Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“I’d rather be in the army than the navy.” Vanya filled his mouth with sunflower seeds. “Stuck on a floating tub? Not me. I don’t even like fish.” He chewed and spat the shells down on the crowd below. “What about you, Pravda? You gonna join up?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe the cavalry.” I thought of Volodya, fighting against boys just like these. Trotsky had called for a universal draft—he wanted to build a three-million-man army. “I like horses.”

“I’d rather be in an armored division,” Yura said, wiping his nose on his hand.

The fireworks flowered like seasons and the air grew thick with smoke. I wondered whether we’d have enough gunpowder left to fight the Whites.

But eventually it ended. If getting into the boat had been a risk, a dare, a leap of faith, getting down was a moment to savor. Vanya made a sort of lasso and tied it to the prow. The two boys slid down neatly as alpinists, and though I didn’t have their strength, I followed as smartly as a fairy-tale prince down a maiden’s braid.

To my surprise, the stocky man handed me the tripod after I’d clambered down to the Volga statue. “World’s going to be different for you boys,” he said. I shook his hand. For us girls, too, Comrade.

Vanya shook the rope free and it tumbled down into his arms. “Hey, you’re pretty good,” he said, twining it into figure eights, hand and elbow, tucking it under his coat. “Ever think of makin’ some money like that?” It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. Thieves. My new pals were young second-story men. I didn’t dare ask if they knew the Archangel.

The crowds began to move off the embankments, and we wandered over to Nikolaevsky Square, where someone said there’d be an outdoor movie. They were playing Tillie’s Punctured Romance, with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand. In the shadow of the Xenia Institute, to be anointed the “Palace of Labor” in the morning, we shared a bottle with some other hooligans and picked up a group of factory girls out for a good time. A girl with a little pert nose kept touching me, clutching my arm. Yura glared. Obviously she was his choice. I leaned against the wall as my girl chattered about her friends, and who said what at their Okhta mill, and did I like her kerchief, and what did I think about Charlie Chaplin? It never occurred to me how dull girls were, how tedious our minutiae. I pretended to read a poster affixed to the wall over her head, and then suddenly began to read in earnest:

^{THE POETS, ARTISTS, DIRECTORS, AND ACTORS OF THE} COMMUNAL THEATER OF THE FUTURE ^{WILL CELEBRATE THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION WITH REVOLUTIONARY SPECTACLE} A R C H I P E L       A G O ^{MINIATURE THEATER, LITEINY PROSPECT 10:00 P.M.} KURIAKIN—TOMALIN—SHCHAPOLNIKOV—OSTROVSKAYA

“What time do you think it is?” I asked the little girl with the pert nose.

“Who cares? No work tomorrow, lambie,” she said, kissing me.

I glanced around for someone who might have a watch, but it was a solidly proletarian crowd. I gave my new sweetheart a squeeze, saluted my comrades, and began pushing through the crush toward Liteiny.

THE THEATER CROUCHED IN a cellar hard by the Muruzi House, where the art collector Tripov used to live, though surely no longer. The tattered placards gave evidence that the cabaret was ferociously clinging to life in the new revolutionary climate. Like séances, cabarets were stained with bourgeois tar—too inclined to the ribald and satirical—but not completely done with. I would have imagined that after Red Terror, they’d have boarded up the doors, but the company seemed to have fellow-traveled its way through the Year One. A group of ticketless clamorers beset the chipped black doors and stairs and I thought of the Stray Dog all those lifetimes ago. Tonight I approached importantly, shoving my way through with my tripod and Kodak. “I’m from Pravda,” I announced to the ticket man, a small intelligent in a necktie and frayed white collar. “Have they gone on yet?”

He eyed me skeptically. In honor of the anniversary, free tickets had been issued by the thousands to tobacco girls and metalworkers’ boys, to literacy classes and orphanages, and—who knows?—possibly even Soviet newborns. A boy with a small camera—who was to say he wasn’t from Pravda?

“We’re documenting the Revolutionary Carnival. Lunacharsky himself ordered it.” I waved the name before his unimpressed nose like a pass.

Other people crowded in behind me. He had to make a decision. “Nu, khorosho. Just don’t block anyone’s view.” And he parted the curtain.

I descended into the tiny nightclub, packed with unwashed bodies, muggy with cheap tobacco. I—or rather Misha—pushed to a spot by a post and set up Mina’s ridiculous camera on its spindly tripod. There I could shoot—or pretend to—past the shoulder of a woman in a hat with crushed feathers. Onstage, very young and energetic actors wound themselves into the crossbeams of an ultrastylized set, the scaffolding casting strong diagonal shadows on the wall. A few geometric shapes in bright colors, an abstract backdrop, and some ropes completed the mise-en-scène. It brought to mind a cross between a construction site, an amusement park, and a gallows—a nice metaphor for the place where we found ourselves on the anniversary of the revolution.

People coughed extravagantly, and the man next to me shoved me, almost toppling the camera. I elbowed him back. “Watch it, Pops. I’m with Pravda.” Someone jarred me from behind. A small group of workers burst into sudden laughter. I was thankful it wasn’t a real assignment. I could never get a decent shot in a crowd like this.

