Her new place was just as she said, not far—on the Fontanka below Nevsky, a flat in a building designed in the heavy Russian style of the 1880s. We stopped to wring out our skirts, then ran up three cold flights to a subdivided flat whose inner hall was lined with numbered doors. I followed her into number 3/8, a room of two windows overlooking the river, with old flowered wallpaper in stripes, a bed in an alcove, papers everywhere, books, a typewriter. “My villa by the sea,” she said, opening and closing her umbrella to shake off the water, then propping it by the door. I did the same.

I took a seat on a splintery chair, undid my wet scarf and fluffed my hair. The place stank of cold tobacco, mold, and soot from a leaky stove. She tossed Kommunist on the table, cleared off some of the papers and the typewriter, and went to start the little stove. I took off my gloves and rubbed my hands together, blew into them, opened her paper and read aloud from Kommunist about the “vertiginous decline of the Petersburg region,” dangerous unemployment, the disruption of production, and the “declassing of the proletariat.” “Peace has saved the territory, but the spirit of the Red capital has been sold away.”

“Petrograd’s a disaster.” Varvara squatted and placed kindling in the stove from her modest woodpile. “You’ve got the seasoned Bolsheviks out in the villages trying to recruit illiterate bumpkins, leaving our factories full of whiners and snivelers, the most nonmilitant elements.” The declassing of the proletariat. “So who jumps into the breach? Of course—petit bourgeois SRs. And anarchists, always happy to make a muddle of things.” She blew on the fire, sending smoke and bits of ash into the room. “Sometimes I’d just like to shoot everyone. It’s like driving a stupid ox that would rather freeze in the snow.” Her eye drooped where she’d been hit.

It was probably a bad time to ask about Arkady.

“You’re pacing like a nervous cat. What’s going on?”

She could always see through me. I shrugged. She was being beaten up by striking workers for arguing on behalf of World Revolution while I was dabbling in petty crime, speculation, and possible counterrevolutionary activities. How could I begin to tell her about my problems involving Kolya, illegal flour and oil and meat, passports, and rendezvous up in the islands with Arkady von Princip? “It’s un-Soviet…”

“Then don’t tell me about it,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do anyway. My guy is on the outs, and I’ve got as much on my hands as I can possibly handle. Did Vera Borisovna survive the offensive all right?”

“Yes, but Genya came back and we broke up. I’m back on Furshtatskaya now.”

At last she got the fire lit, stood and brushed her hands off. “You never learn.” The fire was going but the stove leaked, made my eyes smart. She opened the fortochka, peered down. “Does it have something to do with the man by the embankment, with the cap?”

“Is he still there?” I shrank away from her.

“He followed us all the way down,” she said.

Surely she would have some ideas if I could figure out how to couch it so it wouldn’t look so bad. I wondered what her position was now that her boss had resigned. “Are you even at Smolny anymore?”

She shrugged, set out glasses for tea, lit the primus, set a pan of water to boil, then peeled an old carrot into the teapot. No actual tea anymore—you either got roasted barley or carrot peel. But any food preparation was uncharacteristically domestic for her. She seemed… hesitant. As if there was something more she wanted—but also didn’t want— to tell me. That made two of us.

“Look again.”

She took a peek out the window. “He’s gone. Now there’s a woman, walking a little dog. It’s not us, I don’t think.”

We eyed one another, sizing each other up like wrestlers. I realized that between my dubious commercial and romantic entanglements and her political engagement, we probably could never again be as completely open with each other as we’d once been. Our girlhood friendship had been transformed into a new thing, a sort of hungry, wary circling, a friendship not between girls but between women. Each would hold back a piece of herself that could not be shared.

As Varvara was in the middle of pouring boiling water into the teapot, we heard a key turn in the lock. She stopped, listening, and a slim woman entered. Shorter than either of us, she shook her umbrella and stuck it in the stand in the corner. Her little glasses were steamed from the rain. “Hello,” she said, and smiled.

All the color had drained out of Varvara’s face. “I didn’t expect you back.”

“We’ve been meeting all night,” the woman said. “I’m about to drop.” She regarded me with unabashed curiosity.

“Manya, this is Marina. I told you about her. We ran into each other on Liteiny.” Now my friend noticed she was still holding the pan and poured the rest of the water into the teapot.

“Oh, yes! Marina the poet. Good to meet you.” The woman offered her hand, and I shook it. Small, firm, still icy cold from the street.

“Good to meet you, too,” I said. A roommate? A lover? The double bed. Varvara wouldn’t look at me.

“I was just making tea. Want some?” she asked Manya. Pretending casualness, but I could see her nerves in her twitchy gestures.

Although Manya was the smaller of the two, she seemed the more self-possessed. She took off her hat and hung it on a hook, touched her dark, wavy coif, threaded with gray. “I think I’m just going to—” Then she noticed Varvara’s beaten face. “What happened?”

“Rechkin,” Varvara said, embarrassed at her attention. “It was a mess.”

“You’ve got to take care of that. Oh, you’re going to have a shiner in the morning. Sit down.” The older woman moved about the flat efficiently, brisk and precise as a field nurse, getting iodine, wringing out a cloth in the washstand. She cleaned the cut on Varvara’s face, then pressed the cloth to her eye and cheekbone and had her hold it there.

“She pretends to be so tough,” Manya said. “Well, you’re going to look like a brawler now.” But she left her hand on Varvara’s shoulder.

