by Janet Fitch
Alla lost what little animation she’d had. She curled her lower lip. “Lost them. 1915. Scarlet fever.” She sighed. “Both in a single month.” Then she straightened her back, picked up her handbag. “So that’s it. See how far you get. And don’t let anyone back here no matter what. I’ll see you in the morning.” She took off her white nurse’s scarf and put on her hat.
“What if I have to use the toilet?” I remembered to ask.
“There’s a chamber pot in the broom closet. Boiled water in the pitcher. Breakfast at seven. Good luck.”
And so I began. I swore I wouldn’t read the files, simply alphabetize them. I set Iskra on the floor on my sheepskin, but she howled. I made a nest for her on the counter, so she could watch the children in the lobby. I tried not to read the files, but I couldn’t help seeing the ages on the forms, the fates of the children. Sent to a detsky dom was a common fate. They all seemed to be in the suburbs—Detskoe Selo, Kamenny Island, Narva. I hoped the children fared better there than at Orphanage No. 6.
The runaways were mostly older children. Or Disappeared. Or, if it was indicated they had living relatives, perhaps they’d gone home. What a look into the life of the second year of the revolution. Reading through this Everest of paperwork reminded me of the boxlike viewers Papa had bought us to look under the surface of our pond at Maryino, to see the tadpoles. Reading, I could peer into the heart of the city, what was going on beneath the surface of its empty streets. I avoided the end of the counter holding the so ons. Here were transfers. You had to hope for the best—boys, a few girls, and babies, so many, transferred to the Kamenny Island Orphanage No. 12. It must be an infant facility.
So many abandoned children. Orphaned in the waves of disease, or simply left behind, coming in from all over Russia, riding the trains into the former capital. What would become of them, with women like Alla and the pancake girl caring for them?
“Hey,” said a child’s voice through the grate of the front desk. “There’s something wrong with my tongue. Could you look at it?”
I glanced up. A girl about thirteen, skinny with stringy straw-colored hair, leaned on the desk, sticking her tongue out at me. She and her friend burst into giggles, joined arms, and skipped out the front doors of the lobby, into the night. Probably to find some men who could give them food or money or something else worth having. The disease rate among them must be terrific.
And so on.
Worse, when I saw those girls again, they’d brought their “dates” right into the orphanage, leading them through the lobby like grown prostitutes at railway hotels. How could this be allowed? Couldn’t the government find a single Red Guard to stand watch over an orphanage with hundreds of children? No wonder Alla had locked me in. The girl who’d stuck out her tongue had a particularly stupid-looking man about twenty-five in tow, with small but wide-set eyes and no chin. Her friend, with pimples like boils, led a soldier, a mean-looking blond, about nineteen.
I called out to the men from behind the locked grates. “Comrades, these are children. Have you no shame? No pity?”
“Have you no pity?” the girl mocked me. “Keep your pity to yourself, pitty-pat.”
Her man laughed and followed her up the stairs. I was glad Iskra had fallen asleep. Certain things even a baby should not have to see.
Late in the night, a group of boys, the ones who’d catcalled Denisovna, returned from their adventures to climb the wide marble stairs to their own floor, pushing and laughing. The place, I could see, was no better than a flophouse. Perhaps the younger children had some supervision, but these older ones…I wondered if the Commissariat knew what was going on here, or were they only worried about their record keeping.
I nursed Iskra, tried once again to tuck her under the desk out of sight, but she wouldn’t have it, started to howl, she wanted to see what was going on. For some reason, I didn’t want the children to see her. I feared their envy—like a peasant worrying about the Evil Eye, calling her child stupid and ugly. Now I understood the superstition. The danger didn’t spring from devils and sorcerers. It was the mean and envious you had to watch out for. It could be as simple as a child who was humiliated in front of his mates, or a girl who lost a trick because of you.
In the end, I could not help approaching and so on. I had to know. The records seemed banal, benign, until you assembled the picture behind the bland language.
Cause of death: Cholera. Typhus. Typhoid. Scarlet fever. Measles. Smallpox. Concussion. Contusion. Hematoma. Alcohol poisoning. Malnutrition. Pneumonia.
