by Janet Fitch
“How can you be so selfish?” Dunya said.
Mina was speechless for a moment, shaking her head. “No. No. That’s the living end. You can leave with her. Who needs you either?!”
This wonderful family, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. Why had I ever come here? Why had I started this?
Her mother looked so frail, as if the sound of her family’s quarrelling had sucked the flesh from her bones. I was ashamed I had brought such misery here. She shook her head wearily, gazing at the younger girls, and rose, putting her hand on Mina’s shoulder as she wiped her tears. “Whatever we think about this, your sister has given everything to keep a roof over our heads. More than all of us combined. She’s taken your father’s responsibilities on her own shoulders. And if she says no, it’s got to be no.” She looked me in the eye with such regret. “I’m sorry, Marina. But these are terrible times.”
A silence dropped over the assembly. Aunt Fanya and Uncle Aaron looked down at their hands, knowing that they were the ones who were the biggest burden. It was horrible. I wanted to protest, I can bring in rations. I can help in the darkroom. With someone to care for Iskra, I can work. But what was the point? It was over. This was what families did, this was how they survived. They tightened ranks, took care of their own. Much as the Bolsheviks wished to do away with these ties, they were the only ones left. I just wished I was part of it. They were kind, but my membership in their circle had just been a visitor’s pass. I was as much an orphan as any little beggar working a train station. When I’d taken off with Kolya that November night, I had gambled our friendship. Now I had to leave the casino, busted, my heart’s pockets turned inside out. I gathered up my bundle, my pail, my sheepskin, collected Iskra from Shusha, whose face streamed with tears. My baby slept on.
“Let us do something for you,” their mother said sorrowfully. “How can we make this easier?”
There was a part of myself that wanted to walk out a complete martyr, trailing my blood behind me, see if I could increase their shame. But what good would that do? Who cared about my pride now? I asked for a bottle of boiled water. I felt like some character in the Bible, being sent into the desert. Shusha ran to fetch a bottle, and Dunya poured the contents of the samovar into it. Their mother handed me a hunk of bread out of their meager rations, a slice of hard cheese, and a piece of herring, all wrapped in a page of Pravda.
I descended the stairs and emerged into the city, now dark. I would never have a reason to climb those stairs again. The thousand and one times I had gone up in that elevator, anticipating the sights and smells of their homey flat, the sweets her mother would have for us, the mysteries of her father’s studio, the sanctum of the darkroom. How kind they’d been to us. How they’d loved Seryozha. What would Solomon Katzev say if he’d been there today, and seen the choice that Mina had made? What she’d pulled in wax, that key—locking the door, barring her heart. I remembered the day we’d followed that lovely man down to the Neva to see the Aurora opposite the palace. I remembered the dresses Sofia Yakovlevna had sewn, her magic lantern, Vasilisa the Beautiful…I couldn’t stop seeing Mina’s face, the way her chin stuck out, the smallness of her bitter mouth. The book of the past had closed. There was nothing left but this—the book of the city itself.
16 The Astoria
I took a brave turn in the streets, but the ravaged revolutionary city was too unnervingly empty to spend a night in a doorway. I swallowed my pride and curled with my infant in a jog in the Katzevs’ hallway, still hoping against hope that Sofia Yakovlevna would creep out and usher me inside. I’d dreamed for so long about my return to Petrograd, but I hadn’t expected this.
“We’ll figure this out,” I promised Iskra, as she nestled inside my sheepskin. I ate some of their bread. It stuck in my throat. Maybe I would have been better off staying in Udmurtia, where there was still kindness, and work for my hands, room for a woman with a child. But who could tell good luck from bad now? You couldn’t know what might lead where. There was only fate, and this was mine tonight.
And I still had Aura Cady Sands hidden in my pocket, my ace in the hole.
