by Janet Fitch
In no hurry to return for pre-dinner duties, I strolled under the unfurling lindens, enjoying the symphony of birdsong, when I heard a gang of new recruits being marched to the barracks. I automatically stepped out of their path. “Marina!” someone called. I glanced up. Amid the usual pale, desperate faces of the draftees, among their patchily shaven heads and homemade caps, a tall recruit was waving at me. His dark eyebrows met in the middle—Bogdan! And there was hatchet-throated Ilya Ionian, and sandy-haired Gleb—marching together in a group of maybe twenty conscripts. I ran after them. “Bogdan!” I didn’t care who saw me. He tried to run back to me but was stopped by a soldier’s rifle.
“Look at you!” he grinned. “We thought you’d gone back to Petrograd!”
I could see the blood near his ear where the shaving had nicked him. “No one’s going to Petrograd. Only leaving. How did they get you?” I was trotting alongside as the soldiers pressed them onward.
“The village turned us in.”
Yes, Lyuda had warned me. They’re not all that safe there at Maryino. It’s only a matter of time.
“They burned the house to the ground.”
A numbness came over me, dull and thick like a stifling quilt. A roaring in my ears. Maryino. The big dacha…my childhood and my mother’s. My grandparents, my brothers. That lost world. I thought it would survive—that someone would always live there, even if I could no longer return.
“They roughed up the girls,” Bogdan said. Meaning raped. Meaning beaten. But left alive.
“The Mother is safe,” Ilya added in his deep singer’s voice. “They got away. The Master. Magda.”
The smoke, I could smell it. Burned it to the ground.
“Of course they would,” I said. “Where did they go?”
Bogdan shrugged. That familiar gesture. Oh, for something familiar, I didn’t realize how I would miss it! “I don’t know. We woke up and they were gone.”
“They’d been planning it all along,” Gleb broke in. “Just like the Petrograd dacha. Left us there with our dicks in our hands.”
“And Avdokia?”
“The old lady too.” They’d taken her with them, and headed out, probably behind the Urals. How would she survive? She’d wanted to be buried in Russia, in the yard of the village church. I imagined my mother and Ukashin heading east now, into the madness of Siberia. And I would never see Avdokia again. I clung to Bogdan’s rough sleeve, letting my tears slide down my face. Maryino, all gone, the big logs, the deep porches. Why cry? When I’d gotten out by the skin of my teeth. Knowing I’d never see it again. But I still thought it would exist. I could go back, someday. But the world wasn’t made that way. It burned itself behind you.
“Enough,” the guard said, tearing my fingers from Bogdan’s sleeve. “He’ll be back someday, girlie, if he’s lucky.” He shoved Bogdan ahead with his rifle.
“What happened to Pasha?” I called after them. “And Katrina?”
“They got away,” my friend shouted back as Gleb lost himself among the other recruits. Katrina’s love for her Pasha had saved her. As Gleb’s would not have. Sweet Bogdan turned and waved once more. “See you back in Petrograd,” he yelled. “I’ll be dancing at the Mariinsky!”
“See you there,” I called after him, as they marched away down the avenue.
So there it was. The end of Ionia. Drafted, abandoned, defiled, the house burned, and the Family of the Future flung to the five dimensions.
I felt time, the iron thing, groaning. Bogdan, turning the corner, disappeared. That sublime dancer—in the army. Like harnessing a prize thoroughbred to a caisson. Why couldn’t there be a place in this world for someone not a soldier? The sweet, the gullible, the beautiful? Bogdan and Natalya, Andrei Petrovin, Seryozha. Only the Ukashins left standing, the Kolyas, the Arkadys, fanatics and criminals. I waved to the empty street, knowing we would never meet again in this life or the next. All of us disappearing into the tunnel of the terrible year, cloaked in thin sunlight.
5 Dom 13
May came in its robes of green, squeezing the darkness back. The baby wouldn’t let me sleep. I did nothing all day but pray for night, but now in the brief dark, in the narrow child’s cot across from sleeping Liza, I sweated and tossed. The only reality was this child, growing within me, my belly taking me hostage, commandeering me like troops on the move, requisitioning my reserves, billeting its soldiers within a body no longer my own, but collectivized. It was getting hard to breathe, I was exhausted all the time.
