by Janet Fitch
Blau leaned forward, his bony hands clasped together between his knees like a penitent in a Lutheran church. “Thirty thousand Freikorps, with enough armaments to retake France. The soviet was no match for them.”
“And the Kiel sailors? Bremen? The Ruhr?” This was our hope, that these workers’ strongholds would come to Russia’s aid.
Blau shook his head. Gone.
I sat back in my seat, knocked down by the news. Why hadn’t we heard this on the agit-train? No one had told us that the revolution was finished in the West.
“There’s still agitation in Turin and Milan,” said the woman. “But Poland’s gone, Romania—”
“Hungary?”
Four heads shook in unison. “Also the Slovak Republic—the Czechs took it in July.”
My head swam with the news. It had been so long since I knew anything of the outside world. I propped Iskra in the crook of my arm, fussed with her hair, trying to take in the enormity of these reversals. “What about America? The miners. The steelworkers. Seattle’s general strike.” On the Red October, we’d drunk in these stories—strikes and struggle worldwide. The textile plants of France and the mines of Wales, the factories of Glasgow and the steel mills of America, the world was rising up all around us. And we’d been sharing this information as fact to crowds in the thousands. Everything that Moscow had been radioing us. All dissolving like a pretty frost.
The German with the knobby face and heavy brow presented his view. “You have to understand the frenzy in France and England to revenge themselves on Germany. Their socialists are either jumping on the cart or warring among themselves how best to use the knout of your Soviet Revolution to win concessions from their own governments.”
“And America?”
He grimaced. “As long as the worker in America can buy bread to feed his family, we’re not going to see socialist revolution there. We were the closest in Germany, but our timing was off. Comrade Liebknecht said it was too soon, and sadly, our socialists were too willing to settle for what we could get. Now it’s over, at least for a while. You Russians, you’re going to have to go it alone until we catch up with you.”
My mouth filled with dust. No world revolution. No workers of the West coming to rescue us, no flood of industrial goods, no help. We were alone. The only Red Republic in the world. We had been lying to the people all this time. Because horses have to be fed, where men can live on the hope of it. All those discussions with Varvara, how the revolution may have begun in Russia, the least industrialized nation in Europe, but we would be the spark, and Europe would catch fire. Without world revolution, what did we have? What were we going to do?
We’d been abandoned by the world’s proletariat like children in a train station.
I looked down at the baby in my lap, loosened from her cloth, gazing up at me with those green eyes as if I were the eighth wonder of the world, Hera of the mountainous breast. Then she closed her eyes, her face went red, and I realized I had more immediate problems than world revolution. The poor Germans! The foul diaper had to be removed and the baby cleaned in sight of all, which I accomplished with foreseeable clumsiness. They were so kind, holding their gaze out the window, now full of twilight. But what to do with the remains? The stink was unbearable. Of course, it couldn’t be one of the compact variety.
The German SD woman, Lise, volunteered to hold Iskra—Danke!—while I went out in the corridor and tried to address the problem. I would have liked to just throw it out the window and been done with it, but I couldn’t afford to lose any diapers. It might be years before I could get more.
I waded through the passengers clogging the passageway, hanging from the windows, smoking and spitting sunflower shells on the floor, until I found a family, the woman with an infant in arms. “What do I do with dirty ones?” Holding up Iskra’s little present.
She shrugged. “Put it away until the next station,” she said.
Not likely. I waited my turn at the unspeakable convenience, where I knocked the remains as well as I could out of the offending linen, poured water from the tap into my bucket, rinsed and dumped it down the hole—you could see the tracks down below—rinsed and dumped again. In the end, it wasn’t too bad—stained, but when it dried, it might be useable, and in any case, wouldn’t make everyone ill. Halfway through the operation, someone began banging on the toilet door. I hurried to finish, and the moment I opened it, a heavyset man pushed past me, I could hear him vomiting. There was a samovar with boiling water. I threw a little of it into the bucket for good luck, rinsed, burning my fingers, wrung out the cloth and threw the water out the window, hoping it wouldn’t spray the people in the next car, before I inched back through the shuddering train to our compartment.
