Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“Too many coincidences. I don’t like it.” Varvara pursed her lips so hard, her wide mouth nearly disappeared.

“After what he did, setting me up with von Princip? You think I’d forgive him for that?” She was making me angry all over again.

She sighed and lowered herself back into her seat. “All right. We won’t speak of it again.” She lit the primus with a twist of paper, set the kettle on to boil. I tried not to cough. That bone was sticking in my throat. She prepared the tea, with something that looked like real tea. A sad celebration. The smell uncoiled in the room. We waited for it to brew and rearranged our faces.

She rolled a cigarette and put her stockinged foot up on the table. Her heel had a huge hole in it. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you. There are going to be massive celebrations for the October anniversary,” she said. “In honor of Year One. The futurists are knocking themselves out. They’re preparing theatricals, parades, puppet shows. They’re redesigning Palace Square. You should do something with them.”

“Funny, I don’t feel much like celebrating.” Just as I watched our dreams fall under the horses, they were staging a parade. There was no bread, but it seems there would be circuses. Still, hope was as real as bread and more easily constructed from papier-mâché, wire, and broadsides.

“This will be over soon,” she said, meaning Red Terror, “and then it will be Petrograd’s chance to live a little—remind people what it’s all about. The Commissariat of Enlightenment’s somehow twisted the money out of Moscow. There’s a ton of work. You should write a poem for the celebrations—it’ll reinforce your revolutionary credentials. I’m sure there’ll be readings. Some of your poets must still be around.”

But you had to have a soul to write, and I wasn’t sure I had one anymore. Maybe it was with Arkady’s now, inside an egg inside a duck inside a hare, at the bottom of the sea.

Varvara’s rations didn’t include enough firewood to warm the room past nine. We lay together under a pile of blankets. She held her manuscript on her knees, correcting pages. I had nothing to read, didn’t dare open a newspaper to hear the shrieking of the dead. Instead I was writing a poem—about the Year One—on the back of a discarded page. She smelled of smoke and pencil lead. “You know, I’ve missed you, you idiot.” She rubbed my shoulder awkwardly. “It was hell to see you in that room. That’s not how I like to see you.”

And how do you like to see me? I resisted asking the question, which would sound flirtatious. I could not shake the image of her in the interrogation room, her expert hand under my armpit leading me out of the cellar, her working in that hellish place every day. She was writing about it even now, urging people to have less heart so they could get through this insanity.

She brushed a hair from my cheek. Smiled.

I fought the impulse to push her hand away.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

To this rangy, dangerous girl I owed my life, and that of the astronomers, and probably Mother’s, too, indirectly. She and Avdokia would have waited for the Cheka like geese on a pond if not for Varvara’s lesson of last winter: when you smell trouble, make yourself scarce.

“I worried about you every day.” So close in my ear. She put her papers down, her arm across my shoulders. “I thought you were dead. I went looking for you. Anton said you were with your mother, but by then she was gone. Couldn’t you have sent me a note? Things could have turned out so differently…” She plucked at the ends of my hair, traced my nose, my lips.

I turned over the page I’d been working on. “I needed to disappear. For my own sanity.”

“All those months, I thought… then they said someone had been arrested in Pulkovo and had mentioned my name.”

She brought her face close, studied me, kissed my temple hesitantly. She shivered. Her eyes searched mine. Would I? That drain, the blood. Another room of the nightmare. Her body’s pungent smell, a higher acid smell than a man’s. Even if I’d been a lesbian I wouldn’t have been excited by her. I’d rather have made love to Manya. But I pitied her, and I owed her my life. I knew how long she had been carrying this burden. I knew what it was to love hopelessly.

“Please?” she whispered.

I couldn’t see what it mattered now, after those twisted nights with Arkady. I leaned across her to turn off the lamp.

“No,” she said. “Leave it on. I want to see you. I want to know this is real.”

Timidly, she began to make love to me. Her nervous hands explored my breasts, tentatively caressed my hips. How little experience she must have had. I was sure Manya had been her first. It was unreal having my old friend embrace me and feeling her growing excitement, the catch in her breath, the sensation of soft breasts against my own instead of a man’s hard chest. Her awkward touch, her keenness, was unbearable. There wasn’t even any vodka to make things any easier. She had no gift for lovemaking.

