Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I wanted to be close to them, but I was sure the cell was crawling with Cheka spies. I told my companion from Tsarskoe Selo to hold on to my patch of floor, that I’d be right back, and I inched my way along until I could hear them.

“We aren’t trying to overthrow the Bolsheviks,” an older woman with cropped gray hair calmly lectured other women nearby. “We just want a change in policy. They’ve got to stop making concessions to the Germans. Lenin is a traitor to the revolution. He’s betrayed the workers of the world for a separate peace.”

Women were purposely looking elsewhere, trying not to seem as though they were listening. My scalp prickled. Such daring, to say something like that while in a Cheka cell.

“The Bolsheviks better start listening to the workers or we’ll make them listen,” said a flat-faced girl with an upturned nose and small Tatar eyes.

A tremulous woman in black with the sagging cheeks of the formerly fat hissed, “Damn all of you. You shoot the man and you can’t even do a decent job of it.”

“I have the statement of Fanya Kaplan,” said another of the Left SRs, a very tall blond girl with deep-set green eyes. She dug a paper out of her pocket and began to read. “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot at Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a tsarist official in Kiev. I spent eleven years at hard labor. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favored the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.”

The words hung in the air.

“They tortured her. Made her drink hot wax,” said the tall blonde, folding the paper back into her pocket.

A silent wail rose inside me. Would I face torture? Hot wax? I thought of what I had already suffered in the room on Tauride Street. I kept thinking of hot wax in my throat—it would burn and choke you at the very same time. The talk moved on to the recent execution of Uritsky’s assassin.

“Good riddance,” said the formerly fat woman who had criticized Fanya Kaplan’s poor marksmanship.

“Unfortunately for us, Uritsky was relatively moderate,” said the Left SR with the gray hair. “He was firmly opposed to the death penalty—the one man in Petrograd holding back the flood. And that idiot Kannegisser had to go and shoot him. Of all targets. It wasn’t even politically motivated.”

When I learned the name of his assassin, the hair stood up on my arms. I knew the Kannegissers, a publishing family. Their salon had been home ground for the entire progressive bourgeoisie. It was where my parents had met so many of their famous friends. It couldn’t have been the father. But I remembered a son, Lyonya—a slight young man, pale and excitable, a little younger than Volodya.

“Was it the son? A poet?” I asked quietly.

“Yes, the son,” she said. “Leonid. A cadet at the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy.” The woman’s old face seemed to glow, the soft creases burnished in the light from the tall, frosted windows embedded in wire. “The cadets devised an uprising at the time of the German invasion.” When I was out digging trenches. “The Bolsheviks shot a few of the boys as an example to the others. One was evidently a friend of this Kannegisser. He skulked around for a long time, thinking of how to get his revenge. He observed that Uritsky crossed Palace Square every day on his way to the General Staff Building. Shot him on his way to work.”

And what he had unleashed. Russia, the great home of unintended consequences.

We were all in the same kettle now: politicals, criminals, students, grandmothers, widows, hostages, and the accidental victims of Fate. All of us used the same slop bucket. We braved cholera and typhoid together with each cup of water. The Third Ancient would have been fascinated with our bread. It certainly wasn’t taking us to Neptune—we’d be lucky if it took us to Tuesday. I had much time to listen and think. I clung to the hope that Avdokia had gotten Mother out of the flat before the arrests began.

We’d been there five days when the teacher from Tsarskoe Selo was called. She collapsed into shrieks and tears. The guard had to come in and drag her out. She wasn’t a hostage—she was just an educated woman, and in the village where she taught, she was the closest thing they could find to a bourgeois. They’d discovered her copy of Aesop’s Fables in Greek and decided it was code, that she was a spy. I was haunted by the thought that if she could disappear for a book of Greek, what would the village Cheka make of astronomical calculations?

Lines looped and snaked in my head, images swirled. A silhouette in a doorway beckoned us into the Future. What would it be—a camp? Torture? Another prison? I was nobody special, but the liquidation of an entire class was going on, and I was no proletarian regardless of whether I’d sewed a few socks. Schoolmistress, piano tuner, proofreader, poet—it didn’t matter now. All guilty.

I lay on the dirty floor at night, wrapped in my coat, listening to the rain and the coughing and weeping and snores of eighty women, wondering if tonight would be the night the guards banged back the door and called the name I had given them—Maria Mardukovna Morskaya. If I died as Maria, Mother would never know what had become of me. Genya… I could not bear to think of dying in this place without a friend, without my name. Though I would see Seryozha again, on the other side. The dead were our Kitezh. They carried our love, our most precious moments, concealed beneath the waters. They were the city that could not be taken, like the secret roots of trees.

The woman on the cot above my patch of floor, the one who’d kicked me, leaned over and whispered, “The guard, Vanka, the fat one—he’s giving out chocolates for a fuck. Real chocolate.”

I had had enough of her. “And how much do you get if I fuck him, Grandma?”

“Half,” she said.

Amid a group of new arrivals, a familiar face appeared. A face I would never forget. The thick red-blond hair, wet with rain, the shapely build inside her shapeless coat. A wave of nausea swept over me. I bowed my head, pulled my kerchief lower on my brow. Did the politicals—the estranged left wing of her own party—recognize Karlinskaya? She certainly didn’t cross the cell to join them, embrace them as long-lost sisters. I could still see her in that room, watching Arkady drag me from the dacha. Hear her yell, “Get rid of her!” It was all I could do not to shove my way over, grab her by the collar and shout, “So, do you still think I’m a Bolshevik spy?” But she would never believe me. I imagined slapping her and slapping her.

