“Is this your name?” he asked.

I shook my head violently, tapped on the name several times, and after it added the fatal acronym, the black crow wings.

Cheka.

He looked at the paper for the longest time, lost in thought. He’d been so happy to have solved the first puzzle… would he understand? Or would I be delivered into the hands of the pig thieves again? Maybe pressured into saying something about the Five? He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his handkerchief. His eyes were without any light or emotion. Outside the high window, a maple tree was losing its leaves, bright scraps floating through the afternoon air. A single leaf hovered impossibly in midair, twirling and twirling, glowing, lit from behind. A small flame of hope that my message was understood. He put the paper in his pocket and nodded at Hollow Cheeks to take me away.

55 Red Terror

I WAS SUMMONED FROM that dirt-floored cellar at dawn. A shabby Chekist I recognized from the observatory search marched me to a police van waiting in the unpaved road. A dull rain was falling and the air smelled of ozone as it hit the dusty earth. Guards opened the back doors. The van was packed tight with prisoners. I couldn’t imagine there being room for any more bodies. “The tram’s not made of rubber,” a man in the back shouted out, and a few laughed. It’s what we said when the trams were full in Petrograd. I tried to keep my skirt down as the guards shoved me in, my drawers having been turned to rags by the pig thief. Before the doors clanged shut, I could see that all the prisoners had been beaten in one way or another. A fleeting impression of black eyes, bloody noses, cuts, and contusions. But no Ancients. I didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.

“Where are you from?” I asked the bulk next to me, a man who smelled of coarse wool and tobacco. It felt so strange to speak after my long summer of silence. It felt dangerous, like a vow I was breaking.

“Tsarskoe Selo,” he said.

“Detskoe Selo,” someone nearby corrected him in the close, thick, fear-tinged darkness. Ah yes, the renaming of the world. The tsar’s village had become “children’s village,” in preparation no doubt for its repurposing as a site for orphanages and schools.

The prisoners smoked and talked as we rattled along. There were no guards back here and I was dying to know if the rumor was true. “They say someone shot the big boss—which one?” I asked.

“She doesn’t know?” another voice said.

“Someone tried to kill Lenin,” said the man in the wool jacket at my side. “A woman.”

“Botched it, too,” said a higher-voiced man, and there was a flash of a match, a cigarette, a narrow face, a shock of blond hair.

My head reeled. What would happen if Lenin died? What would happen to the revolution?

“They assassinated the head of the Petrograd Cheka, too,” said my neighbor. “Deader than dead. Some student shot him in Palace Square.”

Uritsky! Varvara’s boss.

“I wish the woman had been so lucky,” said the smoker over his bright coal. “Now they think there’s a giant counterrevolutionary conspiracy. They’re rounding up everyone with a pulse. It’s been going on for weeks.”

I could not imagine what was happening in the kingdom of Once-Had-Been, but I was afraid I was about to find out. The van swayed over the ruts in the road. At times the wheels spun in the mud. “Are they taking us to Petrograd?”

“They’re taking us nowhere!” A woman’s voice rang out from the back of the van, urgent, edged with hysteria. “Don’t you see? They’re going to stop somewhere and shoot us all!”

“Why would they bother putting us in a van for that?” argued the smoker. “They could have just shot us back there and saved the gasoline.”

My neighbor predicted they were taking us to Petrograd. “Most of these are hostages,” he said to me under the rumble of the engine. “Families of White officers. What use is a dead hostage?”

“White?” I had an image of men bled white, shuffling through the snow.

“White Army. Where’ve you been living, devushka, a henhouse?” My companion made a scornful sound. “The counterrevolutionaries. They’re massing in Siberia and down in the Don.” Volodya and his Volunteers. “Country’s dividing up like a red-and-white cow, with the English in the north getting ready to milk us dry.”

It was all making horrible sense now, the commissar’s questions, everything that had been said in the dacha the night of my death. Father, Karlinsky, the British. He’s in Vologda with the English. Invasion, counterrevolution, money for the Czech Legion. “What’s happened with the Czechs?”

“That’s how it started. A clash on the Trans-Siberian. Trotsky tried to disarm them and it backfired. Instead of going east, the Czechs came west and took every town on the line. The counterrevolutionaries rushed out of the woodwork to join them.” The van careened and threw my neighbor right onto me. I shrieked and pushed him off. “Sorry, sorry.” He scrambled to right himself. “Forgive me. I wasn’t taking advantage.” I immediately judged him to be ten years older than I’d first imagined. It was a relief to realize that the “victim sign” on my forehead wasn’t visible in the dark.

“Why do they toy with us?” wailed the woman. “Why can’t they just deliver the coup de grâce?”

“Akh, would you shut up?” someone called out.

“I’ll ask them to stop if you want, lady,” said the smoker. “If you want them to shoot you, I’m sure they’ll oblige.”

Despite what my neighbor said, I, too, kept waiting for the van to halt. To be rousted out into a field, told to turn our backs… a couple of times we slowed, and the woman shrieked and sobbed. It was terrible—panic was contagious. I couldn’t help thinking of having escaped Arkady von Princip only to have my short stupid life ended by a Cheka bullet, my head exploding like a watermelon fallen from a cart. Sinking in the field to my knees, then toppling over, my naked ass exposed to the wind. No poems, no children, no memories. Left to the crows.

But the van continued sliding and bumping along the road.

Finally we all felt the change from mud to solid, potholed paved street. “The city,” my neighbor called to the smoker. “That’s ten rubles, Goncharov.”

