A relief to be out on the drizzly, quiet streets of the city once more, the Fontanka wide and green, still flowing below the powdered pastels of the buildings across the way. Ah, to be out from under that cracked ceiling, away from those striped walls and Varvara. Down with rooms! A man stood on the Chernyshevsky Bridge, staring down into the water, smoking pensively. I could remember standing just here with Genya the last night before he went out for the defense of the city and came back to explode my life.

Nevsky Prospect was shockingly deserted. Broken and boarded-up windows, block after block. Signs had either been torn down, or stood in sad advertisement for shops long since closed. Whole sections of the wooden street pavers were broken, missing. We were going to celebrate the Year One here in this ruin? Yet I’d missed this place as a soldier misses his leg, like a broken-off piece of my heart. Or perhaps I was a broken-off piece of the city’s heart, and it was Petrograd’s great longing for one of its children that I felt. As I rambled—or, rather, hobbled—I felt as if I were walking along the lines of my own hand, the coils of my own brain, the veins of my own body. I knew every building, every bridge, my short life inseparable from these facades and railings.

An old woman, I walked unnoticed and undisturbed along the rippling canals, the mist holding the promise of more rain, veiling the buildings’ faces. I walked all the way to Palace Square and saw that Varvara was right. The scaffolding of some great project was being built, preparations for the celebration in this next room of the dream. One blond broad-shouldered man way up on the planks at the General Staff Building arch caught my eye. Sasha! I almost called out, but then remembered who I was supposed to be, this hunched old woman—I thought of her as Marfa Petrovna—and shrank back under my shawl. Seeing him made me four times lonelier for my former life.

I wandered for half the day, trundling around in my hagdom, drinking in the sights, this beloved and heartbreaking city. At the corner of Liteiny and Nevsky, the doors of the building swung in easily. A good or bad omen? The old sign for Katzev Studio, gold lettering on black glass, still hung on the elevator cage, though the machine itself crouched uselessly like a miserable, toothless lion in a small-town zoo. I was happy to note that the iron balusters were still intact—cleverly eluding the fate of the wooden ones.

I climbed to the fifth floor slowly, clinging to that solid railing. At the top stood the shiny black door, a bit pocked and peeling now, with its familiar brass plaque under the bell. Did they still have electricity? I pushed the bell and miraculously, deep inside, heard the familiar buzz.

I felt myself inspected via peephole, then heard the clicks as several locks were released. The door opened. Sofia Yakovlevna, thin, wrapped in a gray shawl, blinked at me. We could have been sisters. Her face listed to one side, as if she had had a stroke. “Yes?” She didn’t have her glasses on, thank God, but her appearance troubled me.

“Good day,” I rasped. “Is Mina Solomonovna in?”

“She’s in the darkroom.” Her voice was uncertain, her brow a puzzle of wrinkles. My face was familiar to her, I could tell, but she couldn’t place me. “Are you expecting photographs?”

“Yes. Yes I am.” This woman had known me since childhood. How could she be so easily fooled by a bit of paper and stove grime, a hoarse tone? Being dead would feel just like this, walking about as people you’ve known look through you. I could tell she was wondering why I wasn’t taking my scarf off.

“Don’t trouble yourself, dear. I think I know the way,” I said as Shusha walked in from the back of the house, wearing her school uniform. Her eyes flew open, then her mouth. I touched the side of my nose—careful—and she clamped her mouth shut again. “Maybe this girl will escort me.” I took Shusha’s arm.

We bundled ourselves back to the studio, which was cold but clearly still in use—the green velvet backdrop, the chair for the sitter, the big camera on its tripod. Shusha’s grimy school uniform was too short for her. She’d defied all odds by growing. “Marina, what’s going on? Are you in trouble?” She seemed excited by the possibility, as if it were all one romantic adventure.

I wagged my head noncommittally.

“Papa died this summer.” Her brown eyes glistened. “He was sick all spring.”

I had been so caught up in my own bad news… that wonderful man. I had to catch my breath. “I’m so sorry. How are you getting along?”

“Bad. Mama’s had it the worst. And Mina, she had to leave school to take over the business.”

Poor Mina! I could imagine how devastated she must have been. She loved the university, her chemistry courses. She was no artist. If only Seryozha were still here… “Was it cholera?”

“No, it was his stomach.”

“Vechnaya pamyat’,” I said, even though they were Jewish. Eternal memory. How warm he’d been, sweeping us all up in his familial embrace. I could see him sitting on the divan in his caftan and cap, one leg propped up from the gout. How kind he’d been to Seryozha—only a year ago. The Katzev apartment had always been our sanctuary, but without their father, it felt cut adrift, a raft instead of a mountain. Now he and Seryozha could walk together, could take photographs for eternity.

The red light over the darkroom door was on. “It’s crazy. The studio’s busier than ever now,” Shusha told me. “Even Lunacharsky came for a portrait.” The head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, in charge of all Russia’s educational and cultural affairs. It was a coup for any enterprise, but especially theirs. We entered the light-baffling turnstile into the darkroom, warm and reeking. Mina stood over the sinks, washing prints. Red flashed on her glasses. Her hair was tucked up into a scarf. “Mina, this lady asked to see you,” Shusha said.

My old friend glanced up, frowned at this strange creature her sister had brought in. “Can I help you?”

I peeled back my shawl, spit out the paper from my mouth into my palm. The expression on her red-washed face echoed that of her sister the moment before. “Marina.” No smile, no arms flung around my neck. “You’re alive.”

“Don’t go spreading it around.” I smiled, trying to make a joke of it.

