I wanted her to talk about how he looked, if he’d indicated where he was going. But her father was dead, and she was still angry at me for my past sins. “I hope he brought you the film.”

“He did. And flour and soap. Silver. Platinum salts. All kinds of things. Up to his old tricks, but I’m not complaining. That was June. I saw him once again in August, and that was it.”

I helped her hang the prints as she pulled them out of the fixative. “Tell me about Roman Ippolit.”

She laughed, hoarsely. “What do you want, Marina? I never see you unless you want something. What kind of trouble are you in? That ridiculous costume—it’s not Maslenitsa, is it?” The butter festival, our pre-Lenten carnival week.

“I got involved with some bad people. Disappearing’s harder than you think.”

With all the prints drying on the line, she washed her hands, dried them on a towel, picked up a stack of finished shots. I followed her out into the studio. It was colder but at least we could breathe. She turned on a lamp at the long table and began organizing prints into piles and sliding them into envelopes. “I can’t have you here, if that’s what you’re hoping for. Things are hard enough as it is. The Cheka comes two nights a week.”

I saw where I rated on her table of ranks—somewhere between cholera and a ricocheting bullet. She wouldn’t let me endanger her family, no matter what kind of trouble I was in. “It’s okay. I have a place,” I said. “I’m staying with Varvara.”

She wrote something on one of the pink envelopes. “Be careful with Varvara,” she said. “She’s not the person you used to know. She’s in the Cheka now.”

“She got me out of the cellar at Gorokhovaya 2. Took me in. I have to trust her.” I looked through a stack of prints and stopped at a big group—youthful faces posed in a pyramid.

“The so-called Third University,” she sniffed. “The new privileged class.” It was a recent innovation: the children of workers were allowed in without qualification. Studying while the brilliant Mina Solomonovna herself could not. “They get twice the bread ration as real students. Nice, eh?” she said bitterly. “While our professors were dropping like flies. Some teach over there for the bread.”

She took the Third University picture out of my hands, stacked it with two more and put it in its envelope. “Don’t trust anybody.” It gave me the chills, the way she said it. It was so unlike her.

“Not even you?”

She sighed, took off her glasses, wiped her face on her forearm. I took her glasses, polished them on the tail of her kerchief, then put them back on her nose, delicately threading the earpieces, first one, then the other, over her small ears. Her eyes were deep with some emotion. Was it kindness leaking out? Was it regret? In that instant, she looked very much her father’s daughter. She smiled a half smile. “What are you doing for work?”

I hadn’t thought of it but of course I would need to get some kind of work. I couldn’t go on eating half of Varvara’s rations. She was so rigorously honest that she wouldn’t take advantage of her rank to get more than she was strictly entitled to.

“Look, I’ve got more work than I can handle,” Mina said. “As you can see. Especially with the October celebrations coming up. I can’t pay you much, but you’ll get rations… and nobody’s going to come looking for you in a darkroom.” She took a scrap of notepaper and wadded it up, handed it back to me. I crammed it against my gums. “Come back tomorrow. I’ll set you to spotting negatives until your eyes bleed.”

59 The Eye

I HAD TO FIND a better disguise than Marfa Petrovna. Marfa was too cumbersome with her wadded teeth and sooty face, her limp. Varvara stood by as I chopped my hair off with a pair of blunt scissors, peering into the small mirror above the basin. I turned to examine the profile, left and right. I looked like a boy of fifteen. “Not bad, eh?” I said.

She came up behind me, ruffled my hair—proprietary, like all lovers—kissed my neck, rested her chin on my shoulder, and gazed at the two of us in the mirror. “You have to do something about that red. And these.” She weighed my breasts in her hands. “I can get you something from the infirmary, bandages or something. In the meantime…” She went to her wardrobe and pulled out a red kerchief dotted with small white flowers. Nothing I could ever imagine her wearing—it must have been Manya’s. I wrapped it around my breasts, pulled it tight, shrugged back into my dress, examined the profile. Not bad. But the hair. The red. He’d spot me at a hundred paces.

Mina, the chemist, solved that problem in the darkroom, staining my cropped hair black with something toxic she cooked up out of her bottles and jars. The smell of sulfur and ammonia lingered in my hair for days. But the inky black held fast.

For suitable attire, I went out behind Haymarket Square and speculated, trading a precious egg, a hunk of sausage, and some firewood—courtesy of Cheka rations—with a Former for a pair of woolen pants, a student’s jacket, and a boy’s cloth cap. One look into the woman’s eyes and I saw a dead son performing this last service for the family. Such sorrow, everywhere.

The clothes fit me well enough. I hoped it hadn’t been typhus. I tried not to think I might die because of my disguise. I sewed some crude drawers from a pillowcase with a needle and thread Varvara had to borrow from a neighbor, and she wound my breasts with a bandage she’d secured for me from the stores of the Cheka. It bore brown stains, which reminded me of Viktoria Karlinskaya. My soul would never be free of that invisible stain.

Now I looked for all the world like a beardless boy, bright-eyed and black-haired, too young for the army in this new civil war, which was gathering up the last youths and even middle-aged men into its sack like pickers stripping the last apples of an orchard. I practiced walking like a boy, chin up, kicking out my heels as if my male parts were in the way, elbows akimbo, thumbs tucked in my belt. Varvara shrieked with laughter. “Not so swaggery. You look like you’re going to start singing Puccini.”

I tried a more bashful boy, slouching, hands in pockets, shoulders a little hunched, rubbing my nose, my chin where I had no beard yet. I practiced walking on the balls of my feet to straighten out my feminine sway. I would have scuffed my shoes but boot leather was more precious than eggs.

