Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

We had to get out of there. With Kolya around, it would be easy to put two and two together. “I’ve gotten my shots,” I said loudly, collapsing my tripod. “What do you say let’s get out of here, find ourselves some girls?”

He clapped his hand on my shoulder. “Lead on, brother.”

I began to shove my way toward the door to a chorus of “Watch it!” and “Hey, ’scuse you!” Glancing once more at the stage, I could have sworn Genya saw me leaving. For a moment, he paused mid-speech and looked right at me. Impossible—no way he could see in the dark with the lights in his eyes. Even if he could, how would he have recognized me? Still it gave me a shock. Too late, too late, it had already been too late even at the Cirque Moderne, even at the Stray Dog. I’d already belonged to Kolya Shurov. My heart pulsed to the syllables of his name.

Out on Liteiny, celebrants caroused in the novelty of nighttime illumination. It was as if the promised Future had finally blossomed, a weird flower that would only last a night. And by my side, my one and only love. We fell into perfect step, as we always did, but we couldn’t risk touching—it would be obvious. He’d taken quite a risk to come for me. But if I did not kiss him soon, I would explode. I needed his hands on me, his mouth.

“This getup suits you,” he said, pretending to inspect a building. “I never liked boys, but maybe I should rethink my stance.”

I didn’t even want to discuss it. “We should get off the street. Where are you staying?”

Suddenly he snaked his arm around my waist and swept me into a dark courtyard entrance, pressed me to the wall. Our lips flew together, bodies locked tight. Everything in me rose up to seal myself into the moment, into this man, his fragrant body, his strength. He searched for my breasts under my student’s tunic and found them bound, kneaded my hips, my unboyish ass. If I’d died, I would never have felt this again, this flame coursing through me, like a trench full of gasoline set on fire. It was worth having lived to this hour. It was worth everything, no matter what it had cost me or would.

He spoke quickly between kisses. “I swear I never meant to hurt you. I didn’t foresee, I swear to Almighty God.” He pressed his cheek to mine in the darkness. “My darling girl or boy or whatever you are.” My magician, my life. “I knew you were alive, I knew it in my bones.”

So many things he didn’t know: Arkady, my father, Marusya, Varvara. But their hold on me had broken, and there was only this shape in my arms now. “Don’t cry,” he said, kissing my tears. “We’re here. We’re here now.”

How long did we kiss in the shadows? When Kolya and I touched, the night held its breath. My cap fell in the mud, the camera clattered to the ground. Would I make love with him against the slimy wall of the courtyard like a desperate whore?

He unbuttoned my tunic, bit my neck. “Can’t we go to your place?” Still trying to get the bandages loose.

“I’m at Varvara’s.”

He laughed, despairingly. “Well, that’s out.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

“I’ve got an idea.” He backed away, smoothed down my tunic, hoisted his trousers, settled himself.

Shaking with undischarged passion, I scooped up my wet cap and slapped it against my leg. He picked up the camera and tripod, hoisted them onto his shoulder. We straightened ourselves and walked back into the street like friends who’d just shared a piss. I could smell his honey all over me. It was madness. We blended in with the other revelers. I thought briefly of Mina, asleep, rehearsing her plans for tomorrow. How could two friends be so impossibly different? She loved that sensible life, but at my core lived something hot and red that could not be contained and put to bed at nine. She could no more understand the forces that moved me than I could find delight in a closely planned timetable.

And Varvara… I couldn’t think of how she’d react when she realized I’d slipped her noose, when she saw my little fox footprints disappearing in the snow. Right now, only joy welled up in me, knowing I wouldn’t return to her bed tonight or any other night. It increased the danger—not only would Arkady be looking for me, but so would a deadly spurned Chekist. Scylla and Charybdis. I felt my disguise falling from me. Where was my boy’s walk? Couldn’t anybody tell we were lovers? Could they not see the steady pulse of attraction, the light in our eyes, feel the surge of current between us? He began to whistle “The Internationale.”

Common sense would have me go back to the Miniature Theater and try to burrow myself into the Communal Theater of the Future. But common sense slept in the bed with Mina, and I was myself again, a careless needlewoman among the apple trees of Paradise. How wonderful it felt not to disguise my true nature. Though I had learned many lessons since that day on the English Embankment, in the end I was not such a good student. I was still here, and night beckoned, shimmering before us with all its fragrant promise.

OF ALL THE PLACES in Petrograd he could have taken me, my love led me straight into the brutal environs of my Arkady captivity—a building right across from the Tauride Palace. Even being in this neighborhood terrified me. We entered a dignified house that nevertheless sported a number of broken windows, then raced up the ravaged stairs to the second floor. He knocked a pattern on a door: one, two, three—pause—fourfive. Ochi chor-nye—the song’s first syllables. Two taps back. Three taps from Kolya and we heard the scrabbling at the lock. The door opened to the length of a chain. A blue eye surveyed us from elbow height. Quickly, the chain fell, and a tiny old woman resembling a white mouse stood before us, holding her shawl close around her throat. She checked over our shoulders for loiterers, and satisfied, bundled us in.

She scolded Kolya as he propped the tripod and camera against the wall of the vestibule, stacked with firewood. “Oh Nikolai Stepanovich! You gave us such a start! Who in the world could be knocking at this hour? I asked myself. God save us, it’s never good news anymore. And this ruse, this joke…” She cocked her head, presumably to indicate the world outside. “Patting themselves on the back with their bloody hands. The first year of hell—I can’t wait to celebrate the second! And who is this?” She eyed me suspiciously.

“Elizaveta Vladimirovna, may I present my friend Mikhail Bogdanovich… Orlov.”