I imagined childbirth. They talked about it in the Mothers’ Course, but a woman is not a cow. What if I died? I was only nineteen. Who would mourn me? Styopa Radulovich. And the child, if it lived. I should write something for him, or her, try to explain myself. I thought of Pushkin, the crowds that gathered outside his house as he lay bleeding on his divan after the duel with D’Anthès. The immortal Keats, dying of consumption in Rome.
Alas! that all we lov’d of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal!
To have earned such a mourner as Shelley. The one-armed railwayman would write no elegies. What would remain of this unique sensibility that only I possessed, that would never come again? I crammed the pillow over my head, so Liza would not hear my weeping. What had become of my courage? I heard the lines from Tsvetaeva in my head:
For my poems, written so early
That I didn’t even know that I was—a poet.
Breaking free like spray from a fountain
Like sparks from a rocket…
She was only sixteen. I was three years older, and had done nothing with my life but make terrible mistakes.
The baby roiled at the most impossible time, at midnight, hungry, craving more of that sunflower oil I knew was in the cabinet downstairs. I tried to find a more comfortable position in the narrow bed, a bit of unsoaked sheet, and thought about Dom 13, Moskovskaya Street.
I had been delaying my return to Korsakova’s this afternoon—as usual—my bare feet enjoying the silky dust of the road, when I passed a sagging wooden house, not so very different from this one. In Petrograd they would have already pulled it down for firewood. I’d stopped to take a sip from the bottle of oil I’d just bought in the illegal market. I called it my tip, praying it wouldn’t be tainted with kerosene. Sunflower, thank God. I could feel the calories surge into my blood.
“You know about this house?” the old man on the porch called down to me. I quickly capped the oil. Couldn’t a person steal a sip of oil in peace? Was there always someone spying? “It’s a post house. To the penal colonies. The Decembrists stopped here in 1826.” His little cracked voice. “Fyodor Mikhailovich was here in 1849. On his way to exile in Siberia.”
I hated when old people talked like this, like they were there in 1849 and knew Fyodor Mikhailovich. “That’s a long time ago, Granddad.”
“Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. Russia’s greatest writer, you great ignorant redheaded cow.”
I touched the splintered shingles, silvered with age. Dostoyevsky had stayed here on his way to Siberia. Right here. Of course I knew the story, about how he’d been hauled before the firing squad at the Peter and Paul Fortress, only to be reprieved at the last minute and sent to Siberia. The tsar’s idea of a lesson.
“House 13, you’ve never heard of it?”
I stroked the shingles, pressed my lips to them. To think, in one of those sagging wooden rooms above me—maybe that one, with the broken window—had lain the greatest student of the mystery of man the world has ever known. Would ever know. I imagined him on the floor, his coat around him. Perhaps trembling with fever. On his way to Siberia, three thousand miles. Peshkom—on foot. I knew he wouldn’t have been alone, but I felt his loneliness.
I never knew Dostoyevsky had stopped here on his journey, that lonely road to Siberian mines and wastes. Levitan had painted it—the famous Vladimirka. It was a testament to his elegant taste that he had painted it empty. No
prisoners in shackles, just an empty country road under a heavy sky, a distant church at its tragic vanishing point. Only the title intimated the suffering that road represented. Each posthouse on the long journey to the penal colonies in the east bore a number, each one day’s walk from the last. That road went through every Russian town, the road to exile and servitude.
And one of its Stations of the Cross was right here in Tikhvin, in a crumbling old wooden house on Moskovskaya Street.
Now moonlight glared in through the calico half-curtains, like the gaze of some goddess I’d somehow offended, determined to blow my ship farther and farther from my native shore, into this mundane exile. Dostoyevsky would understand me. Dostoyevsky, with his devils and desperate men. Raskolnikov too had turned at night like a chicken on a spit. Was I not a superfluous man? And whether he had become a monarchist and a reactionary or not, he spoke to our conflicted souls.
