Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

I caught the block and placed it on the pile, then struck a poet’s pose, foot up on a log, as I scraped my thoughts together.

They say there’s not one shred of coal

From Tula to Donbass

Instead the trains run regularly

On birchwood chunks and Vikzhel gas.

Har har har. Oh they loved it. They even stopped throwing wood at me so hard. Encouraged, I continued.

Vikzhel men they love their pipes

Warm outhouses and ugly wives

Vikzhel men jerk off at night

Their daughters have to sleep with knives.

Admitting my uselessness, I managed to keep them entertained until we’d filled the wagon. I hadn’t known Misha was such a shirker. So unlike Marina, who would work until her fingers bled, always trying to prove herself, her value, her intelligence, her stamina, prove herself willing and capable, a real comrade. But Misha was a natural anarchist, traveling on charm, a wastrel and hooligan desiring only to seize the color and avoid the dreariness of life.

Finally Kolya returned with Olinsky, I could spot his jaunty stride painted in the light from the fire barrels at a hundred yards. The two of them climbed into the cab of the locomotive. The Georgian waved me forward, and the others left. Now it was the four of us: engineer, fireman, and two unauthorized passengers, and a tight squeeze it was indeed. Most of the space was occupied by the monstrous cast-iron cylinder of a boiler, a remnant from the reign of Catherine the Great. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had run on her ex-lovers at some point.

As the Georgian stoked—with coal, thank God—he urged me to sing some of my better chastushki to the newcomers. I was shy, but he remembered the first lines—I could not help but complete them. I could see Kolya adored the masquerade. Olinsky, who proved to be the engineer, chuckled but spoke little, his attention absorbed in checking dials, turning cranks, and pulling levers on the side of the big boiler. Slowly the pressure mounted, steam building. You could feel it, like an immense winding spring. He released the steam with an enormous rush, then let it build back up again, twice, three times, and finally we slowly backed into the station, the tenders behind us, until, with a clang and a jolt, we met the waiting train. My excitement surged ahead of all waiting fears. We were finally going to be off on our adventure. Kolya’s secret grin flashed, just for me.

Olinsky checked his own watch. “Tea, anyone? The samovar’s hot.”

“Company’s here,” said Kolya, nodding out the window.

Black leather jackets signaled the arrival of the Railway Cheka. Six of them. They boarded the train, disappearing inside the crowded cars. This would take a while, if they planned to inspect the contents and travelers on this densely packed train. Surely they would find us. But Kolya was sunny and cool as a September morning. Olinsky siphoned off some of the boiling water from the engine into a pot. Kolya added tea to the mix and I tried to hold my cup steady so I wouldn’t betray my nerves. A sudden bang made me jump—a blow to the sheet metal of the cab. The Georgian opened the door and a tall, leather-jacketed man climbed up, letting in a rush of cold air behind him. “Well, Comrades? Let’s see some papers.”

Runnels of sweat trickled down my neck. I was afraid to even blink. The engineer handed over his clipboard covered with curled, greasy papers—records of settings and inspections. The Cheka man, tall and graceless, with a knobbly nose under his leather cap, looked through them perfunctorily and thrust them back at the engineer. “Labor books.” He wiggled his fingers, as though tickling the chin of a billy goat.

Oh God. My labor book was for some girl named Marina. I watched as Olinsky and the Georgian pulled theirs out and handed them to—or, rather, tossed them with purposeful insolence at—the Cheka man. They bounced off his chest and fell to the floor of the cab. “Pick them up,” said the Chekist.

“Kiss my ass,” said the engineer.

Kolya produced two from his coat and scooped the two from the floor into the Chekist’s hands.

“What are these clowns doing here?” He pointed at me and Kolya as he inspected the labor books. Specifically, me. “You. How old are you?”

I could feel sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades, my breasts pushing at the bandage. My heart thumped as loud as the engine. “Eighteen, Comrade.” Misha tried to keep his voice deep.

He was looking at one of the books. “Fifteen,” he said. “Apprentice engineer. What a load of crap. You Vikzhel bastards. Featherbedding. How about you, Shorty? What’s your excuse?” he asked Kolya. Narrowing his eyes as if he recognized him. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”

I felt my guts rumbling, hoped my bowels wouldn’t let go. To have come so close only to have Kolya fall into Cheka hands… all for nothing. What would I do if they arrested him? Head east on this train, I supposed.

“Yeah, I was visiting your mother,” Kolya said.

The Georgian laughed.

“Shut up,” said the Cheka man. “What are you doing on this train?” He went back to examining Kolya’s labor book in the light of the kerosene lamp. “Mechanic Rubashkov.”

“I’m going to Vologda. There’s a train they don’t know how to fix. The English left it behind, a little gift to the Soviet people. Only they wrecked it first.”

“Why do you have”—he looked at my labor book again—“Mikhailov’s documents?”

“He’s my brother. Half brother. He was going off with a whore earlier. I didn’t want him to lose anything while he was out getting the clap.”

“Prostitution is a filthy remnant of bourgeois culture,” the Cheka man warned Misha gravely. “There is no place for prostitution in our soviet society.”

I nodded. I didn’t have to fake the terror I felt. “She’s just a regular girl,” Misha protested. “My brother envies my luck with women.”

“Are we done?” said Olinsky. “I have a train to run.”

But Knobbly Nose was still eyeing our labor books. “You will move at the convenience of the Petrograd Railway Cheka, Engineer Olinsky.”