She looked older than the last time I’d seen her, thinner, a bit worn, a professional. Taking her father’s place had changed her—whether for good or ill it was hard to know. She glanced darkly at Shusha. “Don’t you have some homework to do?”

“I’m going.” Shusha kissed me, quickly. “I have to go to class anyway. See you, Auntie.” She started for the turnstile, but I grabbed her by the arm.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“Anybody.”

She mimed a lock across her lips and disappeared through the revolving door.

Then Mina and I were alone, silent but for the sound of the water in the sinks. They still had water, at least. Mina’s bespectacled eyes examined me, evaluating, then turned back to her work. “So?”

Not at all the welcome I’d imagined. “I’m sorry about your father. I loved him. Seryozha worshipped him.”

“I know.” She sighed and lined up a plate in an easel, her movements deft in the glow of the red safelight. She slid in a sheet of paper behind it, exposed the print, then slid it into the first bath, poking at it with tongs. We watched the image consolidate itself. A group of patient, weary faces over open books. Workingmen, adolescents, old women. “The Liteiny District Soviet Literacy Class,” she said. “There are so many clubs and organizations now. Everyone wants a place in the new world. And they all want it recorded for posterity.” She fished the print out of the developer and plunged it into the stop bath, wiping a lock of hair back with her forearm. I tucked it into her kerchief for her. She worked quickly, efficiently, intelligence in every motion she made. “I know why you’re here. Kolya said you’d gotten yourself into some kind of rotten mess.”

He was back? And had come looking for me? With Arkady right here, waiting for him? “When was that?”

Mina poked at the print contemplatively. Extracted it and slipped it into the fixer, checked the thermometer, poured off a little water from a small tank heater into the tray, checked the thermometer again. “The last time? Back in August. Maybe July. I’m not exactly sure. I’ve got my hands full these days, as you can see.”

She put another sheet of paper behind the easel, started again, revealing a face very pale and grim, then plunging back into red.

“Shusha told me. I’m sorry about the university.”

“Nothing to be done.” Her mouth turned down even more sharply.

“Nothing more from Kolya since August?”

“Don’t I have anything better to do than keep track of your love life?” she snapped, poking irritably at the print in the bath. “You’ve been gone since April. Do you think our lives just stop when you’re away? That we freeze into place, only to reanimate when you next appear? I’ve been here all along, trying to keep a roof over everybody’s head. It’s not a thrill a minute, narrow escapes and bold adventure, but it’s the way real people live. We just keep living.”

I struggled not to show how her words appalled me. She thought I’d died, and now that I hadn’t, she wasn’t even happy about it. I tried to see myself as she saw me. The self I saw reflected in her eyes, in her fury, was not me as I was today, but as I had been as a spoiled girl. It was like looking at a star, the light it emitted a million years ago finally reaching our eyes. But you could not talk people out of their impressions of you; only time could change them. I could tell her about the room on Tauride Street, but she could say that that, too, was my fault. I could tell her about the observatory, and cholera, and Gorokhovaya 2. “We’ve all suffered, Mina.”

She slid in yet another sheet of paper. “Maybe so. But I have my own life now. It’s not my choice but it’s a good life. I don’t chase after whirlwinds. I don’t have time for your dramas. I’m engaged to be married, thank you for asking. I’m trying to live my life in a rational manner.”

Engaged? Our little student? “Mina! Engaged to who?”

She finished counting and extinguished the light. “A medical student. You don’t know him. Roman Ippolit. We got engaged when Papa was sick.”

“I’m so happy for you.” I reached to embrace her.

“Don’t.” She shrugged me off with a shoulder. I thought about her coming to find me, our reconciliation. “You don’t really care, so don’t pretend.” She pulled the exposed paper and put it in the first bath. “You only came here to find Kolya.” I could see she was seething. At least this time he hadn’t given her a whirl, no great big dollop of coo to butter her up. “He showed up here back in May, looking for you. As if it were life or death. Really, you’re two of a kind, you know that? You deserve each other. I don’t know who’s more melodramatic, you or him.”

“And you told him…”

“I said no one had seen you. But I’ll admit, Papa was so sick, I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”

Her father had died, and I had not been there. That’s why she was so angry.

She pulled the photo out of the developer and into the stop bath. “‘Maybe she’s dead,’ I said, half joking. And he started to cry.”

Kolya!

“‘I’d know if she was dead,’ he said. ‘And she’s not.’” Her mouth got very small, and wrenched to the left as she rubbed her nose on her shoulder. I held my hand out and let her rub it on my palm. In the red light, I couldn’t see her eyes behind her glasses.

“He looked around for you, but then he had to get out of town. He said things were ‘too hot’ for him. Needless to say I didn’t ask what he’d gotten himself into.”

She printed another plate on the glass easel. Lights on, lights off. She had a rhythm to her work. It was pleasant to watch people who were good at their work, even if they resented it. Into the trays went more faces, more clubs. Hopeful new citizens of the Soviet utopia. I plucked one out of the last bath and clipped it to the line for her. The faces on the slick sheet pleaded from their borders, Remember us. We, too, have been here. Ordinary people who probably had never before had a likeness committed to a photographic image. This, too, was the revolution. I had to remember that.

“He asked me if there was anything I needed,” she said. “I told him I needed silver to coat my papers. The Cheka took mine on a raid, even though I had an order from Lunacharsky himself. And film, if he could ever get some. I was back to using glass plates. When I have film, I can do more work in the street. Cover events and so on. The world isn’t going to come and sit in the studio and pose anymore.”