Now Iskra was on the lap of the quiet German. Both were all smiles, she was reaching for his cap. “Eine was für kleine Miezekatzekatze? Ich habe meine Frau in den Monaten nicht gesehen.” He sighed. “Meine Kinder. Zhena moya. Deti.”
“You are lucky to be raising her now, in a Soviet society,” Lise said over the noise of the car. “Women are going to benefit from this revolution like no women in the history of the world. If only we could accomplish what you have accomplished here.” I nodded. It made me proud, but also anxious. I certainly hoped that the Petrograd Soviet had made some inroads into building those crèches and kindergartens by the time I got home. I was going to need them.
The train rattled and screeched and jarred its way through the night.
In Vyatka, we said auf wiedersehen to the German comrades. They were taking another train, zigzagging their way to Moscow. I was sorry to see them go. I brought my pail to the engineer, who filled it with boiling water straight from the engine. I gave Iskra’s diapers a real wash—God bless the factory committee and their gift of a simple pail. Now I felt bad for being so irritated at their enthusiasm. I laid the cloths in the sun at the end of the platform, weighing them down with rocks, and got talking with the railwaymen, broad-faced workers in grimy overalls, as they serviced the train and loaded wood and insulted the railroad Cheka climbing aboard to search for contraband. Iskra’s charm won them all. Funny, I’d only imagined her presence in terms of difficulty. I hadn’t realized how everyone would fall in love with my redheaded baby. They invited me to join them for lunch, where, over a meal of soup and cucumbers, I repaid their generosity with stories about the Red October and having the baby and working in the fields—making a pretty tale of it. That was me, the Scheherazade of the Russian rails.
Back in the switching house, I noticed a chessboard on one of the shelves by the stove. “Who plays shakhmaty?”
I spent the rest of the afternoon playing chess with members of the Vyatka rail crew. I beat the first two, and then excused myself to nurse Iskra, covering her with the long cloth that was also her hammock. I’d bet one of my packages of cheese against three bread cards, and then the bread cards against a lighter, and walked away with all of them. “Where’d you learn to play like that, devushka?” the foreman asked, smoking a pipe, still staring at the board in disbelief, as if the pieces had moved by themselves.
Those snowy evenings playing chess with my father. I was not particularly gifted, but I was the only one in the family interested in playing. I so wanted him to think I was intelligent, that I was worthy of his time. The hours we spent in his study, him cleaning his pipe and tapping it out, all those little gestures, the smell, the closeness, his brown eyes, the neatly trimmed beard, his dimples. We would play the famous games, Marshall v. Chigorin, Rubinstein v. Lasker, starting with the endgames, stopping, discussing. Papa’s professorial voice, explaining, until I came to feel in my very bones the power of rooks controlling overlapping rows, the surprise of the knights, the versatile queen. He scolded me on my predilection for lightning strikes and odd impulsive moves early in the game, proving to me again and again how methodical development of one’s back row and pawn defenses would win out against startling aggression or whimsy, which soon fell apart for lack of correct pla
cement of lesser men. But in the end, neither one of us had played a very good defensive game, had we, Papa?
I remember how angry Varvara was when we first played and I beat her, not once but every time. She considered me flighty, and yet, who ended up pinned to the edge of the board, or isolated in the center? She hadn’t had the advantage of growing up with such a father, a man who worshipped cool intellect and living within the rules. In the end, however, she had won on a much larger chessboard. My father couldn’t anticipate what life would deal out in the streets and courtyards of his country, that abiding by the rules would never win against a player who might turn over the board and pull out a Mauser, stick it to your forehead.
The heat lessened with the brief but blessed northern night, and by the time my train trundled into the Vyatka station at three in the morning, I’d won a small pair of scissors, a fountain pen, and a watch that didn’t work. I left them a poem:
Redheaded and red-handed
Red Marina and her little Spark.
