I awoke, curled in a hot room, still in my clothes, covered with sweat. Thank God, I thought. I still had my skin.

Then I remembered where I was and why. My head thundered and my throat was parched, but I grabbed my coat, stuffed my feet into my cracked boots, and flew to the door.

Locked.

I battered at it with my fists, yelled to anyone listening to let me out. I couldn’t breathe. I pleaded to be set free, but no one came. The room stank of him, our sex, a miasma, disgusting and shameful.

The windows! I opened the drapes, but the windows wouldn’t give. Locked. No, I saw the blocks hammered into the wide sill. A prison. And I’d walked in on my own. Thinking I had a new lover. What a fool. I pulled the chair from the desk to the window and climbed up onto the sill, dislodging a geranium growing there. Dirt all over the floor. The smell of my wedding. Down in the street, I could see the enviable people, walking by under battered umbrellas. Rain blackened the trees. Oh to be out there, wet, hungry but free…. I opened the fortochka, I would have cried out, but I was afraid men in the outer room might hear me, stop me. I tore a piece from my slip, waved it. No good, who would look up into the rain? “Help!” I called out. Louder. “Help!” Still no one. I listened to hear anyone coming. No.

I tried the escritoire in the bookcase, lined with drawers and cubbyholes. Nothing dangerous, no letter opener, no penknife, but here was a pen, and a bottle of ink. I found a small notepad and wrote in block letters, HELP being held prisoner fourth floor COUNTERREVOLUTIONARIES March 30, 1918. GET HELP. Threw it out the window. Waved my white flag, now a wet rag. The sound of the rain erased my pleas.

The glass in the window was divided into squares, each too small for me to climb through but perhaps… I broke the first window, my coat over my hand. Listened. Nothing! I had to work quick. I broke out the second above it. Yes. The outer window opened, they had not thought to lock it. Now there just remained the matter of the crosspiece. Clinging to the wide wall of the recessed window, I lifted my foot in its boot—Put your boot in it!—and broke out the crosspiece. Waited for the sound of men running on the parquet outside the locked doors. I jumped down, dragged the Louis chair to the door and jammed it under the doorknob, then returned to my perch on the windowsill. Was I ready? I carefully brushed the glass away from the ledge. Holding on, I stuck my leg through, straddling the entire width of sill and window. Then ducked and got the rest of myself through. My head and shoulders, outside. My heart was pounding, my hands sweaty, the rain falling on my face.

But to my disappointment, there was no balcony, no ledge, no ornamentation one could balance upon. I waved my white flag. “Hey! Help!”

A child looked up. A child, across the street, tugged at his mother’s coat, pointed to the girl climbing from the window. The mother stopped, put her umbrella back, saw me. Other people stopped on the sidewalk and watched. “Help me!” I shouted, weeping, holding on to the inner window frame, praying it wouldn’t break. “They’ve got me locked in!”

But they just looked up dumbly. They thought I was a suicide.

“I NEED HELP!” I screamed.

Nobody moved. Then someone came running from this side of the building. Looked up, ran back in. “HELP ME!”

The drainspout. It ran down the building, past the next window. If I could stand, and make the big step to the next window, and then to the downspout, I just might be able to climb down. Or tie the curtains together and lower myself the four stories… I heard the falling chair, but my position was too awkward to extricate myself quickly.

Suddenly, a heavy hand reached through the broken window and grabbed me by the hair, pulled me roughly inside, knocking me onto the floor. A blow to the face. It was the bearded man. “What do you think you’re doing, huh? Trying to escape?” Another blow. Openhanded, but his hands were like blocks of wood. I curled myself into a ball around the geranium, the dirt.

“Hey, hey, take it easy.” Another man, pockmarked, shoes wet. The one down in the street, the one who’d caught me.

“You take it easy, shithead.” The bearded man. “Where were you? You were supposed to be on watch.”

“I can’t watch everything,” said the other one. “She looks bad.”

“Get some boards. Fix that.” The bearded man bent over me, his gut straining his pants. “You. Stay away from those windows or I’ll pitch you out. Head first. Whee…” He showed me with his hands, flight, and then smack!, brought his two hands together. “Shoulda helped you out the rest of the way, would have solved the woman problem right then and there.” He turned to the other man. “I told him you can’t mix women with business.”

“You told him that,” the other man said skeptically.

“In my way,” said the bearded man.

My hair hurt, my face was bleeding, scratched where it had been pulled past the window frame. My cheek throbbed where he’d hit me. “I didn’t choose to be here,” I said.

“Shut up,” said the bearded man, lifting his backhand, then thinking twice about it. “Stay out of my hair or I’ll cut your throat just to get rid of you.”

He waited for the other man to return with boards and a tool box, watched him board up the broken panes. My head still rang from the blows, I could feel the swelling coming on already.

“Could I have some water?” I asked.

“You get nothing, bitch,” said the bearded man, and slammed the door, turned the lock hard.

At least the fortochka opened. I breathed the cold freshness of the rain. I could see the trees across the way in the Tauride Gardens, their black limbs studded with new buds. I wept like a child reaching my hand out to touch the rain, licking it off my palm. So close, those gardens, the trees I’d climbed as a child. That I made Seryozha climb, though he was afraid. I should have been more afraid, and he less. Among them lay the pond we pretended was Lake Svetloyar. Avdokia would tell us the story: Zhili-buili, once upon a time, a prince built a city without walls on the banks of Lake Svetloyar… Nothing seemed as precious now as the black pond that concealed the holy city, guarded forever against the Great Khan when it sank beneath the lake. And upon the midnight, if you are pure at heart, if you are faithful, you can hear the bells of Kitezh ring out from beneath the waters.