Across the gap between our little beds, Liza snored lightly—she had a slight cold. Gripping her old doll Ninochka tight, probably dreaming of the Warlord Dracula. Then in the morning, she’d throw Ninochka aside, ashamed to be caught clutching it. It made me smile—that odd age of shame. Perhaps I would have my child here in this very bed. Torn from my flesh, no Avdokia to rub my back, to pray, to tell me what to do. I could not stop thinking of those hospitals I’d visited, those ignorant nurses, no doctors at all.
All day, I could be brave, but sleepless in the silence of the house, I lost all courage. Kolya, think of me. I hoped my face haunted his nights. But I was sure he had forgotten me. He was no sentimentalist, only liked the flavor of love. Tried it on as he would try on a coat, and laugh at himself in the mirror.
The baby was hungry. Get me something! Bread, oil, there had to be something left unlocked.
I put my dress on, found the screwdriver the railwayman had lent me, and padded barefoot down the stairs, already guilty, slipping silently past the doors where men farted and snored, the air smelling of quiet grief and stale smoke, past Styopa’s little room as he dreamed of railway switches and fish.
On the first floor, I searched the dimness of the kitchen for something to swallow, quick, like a dog. A mouthful of bread—the baby was ravenous and would not be satisfied. Kolya’s greedy child. The cabinets were locked, the widow wouldn’t have been so careless not to lock up the larder. But it wasn’t hard to unscrew the hinges…Careful not to break the hasp, I lifted the small door away, slipped the bottle of oil out, and drank a hefty slug. Then another. Forced myself to rescrew the cabinet hinges. A perfect crime.
But I couldn’t force myself back to our little room at the top of the stairs—like a coffin. I sat at the men’s long table, my pale feet dirty, my ankles swollen like cudgels, my belly pressing high on my heart, which thumped like a woman beating a rug. I started to cry. For myself, for this lump of flesh, accidentally conceived. For this I’d given up my flame, this life. What of my grand destiny? What of my passion, my soul?
“Marina, what are you doing down here?” Korsakova in her nightdress and shawl, a candle in her hand. “Are you all right?”
I nodded, wiped my eyes, tried to look innocent, tried not to belch. Good-hearted Raisa Filipovna. How wretched of me to drink that oil. Would she notice? But no, she brought out a box of tea, lit the battered samovar, sat down at the scrubbed table. She looked like she’d slept no better than I had, her skin creased, her eyes grave. “I’ve been thinking, Marina. I’ve been thinking a lot, about the future. About the house, and Liza.”
“I can’t sleep either,” I said, the oil rumbling in my gullet. “As soon as I lie down, the baby starts jumping. I swear she’s going to be a dancer.”
Korsakova bit her lip. “Listen. Listen, Marina, and try not to take this the wrong way. But your coming here, it was a mistake.”
I blinked, trying to absorb what she was telling me. I’d grown stupid with my pregnancy. Panic clutched me. She knew I was stealing…oh God! “Was it something I did?” I tried. “I work hard, don’t I?”
She wouldn’t look at me, just wrapped her shawl tight around herself. “You’re a good worker. It’s not that.” Her softened jaw, the subtle lines around her lips seemed deeper now.
“What is it, then?” Please, God, I will never steal anything from her ever again, as long as I live!
“It’s impossible.” Now she looked up, and her eyes, so unlike her fun-loving daughter’s, like the sorrowing Virgin’s herself. “Try to understand. She’s such an impressionable girl, and she idolizes you. Ponimaesh?”
Liza? Was she talking about Liza? I knew I had done nothing wrong there. I encouraged Liza to love books, to recite Pushkin and Lermontov. I made her do her homework. What was troubling about that? That she had become more outspoken? More defiant? Oh, damn politics! What was I supposed to do, creep around on my knees, perfectly silent with my eyes trained on the ground? “They’re revolutionary times…”
Raisa Filipovna’s dark eyes looked so mournful. She ran her long hand against the lip of the well-scrubbed table. “Really, I don’t believe you’re married. I don’t think you even know whose baby it is.”
I tried to keep my mouth from falling open. Children are everyone’s responsibility. How to even begin to defend myself. “I am married, I swear! And anyway, this is Soviet Russia—it shouldn’t even make any difference.”
