“I have to get away,” I said, low, as we walked to the stairs. “Help me get to Maryino.”

“There is no ‘away,’” she said, our feet clattering on the dirty stairs. “It’s civil war. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over. Hold on.” She stopped in the stairwell, glancing around, and surreptitiously pressed a key into my palm, closed my fingers over it. She smiled, touched my cheek with the back of her hand, the way a mother checks a child’s temperature. Her tenderness alarmed me. “You remember the way?”

I hefted the key in my hand. “What’ll Manya say?”

“Manya’s at the front with the troops.” We finished our descent, prisoner and Chekist once more. She nodded to a guard who opened a door into a sort of reception area with worn counters and dirty floors. Wary pale clerks eyed us as ordinary citizens stood in line with bundles for prisoners.

“He won’t let me go, Varvara. He’ll find me and kill me.”

“Trust me—he’s got his hands full. He doesn’t even remember your name.” She opened the door. Outside it was raining. “We’ll get him. When all this is over.”

I walked free into the cold rain with all of my worldly goods—the coat on my back, the boots on my feet. I had vowed never to return to Petrograd, but there I was at the corner of Admiralteisky and Gorokhovaya, the smell of blood still in my nostrils, knowing that I’d set wheels in motion I’d never be able to still.

Keeping my head down, I fled to Varvara’s flat, on Rubinshteyna Street just across the Chernyshevsky Bridge. The key in the lock, a drab hallway, an inner door to a joyless room. I remembered the faded striped wallpaper, the typewriter. But I could still see black oilcloth, blood, a drain. After locking the door and checking it to be sure I took off my boots and stretched out on the mushy bed like overrisen dough. Yet what luxury after two weeks on the floor of a Cheka holding cell. Blood still caked my clothes and hair from yesterday’s interrogation—I smelled like an animal. I should light the stove and wash, but I couldn’t force myself to rise.

I fell asleep as one plunges into a black lake, the water closing over my head.


I didn’t know where I was when I awoke in the cold, dark room. I turned on the bedside lamp and tried to breathe. Safe—for the time being. I got up and moved to her little bourgeoika stove in my stockinged feet, eyed her meager ration of firewood and stack of newspapers: Izvestia, Petrogradskaya Pravda. Krasnaya Gazeta, that bloodthirsty rag. I began to twist up a Pravda for kindling, then stopped and registered what I was seeing in my hands. In a box on the front page was a list of executed prisoners. I sat on the floor and read. Shock after shock as I recognized names: hostages, landlords, generals, publishers, and revolutionaries alike, all bundled together and canceled like stacks of old checks.

Dukavoy, Ippolit Sergeevich, Counterrevolutionary. My father’s chess partner.

Gershon, Pavel Semyonovich, Counterrevolutionary. Pavlik, my old boyfriend. His beautiful green eyes. He was only eighteen, like me. I could still picture us walking together with the food for both schools in the early morning. His face when Genya stole me out of the Cirque Moderne. Dead. And here was Semyon, and Julia…my God, they got the whole family. Execution, moving through the population like cholera.

And Krestovsky, Andrei Kirillovich, Speculator. The type blurred with my tears. I searched for his wife, the beautiful Galina, but it seemed she’d been spared, at least that day. Perhaps she’d only been sent to a camp. Poor Krestovsky. I could still see him uncorking that champagne, doing the sailor’s dance. What had he done besides feed a raft of theatergoers, support a flock of poets?

I couldn’t read on. I wadded the paper up and threw it in the stove. Was this the revolution we’d dreamed of? Our glistening future? If the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2 hadn’t drowned my last hope, this list had. And each issue had more. Hundreds, thousands of names, the liquidation of a class. Yet even as I wept there in the cold, I still had to light the fire, to twist their names into kindling. Forgive me. I searched each paper for Makarov, Dmitry Ivanovich. Or Makarova, Vera Borisovna, but found neither. With the names of the dead I boiled water, washed the blood off myself, and set my clothes to soak.

Dressed in someone’s robe—Manya’s most likely, I couldn’t imagine Varvara even owning such a thing—I poked around the flat. There was nothing personal. Clothes on a hook, some hose, a photograph of Marx torn from a journal, a handbill from the Military Revolutionary Committee—a souvenir from the day they took Petrograd. But the anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s cheery Father Frost face no longer presided as it had in her room on Vasilievsky Island. Neither did I see Delacroix’s Liberty. I cleared the table and moved the typewriter to the floor, adding to it a pile of manuscript pages. They were a political analysis: “A Commentary on Comrade Bukharin’s Anarchy and Scientific Communism” by Varvara Razrushenskaya.

Her stern black bookshelf tolerated no fiction or verse, only big dictionaries, and volumes on economics, politics, and history. But I recognized a small sliver of aqua blue, a title traced in gold, tucked in between two volumes of Marx. I slid it out from its hiding place. She’d kept it through everything. I traced my fingers over the cloth cover, remembering how Father and I had discussed colors. I’d been torn between the lighter blue and something more dignified. In the end the beauty had won out. I turned the soft, creamy pages—and they blurred as I thought of him, the pain I would always feel when I touched that volume, the memory of what had been.

Something fell out and fluttered to the floor. A pressed sprig of white lilac. I picked it up, sniffed. Dusty, but I could still detect the lingering scent of that long-ago night, St. Basil’s Eve, 1916, when we had cast the wax and seen our futures. Varvara had pressed one of my mother’s lilacs into the pages. So unlike her to be that sentimental.

I thought of how she’d kissed my shoulder, how she’d embraced me.