I showed her how. Kiss my throat, running my fingers down it. Offering her the nape of my neck. Kiss my neck, bite it. Using my hand over hers to cup my breast. Like this. My body warming now. I imagined Kolya watching us, sitting open-legged in a chair, his breath speeding up. I ran her hand up my haunch, over my hip, down my thigh. Here. Here. She kissed my mouth, my breast—not biting or twisting the nipple—my belly, and buried her face between my legs. I hoped I wouldn’t have to reciprocate. But how Kolya would adore this. It was easier, imagining him here as our third.

I moved her with my thighs and hands to a better sensation. What I would give for his clever cock now, his hands, his mouth. Thinking about his pleasure, my gleeful fox. Would I ever see him again?

She did not let me go until she felt the arch and ripple of my climax. Then, face smelling of me, she wrapped her legs around mine and rocked herself to completion. I’d never thought of doing that. “Marina, Marina… I’ve always loved you,” she whispered, nestling her chin on my shoulder, her tears dripping on my skin. “Did you know?”

I nodded. Yes, of course I knew. For that reason, the power in our friendship had always tilted a bit in my direction. What I hadn’t foreseen was the day I would lose my sense of what I’d never do, of what was impossible. Nothing was impossible and anything could happen. In the right situation, you could sleep with your best friend, you could turn over your father’s mistress to the drain.

“I’m so happy. You can’t know.” Finally, she turned off the lamp and settled under the blankets to sleep, her leg flung across me.

I tried to get some sleep myself, but her leg was heavy and I was hot and the sheets reeked of her. I pretended to stretch and turn over, out from under that leg, but she moved again to press her breasts against my back, and wrap herself firmly around me.

Alice in the Year One

I slept just fine

           on your floor.

                              Like a baby.

Who doesn’t love concrete?

        It makes you stand up straight,

                               But what to do with a spine

                               in the current condition.

You ask for a poem

                   for the Year One.

I greet it!

                Da zdravstvuite!

Excuse me, Comrades.

               I seem to have lost my drawers.

                                 Like many of you, I was born naked.

               I thought the Revolution

                                 would solve that problem.

               But it continues, despite the edicts.

Sorry, I forgot. You wanted a poem.

            A celebration.

                                              Urah!

“Hey, you, devushka,

                with the fire in your hair.

                      Tell me, where does the Future sleep at

                night?

Can you see it from here?”

Yesterday, your silhouette

                 In the doorway of a lighted room.

            “Come into the Future,” you said.

I peered in,

                 But it was just another room.

No, my sister,

                 It won’t do.

See that ceiling?

                 Rooms in the Future

                              must have no ceilings

                 They block out the stars.

            Down with ceilings!

Who cares if it rains?

                 But Comrade, we need more skies.

                            Tell Narkomprod.

                                    The sky rations ran out before

                             eight a.m.

                   And I was almost to the head of the queue.

              We demand more sky!

Second of all—no walls.

              Things happen behind them

                          And not only the blah blah of the

               neighbors.

Walls hold you

                   too tight

                                like an overbearing nurse.

I don’t mind being naked in public.

                   That’s a poet’s job,

                                  To be naked for all of you.

But I don’t care for swaddling.

And don’t let’s forget—beds.

                   That fluffy stuff—it’s strictly passé.

What good are whispered words on the pillow?

What good are dreams?

They keep us asleep

                   make us reluctant

                                to get up and take our places

                                    on the assembly line of the Future.

                    Also pillows have lice.

Down with snuggling!

                 Waiting for kisses!

                                  The next page of the fairy tale!

In the Future we’ll all sleep standing up

                    like horses in a stall.

                         It’s far more comradely, wouldn’t you say?

                “Are you coming or not?” you said.

               “I’m getting tired of holding the door.”

               “Of course,” I said, sniffing the air.

                          There was no quarreling with the Future

                             even if it was only the next hour’s

                          room.

                 A party was raging

                                     There was nowhere to sit.

                      Tomorrow played with his Mauser,

                                      Sprawling on the couch.

                                           All the guests had telescopes

                       trained on their feet.

                Well, there was still next Tuesday

                                     And the year twenty fifty.

                                                    I went out for a smoke

                      But the door had disappeared.

                      The floor wet with broken eggs.

                  and the only way out was through.

I wrapped my head in the fringed shawl that lay on the bed and gazed in the small mirror over the washbasin. I’d been hoping to disguise myself, but my face only seemed framed and highlighted, even when I pulled the wool low over my eyes. I wadded some paper and stuffed it up against my gums, then took some soot from the bourgeoika and rubbed it around my eyes, hollowing my cheeks, darkening my eyebrows. In the wavy mirror over the sink, there I was as an old woman, as if I had gone straight from this day to the edge of the grave, missing my life entirely.