Sent to hospital.
Returned from hospital.
Death certificate.
The deaf, the blind, the crippled.
And the dates! Infants of a few months, or hours, abandoned,
admitted,
deceased.
I could not read anymore, I could not stop reading. I held my head back from the pages so that my tears wouldn’t make the ink run, wouldn’t blot out the names. I dried my eyes on the shoulder of my dress. Starving children, stronger ones taking their food so that they could grow stronger while the other ones died. Syphilis, gonorrhea. Parfentiev, Matvei. Age 9. Cocaine addiction, transferred to Orphanage No. 15. Drug addiction. Habitual degeneracy. Criminal activities. Juvenile detention. And so on.
When I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I found the suicides. Lapikov, Pyotr Ivanovich. Age 11. 17 July 1919. Cause of death: Fall from the roof. Just this summer. Mordukov, Nestor. Age 9. Cause of Death: Hanging. No investigation, no follow-up, no attempt to establish the circumstances, to find out who might have been responsible. Chuzhova, Anastasia. Age 13. Cause of Death: Drowning. Drowned herself in the Fontanka. No interviews with her friends, nor the attendants. I was loath to bury these files, the fate of these wretched souls, in among those alphabetically related, who’d had half a chance—the housed, the transferred. So many children, eaten alive by the cruelty of our times. With no visible effect upon its appetite. I was unable to shrug and say live and let live. And so on.
In the morning, Alla Denisovna returned to unlock the cage she had put me in. I went to eat with the children, this time slot set aside for the little ones, four- and five-year-olds, boys and some girls. Shunning the bland evil of the adults, I found a place at one of the children’s tables. “Mind if I sit here?” They all stared at me and Iskra. None said a word. All those faces, those little shaved heads, they were so small. I knew their stories before they were written. I ate the kasha, and although I was exhausted from the long night, I told them a story as they ate, about a cow from Novinka.
18 Shpalernaya Street
In the empty light of morning, I recognized the pale building on Shpalernaya Street, its majestic, ruined facade, brawny male caryatids holding up its balconies. I was terrified to be in this neighborhood again, across the street from the Tauride Palace, the neighborhood where I’d spent my days with Arkady von Princip. I kept my kerchief pulled over my hair, my head down over the baby’s sling. It made the scars on my back itch. And yet, this was where my trail of Kolya Shurov left off, in the flat with the ancient Golovins and Naryshkins. Although the building still maintained its stately facade to the street, from the courtyard it could have been any broken building in Petrograd, the yard weedy and silent. I didn’t worry that the old people would recognize me—I’d been Misha then, and today a bast-shoed peasant with a baby in arms. I climbed the toothless stairs to the bel étage, remembering the state in which I’d last climbed these flights with Kolya, our passion a glowing red bonfire popping and crackling and shooting sparks high up into the night. And one found its place, Kolya.
I located the door in the gloom, rang the bell. Listened. Yes, I heard it sound out. But no answer. Rang again. I couldn’t imagine all of those old people had gone out at once. No, they would take the streets two at a time, the others waiting anxiously for their safe return. Then I remembered the secret knock—the first five notes of “Ochi Chornye”—one, two, three…fourfive.
That did
the trick. Here was the same white mouse, peering through the slit in the door, held close by its chain. “Who is it?” she hissed. She must have been hovering just behind it, terrified it was the Cheka coming to call, or a labor conscription from the district soviet. The old lady—what was her name? Elizaveta…Vladimirovna. She clutched her shawl around her throat as if I might try to strangle her.
I positioned Iskra out of sight of the narrow slit. I had to play my pieces judiciously. A good development, slow and correct. The piercing eyes scrutinized. “I’m looking for Elizaveta Vladimirovna. I’m Shurova, Marina Dmitrievna. Nikolai Stepanovich’s wife. I know this is terribly awkward, but I was hoping to find him here.”
I could hear someone in the apartment behind her, coughing. “You are no such thing,” she croaked.
“But I am, as unlikely as it might appear.”
“He would have told us himself.”
Joy surged through me like water up through the earth, emerging as a sweet spring. “He’s here? You’ve seen him?”