On the upper deck of the stage, a boy in a yarn wig and a swallowtail coat swaggered with an open umbrella like a parasol, arm in arm with a girl in a constructivist version of a satin evening gown, looking a bit like a starfish when her arms were extended. Laughter and shouts all around as the boy balanced on two chairs and recited in a pompous voice:

Of course, we must have a Revolution.

         Of course!

                     In the Future

                                in the Future.

Someday, if they trust us

        If they let us educate them properly

                  Teaching them French philosophy,

                  all the things they’ll need

                  to help them when

                               in the Future

                               We give them their Revolution.

A roar of indignation suffused the house. Now a second boy, in a dinner jacket with a giant belly and a monocle, international currency signs scrawled on the waistcoat, exhorted in a deeper voice:

In the Future

         The distant Future.

         Give me a bit of a head start,

                   Will you, old chap?

I gathered that this was a ship, or a shipwreck, and all these people were stranded on a boat or island together. I was jealous. Genya and his friends were having fun down in Moscow, clowning for the revolution, while I was binding my breasts, taking orders from Mina, and sleeping with Varvara every night, jumping at shadows. Now, the banker pulled out a guitar, and the girl in the satin evening gown delivered a song in a high clear voice pronouncing the need for order—a place for everyone and everyone in his place.

God’s in heaven,

          fish swim the seven seas,

          and everybody knows the worker’s place

                                      is to serve the bourgeoisie.

To make things nice,

          to make it easy

                     I don’t know what the trouble is

                                       God save the bourgeoisie.

The crowd stamped and booed as the girl patted her coiffed hair. I longed to be alive again. I should have been one of these actors or writers in the Communal Theater of the Future. If I’d gone to Moscow I would have been, if I hadn’t been too proud to share Genya with Zina. And where was he? Hovering in the wings, whispering to his actors? Making last-minute changes?

No… there! In the audience, crouching so as not to be seen. Grimy-faced, in costume. Even in the dark, he glowed—the size of him, the bones of his face, the breadth of his shoulders in a worker’s coveralls. I would talk to him after the show. I would tell him, I changed my mind. I can’t live here anymore with Varvara and Mina. They’re sucking the life out of me. I’m dying. Surely I still meant something to him.

Now the Proletarians emerged from their hiding spots and stormed the stage, the Workers begrimed in greasepaint, the Sailors sporting striped jerseys. Genya, the lead worker, led the way. He planted himself onstage like an explorer planting a flag upon a rock, threw back his head, and roared:

What is this world where good men toil

          While the greedy spit on us from above…

At home in his element like a fish in the Kapsha. Now I saw Zina as one of the Sailors, her face full of pride, a member of the elect. Her eyes never left Genya—so devoted, so doggishly loyal. I’d been a poor wife by comparison. He mounted the stairs, followed by the crew, as the Aristocrats and Capitalists shrank at his approach. He absorbed the light—more arresting, more confident than ever. But I saw he’d lost his humility, his bit of clumsiness. Was that something Moscow had done for him? How we were all changing.

“Hey, mal’chik, long time no see,” came a voice in my ear. I instinctively turned but it came again, “Don’t look. Watch the play.” A voice not deep but rich like short fur, it moved down from my ear to grip my heart. Tumbling… was the floor tipping? I felt myself falling, the theater folding in like the set with its strange angles. Oh let me just be, just for a second. Let me believe that it’s true. I closed my eyes. Could I smell him under the fug of a hundred cigarettes, his honey scent in the cramp of the room? Yes, I could. I trembled, all my strength gone.

“I knew you’d be here. It was my last hope.”

I had to force myself to attend to the antics onstage—this mummery, this puppet show, Genya spouting while the professor in the swallowtail coat tried to fend him off with the umbrella. To think I’d just been beating myself up, wishing I’d left with him that day at the station. If I had, I wouldn’t have been here to be found. “How did you know?” I whispered back, counting on the noisiness of the crowd to cover our conversation.

“Tell ’em, Ivan,” the woman in front of me shouted.

“It was my last guess,” Kolya said. “I’ve been looking for months.”

I peered into the viewfinder to give myself something, anything to do besides crush him to me and kiss him so long and so hard we’d both faint from lack of air. Through the camera, Genya was just a blur standing on the stairs like a Soviet colossus, the embodiment of Proletarian Virtue. “I never thought you’d come back.”

“Get ’em, Comrades. Don’t let ’em piss on you!” “Watch the stairs, Ivan! It’s a long way down!”

“You really thought I’d leave you to that lunatic?” He was standing so close that I worried what people would think. A man and a boy. Though maybe we were brothers.

Yes, that was exactly what I’d thought. That he’d save his own skin. Now I was ashamed. “What about Shurovistan, population one?” I chanced a sideways glance. He’d grown a beard and wore a rough cap, a shabby jacket, and a turtleneck sweater. He looked like an intellectual worker, a printer or typesetter, like Kraskin. He even lit a papirosa. So much for his beloved cigars. His blue eyes were transparent in the stage-light reflection.

“I’m an ass. I could drown myself in the Fontanka,” he said.

“Why don’t you?” a man from behind us called out. “I’m trying to watch this nonsense.”