She massaged her knuckles, her wedding ring was far too big. She hadn’t had to sell it yet, though she’d been widowed for years. “Carrying on with Stepan Radulovich right in front of everybody, that does make a difference. Even in Soviet Russia. I can’t have that again. I can’t have it.” Her ring, she was twisting her wedding ring. The thing I didn’t have.
I tried to concentrate but it was like listening to voices when you swam underwater. Perplexing sounds from another element.
“She admires you. I hear your voice in hers. ‘Marina says. Marina says marriage is outdated. Marina says children belong to everyone. Marina says, Marina says.’ And you, sneaking down the hall at all hours of the night. You think we don’t know? You think we can’t hear you?”
The shame of it rose within me. Had they all been listening to me and Styopa make love? The whole house? No, it couldn’t be. She would have fired me weeks ago.
“I’ll give you a week to find a new position,” she said firmly.
The heart of a kitten. I could see by those bruised, sleepless eyes, she didn’t like doing this. But she would. She was a reactionary. The world was changing, and in her rigid, mother’s mind, she wanted it to stop. She didn’t understand it, and she was going to do what she could to keep it still.
I sat at the table, my mind an empty steppe. The Vladimirka stretched before me. Exile. The last thing I’d imagined—the Cossack army descending! Unsheathed bayonets flashing red gold in the lowering sun. Losing my place? This awful place? This narrow bed, these rough hands? These sleepless nights? My back, kinked with work, hips that groaned with stiff complaint, my aching knees, kneeling on these very boards? Losing all this? I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream, Take it, then! Who needs it? Your pots and floors and queues and rugs. Is it my fault Yulia was a slut? But I had no idea where I would go. I had no money, no friends. It was difficult enough to find a roof and a job to keep rations coming, but without friends…I thought of Styopa, up there snoring away. How would he like this kitten now?
What would Sergeevna say if I told her Raisa Filipovna had thrown me out? I could denounce Korsakova as counterrevolutionary. Look what she’s done to me, a poor pregnant girl with Bolshevik sympathies. A landlord, a bourgeois! But I could never do such a thing. Even I had lines I would not cross. She was just trying to protect her child in her idiotic way. It was true, Liza did listen to me, watch me, pepper me with questions, imitate my intonations, my expressions. “She’s a smart girl,” I argued. “I don’t think becoming a pregnant housemaid is part of her plan.”
“Keep your voice down,” she said.
My tears spilled out, confusion and shame. “Rai
sa Filipovna, please. I won’t deny it. I was lonely, and he was kind…” This poor widow, twisting her ring. Poor Korsakova, listening to us eke out our meager love. Did she envy me my puny pleasures? My one-armed railroad man? If I wasn’t pregnant, I’d walk out right now. I hated having to beg, and yet, what else could I do? “I’ll give him up. I didn’t realize…Please, give me another chance.” She looked so miserable. “I’ll tell him it’s over. You’ll never have cause to doubt me.” I’d earned my respect for the out-of-doors. I needed her more than I needed Styopa. More than I needed Sergeevna or Lenin himself. “Just two more months, I’ll have the baby and be out of your life forever.” Like a shot. Back to Petrograd or whatever was left of it. I’d find my faithless, worthless knight, someone who knew me, who understood my nature, who could even embrace it.
“No,” she said, stiffening her back, drawing her shawl around her. “It’s happening too fast. She’ll be lost by summer. The men already joke behind your back, call you Styopa’s barefoot bride. Liza’s old enough to understand.”
How could this be happening now? The ringing sound of my resistance to this was all I could hear. I wanted to scream, but instead I whispered, “The mother of a child, you wouldn’t really toss me into the street like so much garbage.”
She laughed, just one short bitter churt.
I imagined her, sitting up in bed, listening to me creep down the stairs, knowing that the railwayman and I would be making love as she held her book of morning and evening prayers. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had kissed her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me. Please. I’ll give him up. I’ll be a model citizen. I’ll set a better example.” In one last hopeless gesture, I threw myself at her feet, I grabbed her hands and kissed them. I felt like a character out of Dostoyevsky.
“Stop it. Get up.”
How had I not considered her terror that her remaining child would turn out like the other? When, of course, she would, eventually. All girls grew up. But this was my neck we were talking about. My baby.