“That’s better. I believe that,” she said, sitting on the bed, her knees tucked under her chin. I could see the schoolgirl in her at times like this. “What’s your name, mal’chik?”

“Misha,” I replied, but my voice came out high, too girlish. I tried again lower, less clear. “Misha.” Ending downward. My jaw flexed, a little defensive. Boys were on edge, it seemed. “Who wants to know, shitbrain?”

She jumped up, held me close. Kissed me three times.

It felt different to walk about the city as a boy. I hadn’t thought of that. When you were a boy, nobody gave you a second thought. People might shove me and shoulder me aside, but they never looked in my face. That first day I headed up to Nevsky passing scores of citizens, and not one even glanced at me. I tried staring right into their faces to see if I could make them. Their eyes slid over me as if my skin were buttered. Just a boy. Nobody worth paying attention to. How strange. How remarkable. How free.

I presented myself at the studio every morning at eight. Misha, the new assistant, was eager, hungry. Sofia Yakovlevna embraced him as she had once embraced another boy… a more sensitive, more beautiful boy, better in every way. “Misha, are you hungry?” “Misha, could you thread this needle? My glasses aren’t strong enough.”

Shusha and Dunya saw through me like a window. Dunya understood that I was in trouble, but to Shusha it was just a wonderful big joke. She made eyes at me, blew kisses, pinched my rump. Her mother told her not to torment me—I was there to work.

Eventually, I even met the fiancé, Roman Ippolit, the medical student. Opinionated, with a square jaw and short, straight, bristly hair, he enjoyed giving Misha the benefit of his vast manly knowledge of the world. Especially its filth and decay. “Misha, the thing you need to know about third-stage syphilis…” He liked to tell me dirty jokes when Mina left the darkroom, about Lenin and his wife, Krupskaya. He was awfully sure of Misha’s politics, yet in his own way he was as much a dialectical materialist as Varvara. No God, no poetry, no grace. Only arrogance and a sort of advanced crudity. I could not imagine the lover Roman Ippolit would be. Even Varvara the Chekist was capable of passion and tenderness. All I could think was that Mina must have made a rational decision to find a man she couldn’t possibly love. That way she would not care if she lost him, wouldn’t have to waste any time dreaming about him or replaying his touch in her mind. She was a practical girl. Her thwarted love for Kolya seemed to have soured her on the whole enterprise.

I started out, as promised, spotting negatives, scanning for the places where the emulsion’s bubbles had formed white dots and painting them out with a fine-tipped brush. Eventually I graduated to the darkroom. We would develop plates she’d shot that day, and I learned to print them, then recoat them for the next series. And as promised, my eyes grew bloodshot with the effort of scanning the hectares of negatives for those white dots and feathering in the darkness.

But soon, she required help with the photography side of things and asked me to accompany her on jobs in the city, to haul her equipment, to help her with crowd control, to organize unruly schoolchildren or factory committees.

Printing was the best part. I loved the moment when the paper went into the developing bath. When something that was apparently blank revealed its true nature. I felt like all of revolutionary Petrograd was passing under my hands. The Dinamo factory’s chess club, the workers’ committee of the Vyshinsky printing plant. Portraits of artists and journalists, bureaucrats and Soviet young ladies. How complex this world was. Was it dying, or was it being born? Both at the same time. How could I reconcile this with the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2? For every hopeful face, a name on a list. Eventually I stopped thinking about it, lost myself in shape and grade and density, the elegant process of the work. At times I felt Seryozha watching over my shoulder, and I talked to him. He didn’t always approve of Mina’s portraits. Her father had a better sense of people’s inner character. But I was only the assistant, and after swimming in that acidic murk night after night, I felt I should be developing gills. I usually came home just as Varvara was waking up and getting ready for work, which suited me fine, relieving me at least of that masquerade, but left her restless and longing.


Mina told me to be ready at ten that morning. We had an assignment. She handed me the camera and tripod and together we descended to the street, just as we’d once descended with her father, so long ago, it might as well have been another century. As we walked up Nevsky, she told me she was worried that Dunya was still spending time with Sasha Orlovsky and wanted to marry him when she got out of school. It sounded all right to me. Evidently Sasha had a job now, teaching painting at the Free Educational Workshops—the old Higher Art Academy. “She’s too young,” said Mina.

But the time belonged to the young. As we walked in the cold drizzle, I thought of Sasha, and Anton, of Okno and our Wednesday nights, Genya in Moscow, poor dead Krestovsky with his newspaper, his wife dancing with the piano shawl. It wasn’t until we were shoving our way onto the tram at Sadovaya that I asked Mina where we were headed.

“The new mothers’ home on Kamenny Island,” she said, slipping between two door-clingers.

Halfway on, halfway off, carrying the camera and the tripod, I almost fell backward. I would have, but the woman behind me was too forceful and crammed me on before I could change my mind. “Watch your step, mal’chik. Live another day.”

I stood pressed up next to Mina, the tripod shuddering between us, and lowered my cap over my eyes. The boarded-up windows of Gostinny Dvor peered at the street like a blind man behind smoked lenses. My skin crawled as the tram came onto Palace Embankment and started over the Troitsky Bridge. I could almost see myself out the window in the fog, marching up to Kamenny Island to sell that pin. Ask for Arkady. Maybe I was still there, on a parallel stream. Marina, don’t go, I tried to tell her. Turn around now. Throw that cursed pin to the goddess Neva.