She smiled sourly, her pale blue eyes at the height of a child’s. “Of course he’s here,” she said. “I thought you were his wife. I might be old but I’m not feeble, young lady. You might know him, but you’re certainly not his wife. Good day.”
She started to swing the door closed, but I stuck my foot in the aperture. “Wait! Please. He told me to meet him here if I managed to come back to the city. Please.” I spoke quickly. I let a tremor come into my voice, which was not difficult, it had been a trying night. How lovely it felt to just let that tension flow out. I brought Iskra into view, kissed her sweet hair, let the old noblewoman see what the situation was. “He said I should speak to his dear friend Elizaveta Vladimirovna, that she would take care of everything. I’ve been trapped in the east, near Perm. It’s taken me a month to get here. Please, just tell him I’m here. Marina Dmitrievna.”
The lines in her brow softened. Her initial horror that I might be his slut weakened by the possibility that she’d misjudged the situation. “We have young ladies here. We’re decent people.”
Young ladies? I only remembered old people. But there might have been others…She was trying to protect them from my shame, as they used to say in Victorian novels. I’d had no sleep in thirty-six hours, the devil was tickling me, I almost broke into laughter. Imagine, in 1919 Petrograd, this old dame was worried about exposing noble young ladies to the coarser aspects of life! When they were probably shitting in the courtyard, and bathing over a basin. “Of course,” I said. “More important than ever.” Where had I picked that up from? I sounded like one of my mother’s friends, in a feather-bedecked hat, nodding over tea on one of her Thursday afternoons.
Finally, she made a decision and unlocked the chain, pulled me inside and locked it behind me. “I am Princess Elizaveta Vladimirovna Gruzinskaya. Please forgive my suspicions, child. The amount of criminality in this city is absolutely staggering. Staggering! So our Nikolai Stepanovich has been made an honest man, the rascal.” She gazed at my baby with an expression half shrewd, half wistful, but made no move to touch her. “Never said a word. Not one word!”
“For our protection,” I said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Elizaveta Vladimirovna.” I took her tiny, brittle hand and, God help me, made a little curtsy. I was always a stylish curtsier, even with the baby in the sling and the gun strapped to my hip and the bundle and the boots. It was everything I could do not to laugh and give the whole thing away. I was light-headed from exhaustion. “This is his daughter, Antonina.” Bless Praskovia for having given her a traditional name. I didn’t have to invent that part.
“Please, come in, come in.” She kept looking over her shoulder at the baby in her sling as I followed the tiny old party into the parlor. “My goodness! Our own Nikolai Stepanovich…Why, I was just saying to him the other day, Nikolai Stepanovich, you should find a nice girl and settle down—really, though, thinking of one of our young ladies, but— Oh, here’s Emilia Ivanovna.”
The parlor was just as I’d left it, almost a year ago. The rich dark walls, the plush furniture, even shabbier now in daylight. It felt good that it had changed so little. It was chilly, but not too cold, a bit of fire in the bourgeoika, the card players with shawls around their shoulders, afghans on their laps, but now it was some semblance of breakfast, and the reading of newspapers. The same flabby old lady, the two old gents, as if they’d been preserved on a daguerreotype. “Viktor Sergeevich Golovin, Pavel Alexandrovich Naryshkin. May I present Marina Dmitrievna—Shurova. Our Nikolai Stepanovich’s bride!” She clasped her hands to her breast. “That little beast. What a secret to keep from us, eh? She’s just been a month coming in from the Urals, poor dear! Sit down, sit down. You must be exhausted. Aglaya! Aglaya!”
We went through the whole routine, as I was greeted by the old people. Emilia Ivanovna Golovina, a distant relative surely, and more desiccated than the last time—the folds of skin hung on her like drapes. And the two old men: her husband, Golovin, white side-whiskered, ramrod straight—I could imagine his chest emblazoned with medals given in service to the tsar—and Naryshkin, tall and stooped, streaks of white hair across this mottled dome, coat frayed at collar and cuffs, and yet, beautifully groomed for all that. The old gents actually stood and kissed my hand, properly, the symbolic kiss hovering in the air just above the wrist. The old people beamed with pleasure that one of their reactionary own had managed to wed and beget a child in the midst of the enemy’s camp. I wondered again how they had not managed to get themselves out of Russia back when the other nobility had fled. Had they seriously thought this would all “blow over”? Were they conspirators? I wondered how many more nests of the gentry like this still remained in revolutionary Petrograd.
