“How’d it go at the studio? You ready for tomorrow?” She set her book aside, dropped her dark head onto the pillow, yawned and stretched.

The bread was dark, sour, more sawdust than wheat. “She’s plotting our schedule like it’s a military maneuver.”

I didn’t ask about her day. Did you kill anyone? Investigate any of our old friends? I washed my face and brushed my teeth, trying not to imagine her striding into some poor family’s room—their terror, the baby crying, the crash of furniture, the wife stifling her tears as her few scraps of silver were confiscated, the husband beaten. Varvara might be miles more professional than her colleagues, but she was essentially a violent person, and the Cheka gave her absolute liberty to exercise that trait. I once asked her why she couldn’t stay a party organizer. “The party needs educated people in the Cheka,” she’d said. “It shouldn’t just be sadists and goons. They asked us to volunteer, and I did.”

Her Red star was rising, shooting upward like a rocket. At nineteen, she was already a commissar. She was ambitious, always had to be first, best in everything. I remember how angry she used to get when I beat her in chess. In many ways she was a very poor Communist. She drew the covers up to her neck, kicking her feet like a child. “Come on, it’s nice and warm under here.”

I peeled off my boots and hung my coat on a peg, climbed into bed to undress under the covers. The springs bucked and squeaked with our combined weight, sloppy as an ungirthed saddle. But it was warm. I wondered if she skimped on the heat on purpose. I took off my shirt and let her help me unbind my breasts—such a relief. Misha converted to Marina again. Varvara ran her fingers over my compressed skin, the angry red marks, kissed my neck, and turned off the light. As a lover she was so unlike her normal certain, direct, unapologetic self. She needed me and was abashed by her own passion. Her hands on my skin were rough and dry as a washerwoman’s, her breath slightly bitter. She had no sense of rhythm or humor and her gracelessness was worthy of pity. If I ever chose a woman for a lover, it would be someone like Galina Krestovskaya, flirtatious and lively and sensuous. But when someone pulled you from a Cheka cell, you said thank you. As she kissed me, I never forgot that she was also capable of shooting me in the head. The tiger purred for now. If I didn’t cross her, this would be the safest place in Petrograd.

“I wish we could be together tomorrow,” she whispered, fingering my nipples, though the flesh was sensitive after being bound all day.

“I’ll see you in all your triumph,” I said. She would accompany Comrade Ravich, the pro-Cheka commissar of the interior for the northern region, to the unveiling of Marx’s statue in front of Smolny. Ravich was another woman who—after years of underground activity—had risen to an unheard-of position of leadership. Varvara adored her. Mina and I would photograph the events, and all the bigwigs would be there—the leadership of the whole Petrograd Oblast, called the Northern Commune. “Maybe I should put Zinoviev”—the Petrograd party boss—“between Ravich and Lilina and watch him sweat,” I joked. Mina had heard that Ravich was Zinoviev’s mistress and that his wife, Zlata Lilina, head of the women’s department, would also be there.

“That’s not funny,” Varvara said, resting her sharp chin on my shoulder. “The people look to us as examples. Comrade Zinoviev of all people should be more rigorous.”

“They’re Bolsheviks. It doesn’t mean they’re saints,” I said.

“We ask people to sacrifice. We should sacrifice as well,” she replied, outlining the letters of Arkady’s love poem incised in my back. She couldn’t stop touching them, tracing them, then smoothing the skin over, as one smoothed down a new sheet of paper. Yet there they stayed. “We’ve heard von Princip’s men are abandoning him like rats,” she whispered in my ear. The Archangel… is not himself now. “When we get him, would you like to shoot him yourself?”

I burrowed into the old quilts. Yes, I think I would. I would do it just to make sure it was done. I knew he wouldn’t plead. He would look me right in the eye as I did it.

“We’re close.” Her breath was warm, her frizzy hair against my temple, arm around my waist. “I’ll save him for you. An anniversary present.”

What strange days. I turned onto my back. Though I wanted him dead, I wouldn’t want her to do it. I could never tell anyone that. Who would understand? But I felt him so strongly—his brilliance, his driving insanity, his loneliness. He’d revealed himself to me, a soul weirder and more trapped than anyone’s. I wanted his soul and his dark self to meet.

She traced the line of my brow, my eyes, my lips. “Think, one year ago we were standing in your father’s hall.”

Yes, my unholy shame, my father’s fury, and her glee at having ruined my family in a single stroke. Ah, the things we’d done for the sound of the word—Revolution. I’d been hypnotized by it. We all had. But I’d pictured change, not terror. I had imagined that the bourgeoisie would mend their ways. Not that one day they would literally be crushed—people I knew. People of goodwill who had nevertheless lived at the expense of others.

“To think I almost didn’t find you again.” She buried her face in my short, chemical-smelling hair. “I still want to cry when I think of you in that cell, covered with blood.” Pressing herself to me. Her long body, her breasts, loose and surprisingly large, her wide hard hips, her knee between my legs. Kissing my breasts, my navel, wanting to taste me, wanting to bring me off. She wanted me the way I’d wanted Kolya. How cruel life was. Poor Varvara could not raise my pulse on her own. She came back up, holding me like I was some treasure from a sunken ship. Oh those wasted kisses. My deceitful self. I took over, touching her the way I touched myself, until the sighs came, the catch in the breath. I bit her, slapped her, pulled her hair. She loved it. I held her wrists together and pressed myself onto her, my thigh between hers, hers between mine and we brought ourselves off together.

I fell into a dead sleep, only to be awakened by a sharp, hard percussion. Were we under attack? Were the Germans here?