Not a roommate. Not a comrade. This woman with the white threads in her black hair was—Varvara’s lover.

My friend watched me as she pressed the white cloth to her swollen face. She loved to shock people, but only when she’d done it on purpose. I didn’t know who was more shocked now. Any response would seem hopelessly stupid, ridiculously backward. Other people had their locked rooms, their secret corridors, and Varvara had planned to keep this one to herself. The flash of her black eyes, of being so revealed, dared me to judge her.

Now Manya bustled about pleasantly, finishing the tea, setting our glasses in front of us, taking one for herself and moving to the bed, where she set the glass down and took her shoes off. “I wish I could join you. There’s so much I’d like to hear, but I can’t keep my eyes open.” She took off her wet dress and hung it on a peg. Her slip clung to her body. She had a nice figure for an older woman. How old was she? Thirty? Younger than Mother, certainly. I wondered how two women made love. But passion makes use of all equipment—I knew that better than anyone.

We drank the carrot peel tea, which tasted primarily of dirt. Varvara’s eyes searched mine—for judgment? Signs of disapproval? She looked so comical with that cloth pressed to her face. I would not have thought to take care of her as Manya had done. To me she always seemed indestructible. I thought back on our friendship—her kisses, her possessiveness. Her loyalty and disloyalty. Unexpected emotions tumbled over me: hurt, abandonment, jealousy. Jealousy? Really? Was I was jealous of Manya, this woman who had taken possession of my friend? I’d come to expect the intensity of Varvara’s feelings. Now someone else would be the recipient of her enthusiasms and her rages, her crises and triumphs.

I wondered if this was how she felt when I fell in love with Kolya. I heard Mina’s voice in my head. Do you have to have everything? Did I? I wasn’t sure. I felt her rocketing away from me as we sat there on either side of the small wobbly table.

Varvara and I spoke of this and that, but like actors in a new play, we were unable to settle into a rhythm. Cloth still pressed to her face, she talked about Manya’s party work and how they’d met at the Smolny canteen. The travails of the Left Communists, the pressure the trade unions were putting on the party. Neither of us able to say what was really on our minds. After a polite interval, I said I had to leave and got back into my coat.

She walked me to the flat’s outer door, took my hand. Hers was trembling, but she still couldn’t say what she wanted to say.

“I know,” I said.

She hugged me hard, kissed me three times, as if we were saying our last goodbyes. “There’s an exit on Rubinshteyna. Be careful,” she said. And I returned to the street, the rain.

48 Never Say No

AVDOKIA STOOD ROASTING OATS in a little iron pan while Mother sat deep in study of some occult tome. She pressed her slender fingertips to her lips in concentration, her fur-lined coat draped about her shoulders. I felt sad she’d returned to her Blavatsky and Ouspensky after she’d had such success helping Anton with Apollinaire. I supposed I’d imagined she might take up translation on her own, but instead she’d returned to unfurl her mania at full length, an iridescent banner of otherworldly faith.

“How were the Gromitskys?” I asked. She’d visited her friends today, also followers of Master Vsevolod.

“Packing,” Mother said, turning the page. “They’re going to China. Master has friends there.”

Maybe she could go with them. I wondered about getting railway permissions. Maybe I should go, too. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear this, listening for footsteps, bracing for a bullet. I drew up a chair before the bourgeoika, held my hands out to warm them. At least we had wood now, so I could take my wet coat off.

Rain pelted the windows, then subsided. I leafed through the new verses I’d written since leaving Grivtsova Alley. Ours was a time for short poems that could be finished in a single sitting before the political situation changed again. I imagined it would be years before a new great novel would come out of Russia. Life changed too quickly. I liked one about digging fortifications:

We handled our spades like rifles,

            our rifles like spades.

It was impossible to say

            what we were digging—

                       trenches

                       foundations

                                or acres of graves.

We ourselves didn’t know.

             The times said dig, and we dug.

Perhaps with Genya and Zina gone, I could safely return to the Transrational Interlocutors. How I missed them, those lively Wednesday nights at the Krestovskys’ in the company of the poets and painters. I had to do something. This waiting was driving me mad. Although I wasn’t looking forward to admitting to Anton that I’d lost his revolver, perhaps he could use Mother’s help. That would distract her from this obsessive research into the kabbalah and the Golden Dawn and give me somewhere to go besides this room.


Promptly at nine, the electric lights went out, and Avdokia lit the lamps. At ten, Mother uncoiled her silver coif before the dressing table, appraising herself in the mirror as Avdokia brushed her hair smooth. At ten after by the old travel clock on the dresser, there was a knock on the door—light, rattling, intimate—but it was far too late to be anyone we knew.

“Don’t answer,” Avdokia whispered. “For the love of God.” She blew out the lamp nearest her, and Mother blew out the other one on the table.

“Makarova.” Spoken with a teasing menace. A man’s voice with its dry rasp. We waited in the dark, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. The Antichrist had come himself, right into the heart of the city, where every Cheka officer in town was looking for him. Though if Varvara was right, there weren’t many Chekists left—they’d all gone to Moscow. “Don’t hide under the covers,” the voice came again. “You insult my intelligence.”

I lit the lamp. It was ridiculous to try to hide from him. I had set this in motion. It was up to me to finish it. Avdokia grabbed my sleeve as I went to unlock the door, shaking her head, begging me with her eyes, but I pried her loose.