My inscription,

For Varvara,

And you’ll say you knew me once,

All my love, Marina

That kiss on my shoulder, that embrace. Manya’s at the front. Her fingertips on my incised back.

Of course I knew she had feelings for me. But I’d never expected to have to live at her mercy.

Now I was burdened with a new set of problems. I saw that I was never going to be my own woman, I simply had traded Arkady and the Cheka for Varvara. Oh, what I would give to just be free, alone, without compromises or betrayals, beholden to no one. Out in the open. A caravan, a campfire, stars in their stately progress overhead. I was tired of rooms.


Varvara returned after dark, talking, laughing, full of news. She spread her meager rations on the table—bread and a few dried herrings. I could only imagine what the Formers were eating if this was the Cheka’s fare. She ceremonially divided it up onto two chipped plates.

“I wanted you to know they let the astronomers go today.”

They were free. A weight lifted from my chest. At least I’d done something good. Then I asked the question that had been haunting me from the start. “What about Mother? Is she a hostage?”

“We never had her.” She wiped her mouth, took a sip of tea. “She disappeared when all this broke out. Maybe she’s clairvoyant after all, eh? Or else she’s learned a thing or two from last time. When we stopped by, both she and the old lady had already flown the coop. Feel better?” She chucked me under the chin as you do a sulky child.

“And Karlinskaya?” I knew I shouldn’t ask.

She sighed. “You’re worried about that bitch? She sang like a bird, if you want to know. She saw what was up the minute we called her in.”

“Did you…” I swallowed past an imaginary bolus of wax. “Torture her?”

“I never torture anyone,” she said, and held my hand in both of hers. “I simply give them choices. Karlinskaya believes in the revolution. It wasn’t hard to convince her to help us. I let her go this afternoon. She’s off to work for us now. You’ve done the revolution a service.”

Which of us would be the Bolshevik spy now? I thought bitterly. “Do you swear?”

“On Marx’s beard. Whatever else you think of me, I’m no liar.” She let that hang in the air, with its unspoken rebuke. “We knew most of it already, thanks to you. I told her I’d put her on a train to Samara if she told me what I wanted to know, and she was ready to oblige. She’s not the hard-liner you’d have thought. A practical woman, I’d say. More so than you.”

As we ate, Varvara delineated the conspiracy they’d partially uncovered at the time of Lenin’s assassination attempt, which my information further revealed. It seemed that a British diplomat had been caught bribing the Latvian Rifles—Lenin’s personal guard—to kill both Lenin and Trotsky. Dzerzhinsky, the Torquemada of the national Cheka—he of the gaunt face and the pointed beard in the portrait in Varvara’s office—had been on the hunt for others involved. Evidently Karlinsky was the conduit.

She went to her bag, pulled out a photograph, and put it by my plate. “Look familiar?”

It showed a dark-haired man with round, sad eyes and drooping moustache in an old-fashioned high white collar and soft tie. It was him, the Odessan, years ago. I nodded.

“Konstantin. Recruited by the British in 1903 in the Pacific before the Japanese war. The one in the uniform you described is a naval attaché, Commander Fielding Brown. Your meeting was preparation for the invasion of Russia by the English—and the Czech uprising on the Trans-Siberian. The plan was to meet up with the Czechs and eventually the Whites under Denikin, to attack Moscow. Karlinskaya confirmed what we knew. Added a few details.”

“And Father?”

She picked a fish bone out of her mouth and set it on the rim of her plate. “He’s in Samara, with Komuch.”

A new acronym, no doubt. “Translation, please.”

“The Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly—the old Kerensky gang mostly, plus some other assorted malcontents like your old man. For some reason, Karlinskaya stayed behind in Petrograd. She said it was because she’d “been ill,” but later admitted she’d been knocked up and needed an abortion. Quite a woman. We picked her up in a random sweep. No idea who she was. Berzhins almost wept—you should have seen his face.”

So Arkady hadn’t been lying. I could have had another sister or brother. Thank God she’d put an end to that.

She sat back in her chair, propped her knee against the oilcloth. “We did find out how they got the gold in for the Czechs. In case you were wondering.”

I forced myself to meet her gaze. She would notice if I looked away. She would notice anyway, but I had to try. “How?”

She spun her spoon around. “Surprise, surprise. Your old pal Shurov. Neck deep in it. A strange coincidence, don’t you think? Want to change your story?”

I tried to imagine how an innocent person would react. Exasperated. “I can’t imagine anyone, let alone Arkady, trusting him with a load of gold.”

She stared at me another moment, then gathered up the dishes. Nobody washed them anymore—we licked them clean. “And you didn’t know anything about it.”

I shook my head, a piece of herring bone stuck in my teeth.

“He never contacted you? Do you know where he is now?” Her black eyebrows arched to disbelieving peaks. She set the dishes on the windowsill.

“Is the interrogation still on?”

I could hear the rain gargling in the drainpipe outside. “Your father, Arkady, Shurov. Konstantin and Commander Brown? You swear you had no part in it?” Her nail-bitten hand suddenly grasped my forearm. “If you’re playing me for a fool, I’ll shoot you myself.” Her eyes glared like sun on metal. It hurt to look back into them. “Think before you answer.”

“I gave you Karlinskaya, didn’t I?” She loved me but I had no doubt she would shoot me if she thought I had turned against the revolution. She would shoot me to prove to herself that she valued the revolution over her personal feelings, even love. “I told you everything.”

She drew her face even closer. Her hair smelled of smoke. “Tell me about Shurov.” Was this politics or jealousy?

I gazed right into her black, frightening eyes. “I haven’t seen him since the last day on Galernaya. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.” The absolute almost truth.