Varvara leaped out of bed and ran to the window, flung it wide. “It’s the fortress!” The guns went off, Boom! Boom! I threw on my shirt and joined her, barefoot on the cold boards. Three, four, five… her arm around my shoulder, mine at her waist. Twenty-five cannon shots from the Peter and Paul Fortress announcing that the first anniversary of the revolution had arrived.

The celebration uncoiled like the spring of an enormous clock, an endless conveyor belt of intricately meshed gears—what Enlightenment Commissar Lunacharsky called the Revolutionary Carnival. Streets bulged with crowds, battalions of workers marched past, arm in arm, singing “The Internationale,” and “Dubinushka,” and “The Worker’s Marseillaise.” Each district provided its own section of the ongoing procession, complete with banners, marching band, and orators as it wound through the city ten abreast. Every bridge had become a work of art, replacing the old railings and ironwork with the colors and forms of the Future. It was hard to hate these goings on, so long had it been since I’d detected any sign of hope anywhere.

Mina and I worked together like right and left hand to capture this moment on film. By midday, like a surgical nurse, I could anticipate where she would want the tripod erected, what the frame should hold. I could get the camera onto the subject, have it ready to go within a minute, and stand sentry to make sure nobody got in the way of the lens or jostled her while she hunched under the cloth. I kept a stern eye on the film case so that it didn’t walk off by itself.

She’d calculated her film stores, planned her shots, mapped out the day’s schedule for maximum economy of motion with a precision that would have made Brusilov himself proud. She refused to be inveigled by serendipitous tableaux—empty shop windows enlivened with posters: BRUSH YOUR TEETH DAILY! Middle-aged women under the banner of the TSIGANY TOBACCO WORKS, marching arm in arm, eight abreast, smoking! She wouldn’t waste the film she’d been allocated on such trivial moments. Sadly, she hadn’t her father’s eye. Worthy subjects were limited to speakers at assorted district soviets, artfully decorated squares, and elaborate factory banners—PUBLIC WINE DEPOT NO. 2, OKTOBRSKAYA FABRIKA METALWORKERS.

At noon we moved over to Smolny, where we photographed the momentous unveiling of a statue of Marx on his plinth. He gazed over the heads of the gathered commissars, looking toward Insurrection Square and the train station, hand resting inside his coat as though he were checking for his tickets.

Up by the inner circle of party brass in the autumn drizzle, Varvara quietly stood beside Comrade Ravich. How solemn my friend looked! It was supposed to be a celebration. Loosen up, Varvara! Ravich, tall and striking in a soft velvet hat, stood well away from Comrade Zinoviev, who was more youthful up close than he came across in pictures, with wild, thick hair that every caricaturist had drawn at some time or other. So this was the man responsible for the madness of Red Terror. He hadn’t even wanted to go forward with the October Revolution at the time. I could have shot him easily if I’d been armed, though I sensed the Cheka presence was thick in the crowd, especially around the many dignitaries who’d come up from Moscow for the celebration. Nonetheless, their desertion remained a sore spot in every Petrograder’s heart.

Luckily, there was no question of arranging them for a photograph. These were the leaders of Red October—you didn’t tell them how to pose. All I had to do was make sure they stayed in the frame. Ravich, skeptical, with soft hat shading dark eyes, stood to the left, and a handsome man next to her, and a fat one, looking like he had a hot pirozhok in each pocket. My guess: the commissar for provisions. Zlata Lilina looked small and fragile compared to her rival, though none of those old comrades could be very fragile given what they’d gone through to arrive at this day. Zinoviev stood next to her, and behind them Lunacharsky stood upright and proud, his bald pate gleaming with the success of his Revolutionary Carnival. This was his day, shepherd of Russian Culture, single-handedly fighting to keep monuments intact and artists alive. He beamed like a proud Scottie bitch over her pups.

After the photographs, the speeches began. Zinoviev stepped up to the dais to announce news even better than yesterday’s. “Today, we’ve learned, the kaiser has abdicated. The Germans are out of the war!” The cheers rebounded above the packed crowd. “The triumph of the German working class is inevitable,” he thundered, his dark frizz bobbing, and I remembered his other role as head of the Third International, the spear point of World Revolution. “In Vienna, in Budapest, in Prague, Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies are taking their places. A red flag flies today over Berlin! Can the same flag over Paris be far off?”

After the applause died away, a dignitary from Sovnarkom joked with the men around him. “You heard that in a year’s time, there’ll be just five kings left? The king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of spades… and the king of England.”

No kings. No empires. I needed a moment just to absorb all this, but Mina was already taking down the camera. “Hurry up,” she said. “We’re due at Uritsky Square in half an hour.” I admired how quickly she absorbed the latest nomenclature. Palace Square had been renamed for Comrade Uritsky as the place of his martyrdom. We packed up our gear and flew down to the palace to photograph the speakers at the Alexander Column.

In the square, constructivist paintings had transformed the grand autocratic buildings into a spectacular vision, a city of the Future. The Alexander Column was a geometric blossom, while all around the circumference of the plaza, murals forty feet high proclaimed the new realities. FACTORIES FOR THE WORKERS. LAND FOR THE LABORER. HE WHO WAS NOTHING WILL BE EVERYTHING. In the midst of the crowd, agitprop groups on flatbeds enacted melodramas and acrobatic feats for the throngs, slapstick comedy with a revolutionary flair. How I longed to be up there with them. This was the fun we had not seen since the days of the Provisional Government. Lunacharsky had been right. The people needed this. They loved it.

I could hear Anton in my head, the dour ass: It’s not art, it’s just advertising. But the players were wonderful and I laughed right along with the crowds to see the agile clowns juggle colored balls, demonstrating how the kaiser and the Entente had juggled our world. Mina for once agreed on the importance of capturing this scene.