Thank you for helping them
along their Red way.
They introduced me to the engineer and the conductor. “But don’t play chess with her,” the foreman warned. “You’ll end up without your shoes and a month of rations.”
There were no first- or second-class carriages on this train, just third class and miles of boxcars brimming with people. Iskra and I were lucky beyond lucky that the conductor got us into third class at all. It was utterly packed, but at least it was designed for human transportation, with windows and berths. The heat was still awful, but once we got going, I imagined there would be a breeze to cut the ripe stew of unwashed, sweating bodies. I followed him down the teeming central aisle of the uncompartmented car, Iskra sweating against me, picking our way through passengers sitting on their packages and sleeping leaning on one another’s shoulders. On either side of the aisle rose three layers of facing berths filled with luckier people who could sleep stretched at full length, heads toward the open windows.
He stopped at a set of berths about a third of the way down and rousted a sleeping boy out of the top berth, up by the ceiling, lifting him down and unceremoniously shoving him in with his mother on the second tier. “Sorry, kid, we got company.”
The mother, startled from sleep and half naked in the heat, raked me with her stink-eyes. “Who’s this, your whore?”
“How’d you like to spend a couple days on the platform and cool off, eh citizen?” He turned to me. “She give you any lip, you let me know, I’ll throw ’er off. Good luck, Comrade.”
“Oh, and a baby too.” She sighed, glottally, ekh, and irritably pulled her ugly son over to her on the narrow bunk. “This is already the worst trip I’ve ever taken. Now God has to make sure it’s the worst I’ll ever take.”
I eyed the thin, hard padding of the eye-level bunk—greasy, cloth-covered, about half an inch thick, up where it was hottest—and wondered how many people had slept on it in the last weeks and months. Fleas at best, lice at worst. I brushed it off as well as I could and put my bundle up there, spread out my sheepskin to lie on. At least it was summer. They said typhus was a winter disease. I couldn’t afford to get sick now—Iskra would have little chance of surviving anything we might catch on this train. I unbound her from the sling and put her up in the berth closest to the wall, and climbed up myself, apologizing as I stepped on the lower and then the middle berth. I lay down, loosening my clothes. How I hated to have to lie down on that bunk, but what choice did we have? Sleep sitting up for a week? I was lucky. I’d been lucky the whole way. Iskra was my luck. I could be in a boxcar. I could be lying on the floor with my infant.
“You’d better keep that baby quiet,” the woman below me hissed.
“Or what?” I said, turning over to face the window.
The woman proved to be a loud-mouthed, irritable harridan traveling with her husband and child from Perm to Petrograd, her husband a spets—specialist—in the chemical industry. She harped on me hour after hour, and when I returned from washing Iskra’s diapers (no offer to hold her, that was for sure) her kid was back lying in my bunk. He climbed down only under duress. Iskra and I spent most of our time lying in the berth up by the ceiling, sweating and watching the trees pass at almost walking speed as the train shuddered down the track. The middle bunk folded up, and everyone else sat on the bottom one, but there was only room for three people. I didn’t mind, I didn’t need to socialize. I slept and fed Iskra and assembled my plan for Petrograd. First, I would go down to the English Embankment and see if Kolya had returned. Then I would try Krestovskaya’s—that was a good-sized apartment, if the actress had been able to keep it after her husband was shot during Red Terror.
I could try Mina if it got desperate. Her mother, Sofia Yakovlevna, had always liked me and she had no idea that Misha and I were the same person—but Mina would be furious at my abandonment of her. Genya’s friend Anton Chernikov was a possibility…he might still have the Poverty Artel. There were still places I could go. And Iskra could see her city. I brushed her damp hair from her face—we were both sweated through—and dried her with the cloth, took the diaper off her in hopes of letting the sweat evaporate. I knew when to expect diaper usage. I hummed to her some of the work songs I had learned in the long hours of harvest.
