”

“Strike at the Rechkin coach plant,” she said, twisting her mouth into a bitter knot. “They have a country now, and all they do is scream about rations and galoshes.” As if rations and galoshes were nothing. “They have to remember why we’re doing this, what it’s all for.”

Still fighting for the revolution. “How’d it go?”

“Rough.”

She’d gone in to face a factory full of striking workers to present the Bolshevik side. She was absolutely sure this was all going to be worth it—her certainty was bound to have inspired people. It was a kind of courage you had to admire. She had one goal, the establishment of the workers’ state, and she would fight the workers themselves to give it to them. “Does it hurt?”

Varvara brushed the words away with an impatient swipe of the hand. “Think that’s bad? Have you seen this?” She stopped and removed a newspaper from her pocket and unfolded it under cover of our umbrellas. Kommunist, it was called. A manifesto of some kind. The dense print was already smudged.

THE REVOLUTION IS AT A CROSSROADS… “What is it?”

She folded it and put it back in her pocket. “The Left Communists have resigned from the party. Bukharin, Kollontai, Radek, and Uritsky.”

The fiery speakers of October. I recognized the name Uritsky, Varvara’s boss.

The party was coming apart. Now what? They’d won the revolution, but the Titans were fighting in the heavens. I had been so busy thinking about my Arkady problem that I’d forgotten the wheel of revolution continued to spin, that the fate of Russia was still unfolding. “Resigned from the party? But why?”

“What else can they do? They can’t agree to these peace terms—they end the revolution! German extortions, threats of Japanese occupation in the Far East, annexations… we’re forbidden to propagandize in the West, forbidden to work against the Germans, right when we were on the brink of World Revolution. Lenin thinks it’s buying us time, but it’s not. It’s selling out the world proletariat to save our skins! ‘Saved the territory but killed the revolution,’ as Bukharin put it.” She still hoped that revolution would catch fire in the West and save us at any moment.

Reflexively, I glanced around to see if anyone was following us. A workingman smoking, cigarette in his cupped hand, looked out at the buildings across the Fontanka. A pair of men passed by, heads close together under umbrellas. I wanted to tell her about Arkady, but I wasn’t sure how sympathetic she’d be. What was a gang of criminals compared with the fate of Russia?

“So who’s behind Kommunist?” I said, lowering my umbrella to hide my face.

“The Petrograd Committee,” she said. Then she, too, glanced around, as if she’d caught my suspicion. “Bukharin, Radek, and Uritsky. We needed a voice apart from Lenin. He used to be a revolutionary, but now he’s just plugging the dikes like the little Dutch boy. Just another politician.”

We. So she’d placed her bets on the schismatics, the true believers.

Out on the Fontanka, the ice was breaking, like a puzzle once solved, now coming apart.

I didn’t like the way that worker was loitering. Who would be standing in the rain without an umbrella just watching the ice floes drift? I had that strange prickling sensation. “Is there anywhere we can get off the street?”

She cut her eyes to the man, having seen him as well. “Da, koneshno.” Yes, of course. “I’ve got a new place. It’s not far.”

The rain intensified, blowing first from the east, then from the west across the thawing Fontanka. She grabbed my arm and we began to run, splashing through the puddles, laughing, feeling like girls again as our umbrellas tugged against the wind and our skirts grew heavy with water. We crossed Nevsky where the bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge fought their eternal tamers.