Oh, was I to be an Orlov now? From hooligan to high nobility in a single night? Misha was to be the great-grandson of the adventurer who’d risen to favor as a lover of the future Catherine the Great. Orlov had served Russia by eliminating her feeble husband so she could rise to power. Later, she’d cast him aside for Potemkin but named the jewel he’d given her the Orlov diamond, which until recently had rested in the imperial scepter. I assumed now it lay in the hands of the people, or perhaps it had been put to work funding the forces of reaction.

The old lady noticeably warmed, satisfied I was nash, one of ours. She received her formal three kisses from Kolya, pressed my hand, and led us into a parlor that must have once held many fusty objects but now was sadly denuded, probably for the better, though there were still chairs and a proud, ugly tufted divan with carved mahogany legs. At a table sat three old people of decidedly aristocratic demeanor: playing cards, gambling—but for what?

“Well, come and kiss me,” commanded another old woman, this one flabby and overdressed, reaching out her hand to Kolya. I guessed she had once been round as a Volga apple but in the food shortage had melted like beeswax. Her gray hair was coiffed as elaborately as it had been in the 1880s.

“Dear Emilia Ivanovna.” Kolya kissed her and shook the men’s hands—everyone wanted to touch him. His young man’s touch was more precious than gold. “Viktor Sergeevich. Pavel Alexandrovich. You’re looking hale.” Were they his relatives? He’d certainly spent enough time with us, and we never thought he had any family to speak of other than his profligate father.

Nervous glances were sent in my direction. Our hostess reassured them by introducing me. The others visibly relaxed when they heard my famous name. “Welcome to our ‘commune,’ dear boy.”

Kolya explained, “Elizaveta Vladimirovna was very clever. When she heard the Bolsheviks were going to collectivize the apartment—”

The old woman interrupted with an impatient hand on his arm. “I said, well, I’m certainly not going to share my flat with a bunch of thieves and Bolsheviks, so-called workers who never worked a day in their lives! So I called our dearest friends, the Naryshkins and the Golovins, and suggested we throw in our lot together.”

“Best idea anybody’s had in a long time,” said the man with a terrifying sweep of whiskers, Viktor Sergeevich. A Naryshkin! Or a Golovin… both families known for their ultraconservative politics. I was a Golovin, too, on Mother’s side, though I didn’t recognize him. I thought better of mentioning it. I remembered visiting my Golovin relatives in luxurious old flats just like this one. So this was how the aristocrats were celebrating the Year One—sitting behind their locked doors, slandering the workers, and hoping for the restoration of the tsar. A lamp flickered before the icon in the far corner of the room. I could only imagine what Genya would say if he could see this.

“Aglaya!” the mouselike old lady called out.

A servant with a nervous demeanor and eyebrows like an untrimmed hedge appeared through a second doorway. A back hall. Ever since my imprisonment with the Archangel, I’d become conscious of exits. “Aglaya, pour Nikolai Stepanovich and Mikhail Bogdanovich some tea!” The old lady sat down heavily in an armchair.

“What tea?” said the poor servant.

“This tea.” Kolya produced a brown-wrapped package from his pocket, which stopped all conversation. I wondered how many packets he carried for just such occasions. I’d like to see what else he had in that magician’s coat.

Aglaya curtsied and bustled to make the tea.

The oldsters insisted we sit with them and partake of the tea and some stale biscuits, though it was the last thing I wanted to do—sit politely and chat to a commune of rheumy-eyed baryny with Kolya tantalizingly within reach. But he seemed to enjoy tormenting me. He launched into a long explanation of how he’d gone to school with Misha’s older brother, and had run into me in the audience of an advanced revolutionary play. “You know the type,” he said. “Poetry that doesn’t rhyme. Sets so modern you can’t tell them from the scaffolding.”

“It’s the same all over the city,” said the melted grande dame. “You should see the Palace Square.” Uritsky, I itched to say.

“We keep trying to get our permissions to travel,” said the white mouse, adjusting her shawl. “But it’s fifty thousand rubles. Each. Which is worth about five hundred in real money, but when you don’t have it, it might as well be a million.”

“I assume you’ve been to the station,” said the other old man, Pavel Alexandrovich, bald with a few streaks of white hair combed over the dome. “Like the entrance to an abattoir. I think I’d prefer the Roman solution. If only they’d left me my sword.”

White Whiskers sipped his tea and closed his eyes in ecstasy. “Oh, real tea. And sugar, too. Thank you, boy. What a wonder.”

Kolya faked a big yawn and stood. “I hate troubling you for a bed, Elizaveta Vladimirovna, but I’ve been traveling since Kharkov, day before yesterday. I just got in when I ran into this one. He’s in from Tsarskoe Selo—”

“Detskoe Selo,” I corrected him.

Harrumphs all around.

“He wanted to see what the proletariat was doing with its dictatorship. We’re all in.”

The bald man shuffled the cards. “And what is your impression of Piter now, boy?” Our name for Petersburg. “Unrecognizable, isn’t it?”

“Hard to say,” said Misha. “But really, people must do something here besides parade in the streets.”

The aristos thought that was quite funny. “No, they don’t,” said Elizaveta Vladimirovna. “Not one blessed thing. Protest, parade, and send in the Cheka to torment law-abiding people.”

Kolya yawned again.

“Oh, don’t let me keep you young people up,” said our hostess, clapping her little bony paws together. Then, maddeningly, she continued talking. “But Nikolai Stepanovich, in the morning you promise you will tell us about your travels. Ever since they stopped publishing the Petrogradsky Echo, we know nothing about what’s going on except the self-congratulatory columns in Pravda. How are our brave boys in the south? Will this be over soon?”