He handed us back our documents but gave Kolya an icy, close-range examination before letting him take his book back.

Then he clambered down from the cab and the engineer slammed the door shut.

The visit took the steam out of our boilers. No one said anything after that, or even exchanged a glance. We all knew what was happening back there on the train as the Cheka searched among the terrified passengers. Finally Olinsky produced a deck of tattered cards, and we played a few quiet rounds of durak as we waited for the all clear. The Cheka operatives removed half a dozen people from the train, marching them through the now empty station toward their own painful future. Each one of us imagined the day when this might be our fate.

OVERHEAD, CLOUDS FANNED OUT into a giant winged angel, while around us stubbly fields still showed patches of brown through an expanse of snow. Thank God the road had frozen over or the wagon would have bogged down ten miles outside the railway town of Cherepovets. I swayed on the seat next to Kolya, feeling queasy as we alternated between dense pine forest and open land under the mesmerizing sky. This land had a dream life of its own—the drama of the sky, the forlorn, harvested fields, the distant lines of trees. Bare birches rattled their knucklebones as we passed by. Every once in a while a single man on horseback or in a wagon waved a short salute. Sometimes we overtook a group of recruits or a man driving cattle with a willow switch. I thought of Annoushka as we silently passed ruined manor houses two stories high, the roofs caved in, surrounded by a few blighted fruit trees. I couldn’t help wondering how Maryino had fared.

Kolya clucked and snapped the reins of the dappled gray as the road unspooled from between its ears. I hadn’t felt well for a week, spending most of my time with my head resting on his lap, looking up at his curly beard and the puffs of steam coming out of his nostrils or at birds crossing the big churning sky—ducks, cranes—flying south. The travel had proved harder than anything I’d imagined. Well, what had I pictured, that we’d be sipping sherry and appraising jewels and precious art? The reality was, we were making a map of remote villages, woods and fields, fording gelid streams not quite frozen over, sleeping in peasant izbas if we were lucky and in the straw with their animals if we weren’t.

In the beginning, our greed for one another drove us like a fire. How miraculous just to kiss openly! I was a woman again, dressed in sarafan, blouse, and woolen kerchief bought in Cherepovets along with a jacket and a sheepskin, complete down to felt boots and red beads around my neck—Kolya’s peasant wife. How luxurious it had been to lie naked next to him in an inn and have him slip a ring on my finger. “With this ring, I thee wed.” It was a joke and not a joke. I had waited so long to be with this man, to really know him for the very first time. All his mysteries about to be revealed.

We boarded the Volga ferry in Cherepovets with a big gray horse and a large wagon and arm in arm, rapturously watched the shore fall away. I’d never had such a sense of high adventure, Kolya and me, husband and wife, the red cord of our fates braided like our laced fingers on the railing as we stood on that deck, gazing out at a river so wide it could have been an ocean.

We traveled south as far as Rybinsk, awash with sailors and flats of lumber, Volga boatmen, fishermen and their wives. This was a world I’d only read about—a world Genya knew, full of barrel makers and the smell of planed wood. Riding along in our wagon, we sang and played tricks on each other, sometimes we made love in the back because we were unable to wait for nightfall.

Our first successes astonished me. In village after wretched village, peasants opened their cellars to us, led us to springhouses, dug up pits in which their hoarded grain had been stashed. Grain, potatoes, even butter and cheese. I was shocked. It was just as the Bolsheviks had said—peasants were holding back, hiding their surpluses in the woods and under the floors of their wooden cabins. Genya used to say that the Russian peasant, once he had his land, was done with his revolution. But our peasant hosts complained that the fixed price the Soviet provisioning brigades offered was impossibly low. They knew the cities were starving, and they cared to a point. They all had relatives in the cities, in the factories. But they didn’t know what would happen come spring. They had to think of the future.

“What do the Bolsheviks know about our lives?” our first host had said. “Why should we sacrifice when they offer us nothing in return?” The peasants needed scythes and plows, machine parts, nails, but the factories were dead. Half the workers were out self-provisioning, being pressed into the food brigades terrorizing the countryside, seizing the grain of the so-called kulaks, the better-off peasants who hired others, who often made money in trade as well as by farming.

“What’s a kulak?” our host had railed. “I hire someone to replace my boys in the army, and suddenly I’m a kulak and my grain’s good for seizure? I supported the revolution! I gave up grain when the workers first came along—I don’t want anybody to starve. But when these so-called Kombedy come along”—the Committees of the Village Poor—“telling us how much we can keep? When they’ve done nothing, these village termites? What does Lenin know about crops? And how much seed you need come spring? The devil with them, that’s what we say, and their nine poods per person.” A pood, about thirty pounds, was the allowable holdback per person for the year.

But soon we’d seen what happened to villages that were discovered to be holding back more. We drove through one that had been burned to the ground. It was a new kind of civil war—not Red versus White but town versus country, peasant versus worker, the poor versus the poor. Waged over not politics but grain. I remember when I’d begged Varvara to send me to Maryino during Red Terror. It’s going to be worse in the countryside than here. With us it’s almost over.

She thought it was all the fault of the speculator, people like Kolya and the peasants who sold to him. If only the peasant would sense his historic role as the ally of the proletarian, she used to fulminate. If only the Cheka could eliminate the speculators, then the Petrocommune stores would have food, the workers could get back to work, the peasants could get the factory items they wanted, and Russia would move ahead into the future.