It was a long way from Vyatka to Vologda, and this train stopped at every little town—Kotelnich, Svecha, Shabalino—and even in between, halting with an unearthly screech and shudder in the middle of nowhere. Another local roadblock, another search. Rough local militiamen in clothes that looked like they’d come off dead people would mount the train and search the cars. I figured it was safer to keep my gun on me, up near my waist behind the baby. Uncomfortable, but they would pat you down everywhere, it was an added bonus of the job.
They searched the cars, demanded everybody’s papers, though it was clear the man looking at mine, dirt caked on his fingers and in the lines on his face, could not read them. He found my food, but no surplus, just enough for the journey, and he returned my little packets and began harassing other people. Out the windows, I could see the boxcar passengers herded out into the sunlight, smoking, blinking like moles. Some of them seemed quite ill and lay in the shade of trees, unable to stand. It reminded me to thank the great forces for my berth and my spets’s family, irritating as they were. None of them were ill and neither were the men on the other side, two from Petrocommune and a talkative blue-eyed man who told everyone he was an agronomist from Ekaterinburg, though I noticed none of the searchers had searched him, or his berth, or his valise, which he kept under it. In case his hearty confidence and ruddy good health—when we were all suspicious and exhausted—didn’t give it away. A Cheka spy. Well, at least he wasn’t ill. I would take the woman and her smirking boy, who spit sunflower shells on the floor that we all had to walk on, even the Chekist—me with an illegal pistol digging into my ribs under my skirt—as long as they weren’t feverish or scratching with lice. Watching a pale, shaky boxcar woman sitting out the search under a tree with a baby at her breast, her dull eyes staring at nothing at all, I knew my luck was still holding.
The so-called agronomist took out a case and began assembling a cunning little chess set on his knee. “Does anyone play?”
He beat both the Petrocommune men, one in a shameful seven moves, narrating the game the whole time: Bishop to queen’s knight four. Queen takes pawn and checkmate. “You,” he said to the spets sitting opposite him. From where I lay in the top bunk, I could just see his shoes next to his wife’s heeled ones, and the boy’s sandals. “How about it? This tedium’s driving me crazy.”
“I can’t say I ever learned,” said the spets.
“He doesn’t do anything,” confided the wife, leaning forward. I could see the black roots of her blond hair. “Just plays with his chemicals. He doesn’t even know how to swim. Isn’t that right, Ivan Danilovich?”
Her husband said nothing. What a coward. Married to that loathsome woman. I wanted to plug
my ears with wax.
“Amazing he knew how to get a kid,” said the thick-lipped “agronomist,” sitting with his knees wide apart, crowding his seatmates. “Sure it’s his?”
She preened at his attention, touching her hair. “You could teach my Yasha. He’s a very bright boy.”
I could imagine the smirk on that little brat’s face. I saw another reason children shouldn’t be praised—that was one the Evil Eye could take any time.
“Do I look like a schoolteacher?” said the bull-necked Chekist. “Someone. Anyone. Hey, you up there, Red, with the baby. I know you’re listening. Can you play? Give you half a sausage.”
Play the Chekist? “Win or lose?”
“Oh, a hard bargainer! Why not? I’ll beat you with one hand tied behind my back. Girl chess players. No concentration.”
We’d see about that. “But there’s no room for me to sit.”
“Make room. You, go up there.” He held out his chubby paws. “Hand me the baby.”
I hated lowering Iskra into those fat hands. I could only imagine how many lives they had ended. But I did it, handed her to him, then gingerly negotiated the climb down from the bunk, hoping my gun wouldn’t clunk against my fellow passengers’ heads. I settled next to the spets on the bottom bunk as the boy clambered up into mine.
Unlike the Vikzhel men, the heavy-jowled Chekist proved a considerable adversary. Good development of pieces, castle on the queen’s side. He made no mistakes. But I would change his opinion of girl chess players. The set was tiny, with little pegs that fit into holes in the board so we could hand it back and forth without losing any of the pieces. The way he narrated his moves, like a man playing to a crowd, was odd and intended to rattle his opponent: Knight to bishop three. Bishop to rook four.