She thought I was dead, shot back at the dacha, and I was better off leaving it at that. I could always hope a Left SR would kill her in her sleep. The SRs had begun as terrorists and some of that always remained. I watched her as she found a place on a cot and sat with her back to the room. Her graceful form, her heavy hair, created a kind of halo around her. My father had stroked that hair. She had spilled it across his face as she leaned above him when they made love. While he was supposed to be at Kadet meetings. It made me sick to contemplate my father as just another carnal man—and a liar to boot. I wondered if they’d arrested him when they got her.

Each day, rousted from sleep, we queued to use the slop bucket and receive our terrible rations. Nowhere to wash. The stench, the weeping, the bravery and despair. Were there eighty of us? One hundred now? More? We were taken out in groups to walk about in the yard in the rain. Ah, just to breathe the fresh air, though the clotted sky was only a small square wedged between the high walls. Women sidled up to speak to me—the tearful widow, the old chocolate pimp, others—but I kept to myself. They never aired the Left SRs at the same time as the rest. I waited to hear my name called: Morskaya, prisoner V367. But day after day, as others went to interrogation and returned beaten and bloody, mute, or pretending nothing had happened, or disappeared altogether like the schoolteacher, I was never taken out. The waiting was slowly crushing me. Some days I wished they’d just call me and get it over with.

The women whispered the names of prisons among themselves. Kresty, the Crosses; Peter and Paul; camps in the north, about which we’d heard rumors since the war. Or there was that much shorter trip, which I could not stop thinking about—out to the courtyard. There were no firing squads anymore. It would be only a single bullet to the head. “Saving ammunition,” the woman with the jug-ears joked grimly. We listened for that single shot, even in our sleep.

Still no one came for me. Not for Morskaya, or for Marusya, or Makarova. I suspected the commissar had not bothered to solve the puzzle—too many bodies to process, too many fates to decide. To judge from this cell, the Cheka had its bloody hands full. They seemed to have arrested every third person in Petrograd. And what was I but just a loose piece of dirt that happened to be lying on the floor when the big broom came through?

THE AUTUMN RAINS GREW heavy, and many of the women declined the opportunity to march around the small courtyard for exercise, but I always went. I would take any opportunity to leave that cell. Outside, I lifted my face to the weeping sky. Please, God, reach down and pluck me from this life. Upon my return, the cell always seemed smaller, as if they’d moved the walls in just a foot or two while I was away. The presence of Karlinskaya sent up a stink I could sense even in sleep. I’d been here two weeks now. Perhaps they’d lost my paperwork, sent the files to Moscow.

I’d been trying to remember Genya’s poem about Abraham and Isaac when finally the fat guard called out through the bars, “Morskaya, V367.”

He led me to a different door from the one we came and left by to go to the prison yard. This one was solid metal, and we passed through it into an unfamiliar part of the building. Yellow walls, low ceilings, shouts, the brutal clang of doors. He brought me to a stairway and I studied the broken tile while he jawed with another guard. Which way would I go? Up could mean interrogation, but it could also mean freedom. Down could only mean one thing.

Like a soul on the scales of heaven, I waited.

Another man arrived. A vigorous, short, athletic blond in black leather. “Morskaya?” The fat guard stepped back and the blond shoved me ahead of him.

Down.

The smell of wet walls and mold, and a dirty animal odor, increased as we descended. A slaughterhouse stench. He walked me down the dim hall. Muffled voices came from behind thick doors. A rising shriek snaked from the base of my spine and coiled around my heart, squeezing my throat in its knot. We passed yellow walls the color of old teeth. Black sticky floors sucked at our shoes. Bare bulbs buzzed overhead. The rest of the country was plunged in darkness, but the Cheka would have its electricity.

From behind a metal door, a gunshot reverberated like a crack of lightning in the closed-off space. Panic was a bird crashing into walls, my heart within my rib cage. The smell, the tile, the promise of pain. I felt as though someone was pressing a wet pillow to my face. I stumbled. The Chekist hauled me along. “Don’t pass out yet. Plenty of time for that.”

A heavy door swung outward, and two Chekists dragged a man’s body out in front of us. He’d gone into that room alive. To think I had scorned the schoolteacher’s terror. I melted into a hysteria all my own when I saw the dead man’s bare feet. And there were his boots, tucked under the arm of the taller man. It was hard to both drag the body and keep the boots from falling.

The Chekist shoved me inside.

The room was windowless, tiny. Black oilcloth lined the walls. A drain in the middle of the floor pooled with blood. A sound—a howl, a moan, a wail all in one—emerged from me like an animal’s from a cage. Now I, who’d been silent for so long, was suddenly chattery as a mockingbird. “This is all a mistake. You have the wrong person. I need to see Varvara Razrushenskaya. She’s Cheka, she worked for Uritsky. She knows me. She can vouch for me. Please call her!” I started to beg but then I remembered what Arkady once told me about men like him, that tears make them cruel. We hate weakness. It inspires us to violence, he’d said. I certainly didn’t need to inspire this man. I had to get a grip on myself.