I slept fitfully, and dreamed of a ship in heavy weather. I clung to the rail, trying to inch my way to my cabin, but I’d lost track of the baby. The ship spiraled in the churning brown water, the crew struggling to keep from capsizing, while the mad captain ordered it onward, into the storm. We were traveling right into its arms, debris flying through the air as I scrambled to my cabin, but where was my daughter? The ship lunged and heeled, taking on water, sluicing the corridor, coming under the doors. The cards I’d been playing flew off the desk. I didn’t want to drown on this ship, but the mad captain had bolted the doors.
Someone was shaking me. Mina? Had she changed her mind?
I opened my eyes, saw broad shoulders, a shaved face. “Clear off. This isn’t a boardinghouse. If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’ll call the domkom.”
It was still very early, the sun rising through mist. The beauty of the unfolding day stopped the breath in my chest. I had forgotten this, the light of Petrograd on the long straight Prospect, the unchanging forms of stone and iron, the mist hanging. Everywhere were the quiet faces I had craved—the benign visages of statues and friezes decorating windows, balconies, archways. They knew me, if no one else did. I imagined they pitied me as I passed by. I stopped to use the convenience of a courtyard off Kazanskaya Street, and drank some of the water Sofia Yakovlevna had packed for me. From there I made my way up to the sleeping Astoria, its sentries smoking by the door. But it was far too early to disturb the singer. I moved off into the haze like a light inside a paper lantern toward the red pillars and dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. I climbed to its granite porch and gazed out between the columns as through the legs of a giant, appreciating the rhythm of pillar and pediment across Senate Square like a stately music. Such beauty, everywhere I turned my eyes.
And there, gazing out at the Neva, stood Great Peter, and Pushkin’s words bubbled up within me:
Here granite borders the Neva
and bridges hang above the river;
and dark green gardens lay a cover
upon each island near and far.
As the young capital unseats her,
old Moscow fades, no more prevails,
just as before a new tsaritsa
a dowager in purple pales.
At this hour the city was mine, mine and the urchins’, curled up against the walls, and a few sleepy streetwalkers’, heading home after a hard night’s work. I nursed Iskra and gazed out at the ensemble of buildings, the Senate, the Admiralty, the Horse Guards’ Manège, and waited for morning to properly age. The leaves on the trees of Horse Guards Boulevard were shedding in yellow pools. I had picked one up to show Iskra, now spun it around between my fingers, tickled her face with it as she nursed and I sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
A group of little boys gathered on the steps nearby, smoking vile makhorka cigarettes to staunch their hunger, and pretended not to listen to my song, as they moved closer, like tramps warming themselves at a fire on Haymarket Square. I shifted to “Fais Dodo, Colin” and “The Little Bell” and “In the Valley” to see if I could prolong the spell.
What a bore to live alone,
Even for a tree!
Ah, a lad without a lass
Is wretched as can be…
When I finished, I asked if they knew any songs, throwing the question in their general direction without looking at them. They were dikiye, wild, and like any hungry, wild pack, they could turn in a moment, throw rocks or swarm me for the food I might be carrying, my boots, or, God forbid, my coat. But right now, they were children, and I was the adult. A mother. Whose comfort and care and tenderness they yearned for.
One of them, a dirt-smeared urchin of about twelve with a brutally upturned nose, spoke up over his evil-smelling cigarette. “Patches knows some.”
Patches proved to be a painfully thin boy with bald spots in his bristl
y hair.
“Sing us a tune,” the older boy commanded, and kicked him.
Patches began to sing a song I had never heard:
Forgotten, neglected
in my youthful state
I was born an orphan
And misery’s my fate.
“Pretty good, huh? And if they don’t fork over, he goes into this one,” said the chief.
The poor half-bald boy looked even more mournful and sang,
Because of you, I suffer.
Because of you, I’ll find my grave…
The song was wrenching, his voice high and true.
“It’s his scam,” said their chief. “On the trams.”
“Are there still trams?” I hadn’t seen one since I’d been here.
“Not many, but they’re crammed full. All the better pickin’ for us. Right, boys?” His friends nodded. “Didja just come inta town?”
They were like a pack of mangy dogs who somehow remembered human caring, human compassion.