I waited all morning for someone to arrive with water or breakfast, a knout or a gun, but no one came. I examined the room’s two dull landscapes and a portrait in a slightly cubist style. I took the latter off the wall and threw it against the door, enjoying its smash and screaming in frustration, waiting for the man to come back and hit me again, but the door remained shut.

Surely someone in the building must have heard me. But most likely Arkady had them all terrorized. He was probably paying off the house committee, too. It could even be that the residents felt safer with him around. And got electricity at night. I stood by the window, watching the rain and rehearsing my sins.

Was it raining in Moscow? I imagined Genya making his kinofilms. Genya whom I had let slip through my fingers—how had I not clung to him in the station, sworn not to let him go? If I ever got out of this room, I would go and live with him in Moscow—Zina, too. I didn’t care anymore. A city in which Arkady von Princip drew breath was cursed down to its cobblestones.

Or I could go Maryino. I was no barynya anymore—I knew how to work. I could walk cows to pasture, cut rye, saw wood, make shoes. You could vanish like that. Safe under the waters.

I sat down in the blue empire chair and searched the escritoire again to see if there was anything I could use, something I’d missed, but the little drawers and cubbies held nothing but old letters and ticket stubs. Not even a hat pin. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way that man had used me, like a cow or a horse.

It all came back to Kolya. When I thought of him, my heart didn’t jump as it had even the day before. This was his fault, in more ways than one. Not only had he given me the jewel and told me to see Arkady if I needed to sell it. No. He had introduced me to my own boundless passion, the possibilities of the flesh, had left me wide open to this kind of seduction. That’s what made me want to retch with self-loathing. I tried to think back to our good times, the sleigh ride, snow on the Catherine Canal, but that cruel parody of love with Arkady had erased it.

I used the chamber pot. The pain made me grit my teeth. No paper to wipe with, only dusty copies of the old journal Severny Vestnik from the bookcase. I ripped out a sheet—a poem by Sologub—and gently blotted my torn flesh. No blood on the paper, that was good news. My vulva would be very well read. I started to laugh. Of course, love was the poem’s subject.


Later in the day, I heard a key turn in the lock and my heart spun like a tumbler. But it was only the Kirghiz, impassive, wrinkles deeply etched, a basket in one hand, a pitcher in the other. He glanced at my battered face, the boarded-up window.

I ran to him, clutching his arm. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. “I beg you. I’ll give you four thousand rubles. You know I’m good for it.”

He shook his head, grinned. His teeth were dark from tobacco, ground to stumps. “He likes you, little bird,” he said. “Imagine what he’d do to someone he didn’t like.”

I slumped in the chair. “Will he ever let me go?”

The man shrugged, setting the basket on the desk, the pitcher alongside it. “The Archangel holds our fate in his hands.”

In the basket, an egg. A loaf of good bread, a sausage. Like a love letter from a hangman.


The room measured ten paces by four. I spent the day pacing it off, or gazing out at the Tauride Gardens, and avoiding the daybed and the Louis chair. I knew their treachery. The chair stared back at me, blank as a babe. The hypocrisy of furniture. I sat at the escritoire and read all the family’s correspondence. Old letters from Moscow and Tsarskoe Selo, a postcard of the harbor at Novorossisk, to the Dearest Mustasovs, from Elena… a stack of overdue bills. The Dearest Mustasovs were evidently behind on payments to the butcher, the florist, the stationer. Maybe they were relieved that the revolution wiped out all their debts. In fleeing they could leave those problems behind.

I closed my fist around a pen, imagining stabbing him in the neck with it. Did I have the nerve? The speed? He was quick as an adder. And would avenge an attack without mercy.

Someone was playing the violin in another apartment. How crushing it was to know how little I mattered. Even if I died in this room, people would go on making dinner, taking children to the gardens, practicing the violin. How enviable they all seemed, unaware that in this room in their own building, a girl was being held prisoner.

No. Not unaware. They’d heard me. And decided to do nothing. Even on Grivtsova Alley someone would have come by now. Even the meekest of housewives would have knocked gently once the coast was clear. But here, as long as it wasn’t their own problem, a human being’s misery was something the neighbors could close their ears to, pretend it was a cat yowling.

I hated people. Who could go on living as if nothing was happening when something hideous unfolded just overhead, or in the next flat, working its way into their dreams? “I hate you!” I screamed. “I hate all of you!” I took the children’s silhouettes and pitched them across the room, one by one—their little curls, their overbites—where they broke with a satisfying crash.


Light bled from the sky, abandoning the bare branches of the trees. Would he return? Maybe I wasn’t that important. Maybe I was merely a hostage against Kolya’s unlikely reappearance, no more. I switched on the electrolier. At least the electric lights worked. I picked up a book—Chekhov—read a page or two of “The Lady with the Lapdog,” and then “The Black Monk,” but they held no interest, these men and women, fathers and daughters, orchards and oceans.

I found some paper in the desk, ink still in the inkwell. They had departed quite recently. Maybe Arkady had threatened them. I looked down into the black soul of the ink. Maybe I should drink it. If it were the previous century, that’s what I would do. A ruined girl. The idea sparked a sudden rage. Ruined for what? That murky melodrama. Better to throw it in his face, savor his pain. Before he caught me and killed me. Or handed me over to men rougher than he was. Anything could transpire in a room like this.