Over soon, meaning a White victory. “I wouldn’t start hanging out double eagles quite yet,” Kolya said.


Elizaveta Vladimirovna lit a kerosene lamp and led us through the huge flat to a room by the kitchen, apologizing profusely for the meager accommodations but explaining that all the good rooms were occupied now. The one she showed us, a maid’s room, was packed with odds and ends waiting to be sold off. Sleds and skis, tables and lamps. But we unburied the narrow bed and found its thin mattress rolled on top of the springs. “One of you could use that, and the other could perhaps—”

“We’ll figure something out,” Kolya interrupted her, trying to push her out of the room. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Aglaya will bring you blankets and sheets.” The old lady kept talking, craning her neck back into the room. “She’s just next door if you need her. Here’s a candle.” She dug in her pocket and produced a short stub. “I wish we had something else, but the world—”

“After a week on the road, traveling on top of trains, believe me this is paradise,” said Kolya, lighting the candle off the lantern wick. “Good night, dear. May God bless you a thousand times.” He finally got her out and closed the door behind her, stuck the candle into a chipped china candleholder on the windowsill, and surveyed our love nest. Certainly we had made love in better surroundings, but we unrolled the mattress eagerly, and were just sitting down when a knock broke us apart—the maid, bearing sheets and two quilts they had given up for our comfort. I was touched, as the old would suffer so much more from the cold than we would tonight.

Finally we were alone.

The scuffle of flying clothes I’d presumed would ensue turned into a sudden awkwardness, an uncertainty. I think Kolya was ashamed of what a mess this had all turned out to be, and for my part, I couldn’t avoid a moment of remembered pain from the last time I’d seen him, when he’d left me to fend for myself, sent me back to Genya. If it hadn’t been for Arkady, he probably wouldn’t have come back at all. In the dark entranceway I hadn’t been able to get enough of him, now I couldn’t look at him. Instead, I pressed my forehead to his, like a good horse. I remembered this.

He knew enough not to speak, not to move. He put his arm around me and we sat for a lifetime. Continents drifted and collided as we just drank in the presence of the other. How lucky we were to have found each other again, in this world like a river in a spring flood that was carrying away horses, trees, villages, whole cities.

“Marina, dearest, I’m so sorry—” he said, but I stopped his words, planting my fingers against his mobile mouth. He didn’t have to say anything, I was already his. I just needed time to remember him again.

My fingers moved through the curly beard, marveling at the texture, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and turned my hand over to kiss the palm. And the hand came to life, as in a magic act where a piece of paper suddenly becomes a dove and flies away when the magician softly blows on it. Tenderly, he removed my cap, my coat. I trembled uncontrollably. “Are you cold?” he whispered.

I shook my head.

He gently arranged my short black hair with his fingertips, ruffling it, then smoothing it, tickling the sideburns. He stroked my brows, my eyelids, my lips. His fingers when I kissed them tasted of smoke and leather. He slowly unbuttoned my student’s tunic, beginning at the high neck, coming across the chest, down to the waist, and slid the brown fabric off my shoulders, then the undershirt, to reveal the tight bindings around my breasts and torso, my maiden’s armor.

He unpinned the fastenings and began the unwinding. I held my arms over my head until he had finished. He ran his warm hands gently over my breasts, which always surprised me a bit as they sprung loose—so accustomed was I to being Misha. The other hand stroked my back, then stopped. His expression turned to puzzlement. He turned my shoulders so he could see what his hands had sensed.

Yes, my love. I’m afraid this isn’t going to be as simple as you’d hoped.

“He did this to you?”

I turned so he couldn’t stare at it, or perhaps I wanted to witness his reaction. His face painted with pity and shame, his hand across his mouth. In the silence, I could hear the old people chattering in the distant parlor. This was the moment Arkady had planned, ensuring that Kolya could never again look at me or touch me without knowledge that he had been there, had left his mark. The devil Kolya himself had summoned. Would it diminish me for him? “He could have shot me, Kolya.”

“I’m not grateful,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t graduated to sainthood yet.”

The lines across his forehead—one, two three—like waves coming in low and even on the Finland shore. Plus the strong double line between his brows. I took his hands. “It was another lifetime. I don’t care about that now.”

He knit our fingers together like we were praying, pressing our knuckles to his lips. “Forgive me. I should never have started all this. I should have left you alone.” And he began to weep. “I’m a bad man, Marina—you don’t even know. If you stay with me, you’ll only have grief. If I had half a heart, I should leave you right now and let you have your life back.”

Of all the things I expected when we’d gotten away from the waxworks in the living room, I never expected this. I stroked his cropped hair, pressed my temple to his. “You can’t, though, any more than I can. So stop thinking like that. I’m responsible, too. I sold the diamond—and it kept us going for a good long time. Getting involved with Arkady—that was my mistake, and I paid for it, and it’s done.” Though it was hardly done, I had stopped blaming Kolya for it.

“I should have seen it coming. I should have been there. I thought I was keeping you safe. My God, what a fool!” He struck himself in the forehead with our clenched hands.

“Stop it.” I jerked my hands away.

“Forgive me, I was such an idiot, such a fool.” He slid to his knees by the bed, where some maid had worn a bare patch through the oilcloth with her praying, pressing his cheek to my knees in Misha’s rough trousers. “Can you ever forgive me, Marina?”

“Two idiots. Who’s here to do the forgiving?” Kolya with a conscience? I kissed his sweet, agonized face. My God, what now? Would Kitezh rise from the lake?

“I’ll make it up to you. I swear I will,” he whispered.

I held out my foot, still clad in a boot. “Pull,” I said.