“I just got back. I’m from here,” I said. I kept it vague in case any other of their brothers had been on a train that night on the Vologda-Petrograd line.
Iskra squealed and wanted to be played with. I tucked my breast away, let her grip my finger. “I love this place. I don’t have a place to put my head, but—” and I recited a bit more of “The Bronze Horseman”:
I love you, miracle of Peter’s,
your stern and graceful countenance,
the broad Neva’s imperious waters,
the granite blocks that line your banks…
“What’s that?” asked their leader.
“It’s a poem. Something I heard once.” As if Pushkin’s masterpiece was just something I heard in a breadline. “You know the statue of the guy on Arts Square?”
“The guy checkin’ the weather,” said their leader, imitating Pushkin’s posture, palm upturned.
“Pigeons shit all over him,” said another boy, emboldened. The same age as the leader, he grinned through teeth already ruined.
“Yes, that guy,” I said. “It’s an old poem, just so you know.”
“Go ’head, say it,” said the leader. I was Patches, here for his entertainment. I hoped he wouldn’t kick me.
Iskra was squirming. She liked the morning. I stood up so I could rock her on my hip as I began to unfold for the orphans the tale of their own city’s mythology, a story they needed to know. Even if they were homeless, they were still citizens of St. Petersburg, and more so than most, as they slept on its stones.
“It’s about the great flood of 1824, right here, a hundred years ago,” I said. “But it starts in…”—what did they care about dates?—“with Peter the Great founding…this city. That Peter.” I pointed to the Falconet statue, the horse’s great haunches, rearing on its stone. “He’s called the Bronze Horseman.”
And I began:
Where desolate breakers rolled, stood he,
immersed in thought and prophecy…
My recitation was by no means perfect, but none of these urchins had ever heard of Pushkin, and oddly, their attention flattered me more than any silver ruble my Makarov grandmother could have bestowed. All the while, I kept a good watch on my coat and my bundle. And by God if they didn’t listen until the very end, until poor mad Evgeny had lost everything, city, love, home, chased to his death by that brazen statue come to life. And for a moment, we all sat together, and looked out toward the grand, treacherous monarch, and over his city, dramatic, tragic, deadly. Our city, mine and theirs, Iskra’s and Pushkin’s. We citizens along with every poet, every poor clerk and water carrier and nurse. Whatever the fate of this place, I would be part of it. I wouldn’t be mindlessly grazing in a field like a cow chewing its cud.
Later, the children melted into the morning, following their leader, off to steal and beg or whatever it was they did to get their daily bread. I still had hours to go before I could safely visit the singer. Now was the time a reasonable person would go and queue at the district soviet, take the next step in my official future. Find some sort of job, any job, and a corner in a collective apartment. I had come back of my own free will, hadn’t I? Nobody had forced me, I had no right to cry. I should have known Mina would hurt me if I gave her the chance. But the idea of Aura Cady Sands glittered before me like a lamp, a way back into the world. There were still giants here in Petersburg, the sons and daughters of Pushkin and Tolstoy. I would not miss the chance to bask in their light, pale moon that I was. It was worth another night in an unguarded hallway.
I chewed on more of the Katzevs’ bread and went for a stroll along the Admiralty Embankment. I wondered what was housed in the Winter Palace now. I remembered the orgy in the tsar’s wine cellars during October 1917—whole battalions lost down there, the confusion and gunfire in the halls, and how we stumbled into the room where the ministers had just been arrested. Genya’s excitement over Kerensky’s pen—I never asked if he still had it. The palace showed its neglect now, weeds growing everywhere, broken windows boarded up or not, the corner that had been bombarded by the Peter and Paul Fortress still unrepaired. Would it really have been so bad if we’d stopped with Kerensky and the Constituent Assembly? The Kadets, the Right SRs? Though it was counterrevolutionary to think it. Better for the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia—but I knew quite well the capitalists would have kept a tight hold on the reins of power, and the workers would still exist only for their labor, their needs disregarded. No, we needed this, a complete overturning of everything, even if we privileged classes suffered for our former greed and arrogance.
