By early twilight, the crowds began to turn toward the theaters for free concerts and plays. Thousands of workers streamed through the doors. Those not lucky enough to have tickets moved toward the Neva to watch the fleet preparing for the evening’s spectacular. I wanted to see it all, disappear into the crowd like a fish into the sea.

“That’s it.” Mina yawned, stretched, cracked her neck left and right. “Thank God. My head is ready to explode. Big day tomorrow.” She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

“Let’s go see the ships.” I didn’t want to miss them. I was as eager as a child.

“I’ve seen ships. We’ve lost our light. I can’t shoot in the dark, and I need to get off my feet. Let’s go.” She picked up the film box and turned for home.

“Old lady. Who cares about your feet? This is history!”

“This”—she lifted the box with our exposures from the day—“is history. And I care about my feet. We have a big day tomorrow, remember?”

I shook her by the shoulder, trying to loosen her up. “Come on, Mina. Sailors! Fireworks! You can’t go home now.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped, shrugging me off. “Do whatever you want to do, Misha, like you always do. But get this stuff back to the studio first.”

How she enjoyed ordering me around. He Who Was Nothing Will Be Everything. I shouldered my waltzing lady and we pushed our way back to Liteiny, with the entire Red city shoving in the other direction.


Back at the Katzev flat, Sofia Yakovlevna was waiting, the samovar steamed. I could smell dinner cooking. Nostalgia gripped me as we carried the equipment back into the studio, dropped the big camera and its tripod, the wooden case. But the noise from the crowds, the pipes and whistles, called me. I had to go—it was a physical yearning. “Give me a camera,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”

“You must be joking. I’m not going to give you a camera.”

“Your old Kodak? I bet you still have it.” A little box camera with bellows her father had given to her on her thirteenth birthday. She’d only used it one or two times to please him—never dreaming that someday she would support her entire family with a camera.

“I don’t know if it even works. And the film’s easily four years old. You’d have to use a very long exposure in the dark. I don’t think you’d get anything.”

“Let me try,” I said. “What would you lose?”

She dropped into the studio prop chair, a plump tufted armchair from the 1890s. “A camera?”

“I’ll fight them to the death for it, as the devil is my witness. And if I’m lucky, you’ll have photos like nobody else’s.”

She sighed, but she pushed herself out of the chair and into the darkroom.

The little leather-cased Kodak sat on a high shelf next to a magazine of film, under a coating of dust. She wiped it off, slowly, then loaded it for me. She explained about the aperture and the exposure, blah blah. “The tripod’s there—no, the little one. But don’t you lose that camera. I swear, Marina, I’ll drown you in the developing tank.”

61 Hooligans

OVER THE NEVA’S CROWDED shores, a shining dark rolled out like a bolt of silk taffeta, no longer recognizable as our poor Soviet night, homely as a darned sock. This was something we’d dreamed after going to bed hungry. A dream of ships transformed into floating cities of light, strands glittering between smokestacks and masts like spiderwebs in new grass, the black water transformed to lightning. Such sound! Cheering, whistles blowing, pipes and rattles, bouncing off the tsarist facades like kopeks off a taut sheet. The ships’ searchlights wrote their angular signatures across the sky, sweeping over crowds so dense they looked like fields of dusky wheat. Mina was right—no way could I capture this with chemicals and celluloid. Yet I would try, if only to prove her wrong.

What would have been the perfect vantage point—Liteiny Bridge—was now impassable. I’d have to sprout wings and fly to it. I worked my way instead down to the Nikolaevsky Bridge and crossed it inch by inch, using my tripod like a sorcerer’s staff to part the woolly masses, those worn and hungry faces full of light. Hard to begrudge such pleasure. Everyone smiled at me, even as I shoved. When was the last time we’d seen such smiles?

An hour of determined force brought me onto the Strelka, the tip of Vasilievsky Island, wedged between the Bolshaya Neva and the Malaya Neva, with its view into the heart of the river. Before me lay the grand jewel of Petersburg cracked open like a walnut—the Winter Palace, the Admiralty with its constructivist flags and spire, the Peter and Paul Fortress, prison and palace. All lit up, no rationing tonight. But the mansions on the English Embankment turned their blind eyes to the fete, resentful, lost in the past. I thought of that long-ago summer night—or was it only last year?—when I walked here with Genya in the small flame of new love, our heads full of revolution. Well, we had gotten our wish. I never suspected how it would unfold—you changed the world, but then the world came back and changed you.

I saw that people had climbed the bases of the Rostral Columns, those red granite lighthouses, each guarded by gargantuan statues representing the four great Russian rivers, and studded with the prows of bronze boats that in Viking days would have been those of captured ships, lit with signal fires. If I could get up there, I’d have a clear shot over the heads of the crowd. I wriggled and pushed my way through a mass growing denser by the moment until I’d reached the muscular statue of the Dnieper—or was it the Volga? Resting the unwieldy tripod on its giant lap the way a cripple holds his crutch on a tram, I scaled the bronze river god to the granite pedestal upon which the column stood. A sturdy man above me gave me a last hand up. Others made room. Looking down on the tripod, I saw that bringing it had been a mistake. Well, Mina had said, “Don’t you lose that camera.” She said nothing about the stand.

And it was worth the struggle. From up here I could see the breathtaking vista, fortress on the left, palace on the right, and half the Baltic fleet floating in the middle. I felt like a prince overlooking his birthright. My city had not died. I felt pride and an overwhelming nostalgia in my tightly bound breast.