My smile reached him at last. The sorrow and shame on his elfin face retreated, the way a wet pavement dried in the sunshine. He just wasn’t made for regret.

Suddenly my boots were off, then my trousers, replaced by magical hands and gifted mouth. This is why I’d survived. I wrapped my thighs around him, knowing again that this was my church, my redemption. It wasn’t the same act as I’d been enduring with Varvara, not even like Genya’s loving efforts. As we rolled on that narrow bed, I knew this was why one needed a body, why it was worth all the pain, the hunger and harm it was prey to, why the angels envied us.

I felt sorry for the maid, Aglaya, in the room next door, to have to listen to such pleasure. I did my best to stifle my cries, and made Kolya stuff my coat behind the iron bed frame so it wouldn’t crash into the wall like a bull kicking its pen to pieces. Luckily the other inhabitants were elderly and hard of hearing. If they could have heard us at all, what a scandal! I imagined Aglaya mortified in her straight little bed, praying under her breath. But at least she’d never have the nerve to relate to her mistress the horrors she’d endured—that those boys had fucked like lions in the desert, all night long.

64 Vikzhel

I WOKE TO THE sight of Kolya dressing in the tender morning light. It fell on his shoulders, caressing the light hairs, the freckles. Even that milky scrap of sun wanted him, wanted to run its tongue along his arms, his squared-off chest with its fan of hair, that narrowed waist, leaner than it had ever been. He bent down to kiss me. “Go back to sleep. I’ve got a few things to do.”

I pulled him to me, rubbing the crown of my head against him, like a cat in a patch of grass. “No, stay here.”

“I can’t. I’ve got some business.” He pressed his lips to my brow. “I’ll be back, don’t worry.”

I groped for the binding cloth that had fallen to the floor, sat up, and began wrapping myself into it—second nature, compressing myself into my armor. “No. I’m coming with you.”

He grabbed my wrists, shoved me back on the pillows, and lay on me, holding me there, a delicious captivity. “Nyet,” he whispered and kissed my nose.

Hurt feelings were a pain Misha wasn’t used to experiencing. I was so unused to being a girl. Compared to all the other pain, this one, Marina’s, was almost nostalgic. Only Kolya could hurt me this way. I tried to buck him off. “I didn’t come here for you to tie me to a post whenever you want. Leave if you don’t want me. You’ll never see me again.”

He kissed my eyes, my mouth. “Don’t be melodramatic. I’ll be back by noon. We’ll go celebrate the workers’ state.” He let me go, then worked his head through the neck of his sweater.

I went back to binding my breasts, pulling the cloth tight, as if it were my resolve. After last night, Misha’s rigid masculine form seemed intolerable. My body had returned to the feminine and resisted confinement.

“You’re not listening,” he said.

“No, I’m not.” I slipped on my trousers and shoved my feet into my poor socks, my broken boots. What I would give for a pair of socks like the ones we used to make at Count Bobo’s.

The exasperation painting his quick, restless face settled into resignation. He helped me on with my shirt, delicately, as if it were an evening cape. I buttoned my tunic as he dug my coat out from where we’d wadded it behind the headboard. “You’re being ridiculous, you know.”

“We’re going to do some beezneez.” I crammed my cap on my head. “So? Let’s go.”

We slipped from the flat, snores arising from every room. I grabbed Mina’s tripod on the way. Even last night with the hooligans seemed weeks ago.

Outside, we could hear distant noise, though Shpalernaya Street was quiet. The Tauride Palace with its columns and its dome—the seat of the Duma, the home of the Constituent Assembly—lay silent. Whatever happened now, a new chapter was beginning in my life. We crossed through the garden—the open parkways where as a child I’d thrown that snowball at Kolya in a fit of precocious jealousy, and which I watched with such yearning through the window of my prison. The sky stretched fresh, a pale blue, scrubbed and starched as Vaula’s aprons.

Proletarian families on holiday were filling Znamenskaya Square, now called Insurrection, their normally drooping heads held high, and why not? The World Revolution was at hand. At last it might be safe to look beyond cold and hunger to a new day. I felt a twinge of guilt for abandoning Mina to all those speeches. But I was with Kolya now, and we had business to attend to. At my side, he stretched and sighed, speaking to me as men do, facing front. “So wonderful to be back. I never thought I’d see it again. What a day. And you!”

I felt it, too, but I didn’t like being down here at the station, out in the open with Kolya, even disguised. This was prime territory for the Archangel and his men. “Shouldn’t we walk farther apart?”

“You were the one who wanted to come along,” he said. “Getting nervous?”

He bought pirozhky from a street vendor, and we walked through the crowd, watching the revolutionary circus of holidaymakers, modernist constructions, agitprop players. “What a farce. I hope they like what they’re getting.” He finished his pie, brushed his coat off, and tipped his head toward the pillared entrance to the station. “Follow me.”

Happy as I was, the sudden realization that my life was completely in Kolya’s unpredictable hands whistled through me like a wind through a too-light jacket. I did not want to go back into that station.

“Cold feet?”

“Davai,” I said.

The darkness of the terminal after the morning light left me temporarily blinded. Suddenly I felt the sly inquiry of a pickpocket’s fingers. I twisted to catch sight of my assailant, a girl of around twelve, and made a half second’s contact with her blue eyes gazing back at me, round and hard as quartz. Then she stuck out her tongue, a little girl again, and laughed before diving back into the crowd. The orphans of the revolution, left behind by starving families or by cholera or typhus or just lost in the madness, wandered the streets in gangs. Sometimes the girls worked as prostitutes. The boys scraped together a living as thieves, lookouts, or second-story men, like my hooligan friends from the Rostral Column. The station was lousy with them—the very reason people had been so happy to employ me as a porter and watcher of luggage.