Now the prisoners spoke in short whispers as we listened for the change in pitch and timbre of the tires, trying to guess our location. When we crossed the first bridge it was clear—the difference between the bridge pavers and the roadway. “Obvodny,” three people said at once. Yes, the smell of the tannery. So this had to be Moskovsky Prospect. If there was another bridge in a few minutes, it would be the Fontanka, and it would mean we were heading into the heart of the city. My longing for Petrograd bloomed inside me. Crazy, to feel hope—it could be far worse here than with the rural Cheka. And yet better to be at home than on some railway siding in Karelia.

After a few more minutes, there could be no doubt as to where we were headed. If I could have seen through the black, shuddering walls of the van, I knew I would behold the wide Fontanka with its wet pavements, its stately buildings on each side admiring themselves in the water. And all around us would be Petrograd—girls walking to appointments, old bony nags clattering along, Formers selling spoons, workers carrying boxes. The state dining rooms would be dispensing tea with saccharine and watery soup. There would be bread queues and poets and, somewhere, a certain madman. Yet I felt such yearning love for every unseen facade and yard, every canal and stone. Would I ever set eyes upon them again?

A turn, and we all toppled to the left. The sound of gates banged back. Close reverberation off stone walls told me that the truck rumbled through a passageway. Then we stopped with a jerk that sent us all tumbling, and the van’s back doors opened with a bang. I squinted against the comparative brightness of the day, though it was still raining. I climbed out with the others, gazing up at this building, most likely Gorokhovaya 2, once the home of the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. How easily the revolution had donned the master’s slippers, taken up his pipe. A few steps from here, St. Isaac’s Cathedral lifted its golden dome, and the Bronze Horseman scanned the Neva. I held my face to the sky, let water fall on my eyelids.

Guards immediately separated us with shouts and shoves. They marched me and the other woman, younger than I’d imagined—a schoolteacher most likely—to a communal holding cell on the second story that must have once been a refectory or classroom. Every spare inch of floor space was occupied with women and beds and bundles, prisoners weeping on cots or sitting stonily on the old boards, gazing at nothing. A group shouted over some slight. It was a waiting room in the train station to some hellish destination. The schoolteacher clung to me. We gingerly picked our way through the bodies and found a place to sit on the floor between two bunks.

A woman on the bed above us gave me a kick between the shoulder blades with her thick-soled men’s boots. I was grateful for Nikolai Gerasimovich’s ointments, my wounds had healed perfectly. My assailant’s face was a fist of rock, and her ears stuck out like honey jars. “Got any food? Any chocolate?” she asked.

My training as a mute held me in good stead. I considered biting her calf in response but didn’t relish having my teeth kicked out.

“We don’t have anything,” the teacher said.

On the other cot above us, a woman wailed, her head in her hands. “I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything! What about my children? They’re alone in the flat!”

An older woman sitting next to her patted her shoulder. “The neighbors will take them.”

“They killed my husband,” she said, weeping. “Because he wore a hat. A hat! His cousin sent it to him from Bremen. They called him bourgeois and chased him down the street!”

Things in Petrograd were worse than I could ever have imagined. I’d forgotten the difference a month could make in revolutionary times, and I’d been gone for four.

“It’s a reign of terror, that’s what it is,” said a thin, sour-looking woman propped up against the wall. “They’ve let loose the hounds of hell. The Bolsheviks are whipping them up—‘You’ve always hated them, your boss, your landlord? Here’s your chance to get even. Go in, Ivan, settle your scores!’”

The widow told us, “My neighbors turned me in! I knew them. I shared my firewood with them. How could people be so cruel?”

Every so often the door opened and one or another of our keepers called someone’s name. “Novik!” “Rostova!” Once a woman pretended she didn’t know it was her turn, and the guard came in, hit her with his stick like she was an animal to be driven, and dragged her out, her head bleeding. We winced at each ugly blow as if we ourselves were being beaten.

“Yes, a reign of terror,” the sour-faced woman continued. “What’s next, the guillotine? The oubliette?”

The widow keened. My companion was starting to cry.

I thought of Vera Borisovna. Some part of me actually hoped she’d succumbed during the cholera epidemic and did not have to endure this. I could well picture our neighbors: the blonde with the dirty braid, stirring diapers on the stove; the ferret-faced woman; Basya leading the pack of Furies… cholera would be kind in comparison.

With the English in the north and the Czechs along the Trans-Siberian, five thousand miles of Russia were in the hands of the counterrevolution. No wonder they were arresting us all. Although I was sure Father had slipped the net. Sensibly disguised, adequately funded, without address, he was a moving target, whereas Mother was stuck in full view. I could see him colluding with reactionaries, foreigners, the devil himself, anyone who would get rid of the Bolsheviks. Poor suffering Petrograd. It was supposed to be the new, just society, and now it was a bloodbath. Civil war. My country, coming apart.

In this bedlam, one group of women comported themselves very differently from the rest. They sat soberly and spoke not only among themselves but also to those listening nearby. “Who are they?” I asked an older woman who’d been here since we arrived, sitting at the foot of a cot reading a tattered book through half-glasses.

She looked up from her reading. “Politicals,” she said. “Left SRs. They’ve been outlawed.” So the Bolsheviks had turned on their own revolutionary brothers. How calm those women were. I drew strength just looking at them. Dignity calls to dignity the way pettiness and panic stir the same in the human heart. Though they had tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks and failed, they shed no tears.