I sat on one of the tufted settees under a gilded mirror and had the strangest feeling of being back at my own Golovin grandparents’ flat on the Moika Embankment. How had all this not yet been seized? A million questions sprung to mind that passion had blinded me to the last time I’d entered this flat. But mostly, I was interested in Kolya’s whereabouts. “So when did you see my husband last?”
“Oh, when was it?” Elizaveta the white mouse asked old Golovin. “July, I think, around the time Yudenich almost made it to liberate Petrograd…akh. He came this close.” She showed me about half an inch between thumb and clawed forefinger. “The English even sank two Red battleships. Did you hear about that? Sank them like bathtub toys, one after the other, half an hour apart.”
“When the English strike, they strike hard,” said Golovin. “Our Red masters should think about that.”
“It won’t be much longer,” said the white mouse. “That’s what dear Nikolai Stepanovich told us. To hold fast. So that’s what we do.”
That battle was back in July. Now it was almost October. When she’d said Kolya was here, I thought she meant now. But I supposed when you were older than the stones, a month, two months, six. What difference did it make to them? When these days you could live three different lives in as many months.
Aglaya served tea—real tea, with a little bit of hoarded sugar—in my honor. They all closed their eyes like cats, sipping, as did I, tasting it with pure pleasure, knowing that it had to have been Kolya’s doing. Without his intervention these old people would no doubt be eating the paint off the walls. Up to his old tricks. But that was beside the point. He had been here, that was the thing. I could almost smell his cigar, his Floris Limes. He would return. Hold fast…
A middle-aged man and woman joined us from the back of the flat. We were introduced. This was the Naryshkin daughter and her husband—Countess Ekaterina Pavlovna and Count Rudolf Platonovich Sobietsky. Ah, this was how the princess had managed to hang on to the flat—she’d brought in a platoon of friends. The comtesse was a tall gray-haired woman in a rusty black dress, with spectacles on a chain, and he a slighter man with elegant longish silver hair wearing a worn but neatly brushed suit. Sobietsky, seating himself on the settee opposite me, evaluated me wi
th a smirk. “So you’re our little Kolya’s wife,” he said, one eyebrow arched in a gesture that must have slayed them at the balls. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”
“Why Rudolf Platonovich!” The white mouse gasped, mortally offended that he would think the same thing she had just accused me of ten minutes earlier.
“Excuse my husband, Marina Dmitrievna,” said the wife. She was as homely as a raw-boned horse, but a Naryshkin, so Sobietsky must have had a title but no money.
What a shrewd little peasant I’d become.
“Look at her,” said the husband. Yes, I could see myself here in their Alexander III parlor, my baby strapped onto me, my bundle, my sheepskin. “Could you really see him marrying her? What would be the advantage? Our man would never do anything that he couldn’t turn to advantage.”
Of course, he was talking about himself, not Kolya. Kolya was a red-blooded Russian man. He could act upon passion, he didn’t have toilet water in his veins like this inbred, aging Petersburg fop. He might have rutted with Faina, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t feel passion for a woman—the only advantage there was the obvious one.
“Whatever you might think of my appearance,” I said, trying for a haughtiness my mother once possessed in boatloads, though I was too exhausted to achieve just the right icy edge, “Nikolai Stepanovich is a man of many facets, and venality is not one of them.” Sipping my tea with a straight back, holding my saucer just so.
Sobietsky’s father-in-law chuckled. “Got you there, dear Count.”
But Sobietsky continued his scrutiny, unconvinced that a ragged urchin like myself would be wed to the Delightful Man. But I had to stay here, this is where he would return.
I tried to make conversation—they were eager to chat—but my head kept dropping, my eyes closing. My body cried out for sleep. On my lap, cradled in her sling, Iskra was already out cold, golden lashes against her soft cheeks, lips parted as she slept.