Then a small shower of something fell on my head. Sunflower-seed hulls. I peered up and, in the lowest projecting prow, saw human arms twenty feet above the crowd. Another spray of sunflower hulls. Someone had climbed up to one of the symbolic bronze boats—every Petersburg child’s fantasy.

I had to be up there. And only now, in the chaos of Bolshevik rule and the complete absence of police, would such a thing ever be possible. I shouted up into the darkness. “Hey, Comrade! Sunflower spitter!”

A boy leaned over the side and spit some seeds into my face.

I brushed them off. “Hey, brother! I need to come up. I’m taking pictures for Pravda.” I held out the camera. I felt like the golden perch in the stories, bargaining with the old man.

His head disappeared into the darkness.

“Come on, have a heart!” I shouted up. “For Lenin!”

There was really no need—I had a perfectly decent view from here—but I yearned to be higher above all the world, as I once needed to climb all the way to the treetops.

Then the sturdy man next to me elbowed me and pointed.

A rope had descended from the ship.

I was not nearly as strong as I’d once been, but I tucked my camera into my jacket, grabbed the rope, and wound it around my leg like that circus girl I’d once imagined myself to be, and pulled myself up, a foot at a time, until unseen arms hauled me up the rest of the way, bracing the rope against the side of the hull like fishermen pulling in a full catch. Don’t let go, I thought as I slowly twirled on the rope, the pounding of my heart drowning out the din from below. Hands dragged me in over the lip, and I squeezed in between two boys, hooligans Misha’s age, flashing grins.

One thumped my shoulder, face full of freckles. “Good man, Pravda. Vanya thought you were gonna chicken out.”

“You really takin’ pichurs for Pravda?” said the other one, with a nasal voice, a smashed nose.

“Lenin’s going to give you a prize, personally,” I said.

All along the Neva, the embankments were so thick with human beings they looked like they’d grown fur. It was colder up here, the wind sharp. My nose ran, my head throbbed, but I wouldn’t have traded places with a king.

I pulled my cap down over my bruised brow, where I’d struck it on the way in.

“I’m Misha,” I said.

“Yura,” said the first one, and we shook. “We always come up here.”

“I always wanted to,” I said. “Willya look at that?”

Gazing out at our city, shining, twinned in the black water, I ached for all the exiles who would never return to this. I wiped my nose on my sleeve—it was un-Misha-like to cry. My terrible, my beautiful land.

I got to work, opening the bellows of the Kodak, resting it on the cold bronze lip of the boat, the strap secure around my neck. I sighted with one eye, although it would be pure luck if I got anything at all—the viewfinder was nearly invisible in the dark. I framed my shot as best I could. It was so different from the ground glass of the huge camera, where the image was clear and bright behind the grid and the whole thing rested on a stable tripod so you could leave the lens open for ten minutes if you needed to. All I could do now was point at the lights, open the shutter, and hold my breath.

“At first Vanya didn’t want you up here,” said Yura.

“But we figured, Pravda? Might be worth somethin’.” Vanya’s nose had been smashed almost flat—or maybe he’d been born that way. “Got any booze?”

I shook my head.

“Smokes?”

“Nah. No caviar neither.” I should have packed some kind of offering, but I’d never been a photographer before.

“Then what’re you good for?” He lit a makhorka, the foulest I’d ever smelled. He must have picked up butt ends off the street and rerolled them. He handed it to Yura, who handed it to me. My eyes watered but I would not cough and disgrace myself.

Perched there above the glittering scene, I felt like a hero, like I could eat the entire glorious night and drink the river dry. Even Marina wouldn’t have risked coming up here with two hooligans. But I was just a boy, smoking a horrific cigarette and drinking in the sights as if I were Peter the Great.

Over the river, a mechanical roar even louder than the crowd drowned out the voices, the whistles, everything—and a hydroplane flew past our nest, right at eye level. Then another. The boys stood and shouted, waving their arms. Vanya almost fell out of the boat. I balanced the Kodak on the boat rail and tried to follow their flight—their delicate gleaming wings—upriver, over the ships. They went as far as the bend toward the Okhta side, and then circled back. The crowd roared like waves on the ocean.

“Better get it if yer gonna get it,” Yura said.

I got the picture as they raced past. At least I hoped I got something.

Now searchlights from the destroyers combed the night, raking the mobs. A rocket went up from one of the ships and exploded into a fiery rose, and the noise reverberated off the river and the buildings. Fireworks responded from other light-bedecked battleships. We cheered at each glittering explosion and laughed at the percussions. My comrades’ tough-boy faces filled with equal parts fear and delight, like the children they were. I turned the Kodak onto them, and they posed for me like sailors, their caps on backward.

All this firepower reminded the boys of the civil war, and they began to talk about the Red Army, recounting its victories. Budyonny, Stalin—these were the names they mentioned with awe. “Didja see the Kronstadt sailors last week?” said Yura.

“What about ’em?” his friend asked.

“Had a rally on Nevsky is what. Think they’re gonna get rid of the Bolshies. They ain’t afraid of nothin’.”

The Kronstadt sailors were protesting against the government? Varvara had said nothing about this. Why? It was a serious thing.

“Anybody get shot?” asked thin-faced Vanya, sniffling in the wind.

“Nah. But they marched over to the Mariinsky and stole the band. It was hilarious. Took ’em down to the river to get the dockworkers to walk out.” He leaned back with his makhorka like a man in a hammock, eyes full of fireworks.