I squinted up at the Admiralty spire, surmounted by its golden ship as the mists cleared and the bright day sparkled on the river. I felt hopeful again. I would find a way of ingratiating myself with the singer, convince her she needed Marina Kuriakina as translator, guide, housemaid, friend. But I had to approach this songbird with care, to lay a snare without frightening her, having her fly away. Worst would be to appear indigent and at my wit’s end, throwing myself at her like a scabrous beggar with my sheepskin and my infant. No, I had to act as if I was just dropping in, that her friendship was all I sought, a pleasant half hour with a fascinating foreigner: Oh! I forgot my calling cards! I hoped she had more than one room, wondered how famous she was. Perhaps she knew Chaliapin, or Gorky.
Across the river on the rock where the city was founded rose the Peter and Paul Fortress, as grim and solid as ever. How many people from my past were now imprisoned behind its stout walls, locked in its dank and cramped cells? How many hostages against Yudenich’s attack had been imprisoned there, Denikin’s officers’ wives and children? A lone man walked across Palace Bridge. There were so few people, I could watch him all the way across.
At last, it seemed late enough for us to visit. Should I wear my kerchief as worker or peasant, or try to upgrade my appearance to displaced intelligent? I chose the last, pocketed my kerchief and smoothed my clean hair with my fingers. Chin up, I approached the hotel—dark and grand on St. Isaac’s Square. I’d come here as a child, whenever my mother’s cousin Tamara visited us from Paris. She carried a white Pomeranian with red-rimmed eyes, Rupert, and wore a coat of black monkey fur that was almost like feathers. I strode across the cobbles as if I had breakfast at the Astoria every day of my life. A heavily armed sentry stopped me before I even got close. “Propusk, Citizen.”
Citizen. I should have worn my kerchief. I showed him my labor book, and my propusk from the Izhevsk Committee. He shrugged and handed them back to me. “Where’s your propusk to enter the First House of the Soviet?”
The members of the soviet were ensconced at the Astoria Hotel? “But I was invited. To visit the singer Aura Cady Sands. Room 223. Call her, see for yourself.” The tightness in my gullet, the weight of the gun under my clothes, heavier than the moment before. If they caught me, they would assume I was another Fanya Kaplan, looking to assassinate Zinoviev or Radek or whoever was living here now.
“What, do I look like a de
sk clerk?” His face was rough, his little eyes stupid and willfully so. “No propusk, no entry.”
I started to feel tears come. Why didn’t she mention a propusk? I remembered going into Smolny itself without having to show so much as my labor book. “She told me to come this morning. She didn’t say anything about a propusk.”
“Well, what did you think, you could just walk in? Who are you? Nobody, anybody. Where do you think you are?” He was shouting at me now. “You could have been sent here by Yudenich. Kolchak. The Entente. You might have a bomb.”
This was going all wrong, the other sentry was becoming curious, what a nightmare. I watched my dreams crumple like a wad of cheap newsprint. “Maybe the baby’s got a bomb. She’s a regular counterrevolutionary.”
“Move along before I shoot you both,” he said.
I had no choice. I moved away.
So I made the journey out to Smolny, hauling Iskra and my bag, pail, sheepskin, aware of my dwindling supplies, but it was the same story as at the Astoria. No propusk, no appointment, no entry. When had that started? Since the assassinations, most likely. “What’s your business at Petrocommune? You have potatoes under that skirt?” He started poking my skirt with the barrel of his gun. To him I was just another baba from the provinces, there to beg or steal or God knew what. With that gun on me, I couldn’t stand a search. So much for the free wandering in and out as we had in the early days. No more democratic free-for-all. It burned, the way they dismissed me, as if I were a beggar.
“This is how you treat the proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry?” I shouted for the benefit of all the others climbing the steps. “Propusk, propusk…You’re drowning us in bureaucracy!”
One of the soldiers shoved me, and I almost fell down the stairs, baby and all.