by Janet Fitch
Matron introduced Comrade Nadezhda and me to the group, but not them to us.
“You bring your baby with you?” a tiny woman asked in a ridiculously high voice straight from the Komedii theater.
“Yes, Comrade. I have no other place to leave her.”
“You can still perform your duties with one hand?” asked Matron.
“Yes, Matron. I have a basket for her when I need both hands.”
“Actually, I think it’s good,” said one of the men, a stooped one with a sensitive face. “It could be a humanizing influence. A bit of family atmosphere.” He obviously hadn’t heard the policy on the hardening of orphans.
“There should be a crèche,” said another woman comrade, young, brash. “When you think of it.”
“Do the children seem to have enough to eat?” an older, motherly woman asked me directly.
Perhaps this was an inspection of the orphanage, and not of me at all. I glanced at Matron for a clue as to how she wanted me to respond, but she gave no indication of preference. Of course there wasn’t enough to eat. What was I supposed to say? I knew there was tremendous pilferage by the staff—understandable, as nobody had food—but the children were always the losers. If I told them, though, my job would likely be over. But maybe they could do something. “No,” I said. “They could use more milk, and meat if you can find it.”
Matron blinked, once, slowly, and they all left. Was I in trouble? Would I arrive tomorrow night to discover my new assignment, Toddlers? Or, God help me, Girls 13–16? Or no assignment at all? I sat down by the stove, Iskra in my lap.
“Hey, what about Vanka Manka?” the room’s chieftain, Nikita, said from his choice bottom bunk near the stove, his arms under his head like a Mongol potentate. “He was on the rooftop.”
They were still waiting. The interruption of the adults meant nothing to them. The artist in me was pleased. It was an achievement indeed if you were able to capture the boys’ attention—to create a world in their heads so that even a thug like Nikita wanted to hear more.
“So Vanka Manka gazed through the window,” I began, walking Iskra as she grabbed at my mouth. “And there, on the table, was the Book of Signs, with its spine of silver and hasp of pearl, the magic symbols embedded in its cover. Here was the Eye of Horus, which could see across the world, and the Mandrake Root, that could change you into a tree or a hawk. The most wondrous book in the world.”
“How much is it worth?” asked Makar, the cardsharp.
I could see my favorite boy, Maxim, in the depths of his upper bunk, the light shining in his dark, dreaming eyes.
“Half a million,” I said. “The last time it was at auction, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible.” They didn’t know a thing about history, but anyone called Grozny must be someone special.
“So, is he going in?” Their chieftain closed the door on financial speculation.
“It was very slippery up there, and Vanka Manka felt the wing of a raven brush his cheek, and suddenly he started to fall.” I wondered how many of these boys had run along a rooftop themselves, broken in through a window, like those hoodlums that long-ago night on the Strelka. “And as he fell, he smelled the sickening sweet scent of hyacinths.”
They shuddered and their eyes grew brighter. Hyacinths, they knew, were Shinshen’s favorite flower. The Black Palace was surrounded by them, huge fields, all of the people he had bewitched and turned to flowers. If you walked through it, you could hear their sighs, their whispers, Alas, alas.
“And there he was—Shinshen.” Seven feet tall in his stockings, and his mad blue eyes could see in the dark, and his hair was made of spiderweb. “He had come to read the Book of Signs, and heard the clatter, but when he looked up, the boy was gone, already landing in a lilac bush in the courtyard below.”
I could see the younger boys fighting sleep as if it were a bear as they struggled to hear more of the story. It was time to say good night. They groaned, called me unfair, but I promised them I would tell them more tomorrow. After that, I went around and checked every boy, tugging up a thin blanket, patting a shaved head. I could give them very little but that small contact. I hoped it would help. Who didn’t need a human touch? It was true of babies, and of boys who thought they were beyond all tenderness. And of me as well, though that would have to wait until I found Kolya again.
I pulled Maxim’s blanket up around his neck. I wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but he was a special boy, so unlike the others, solemn and tender and observant. His eyes shone in the light of the kerosene lamp, huge and full of sorrow. “You know, there is someone like that,” he whispered.
“Like who?” I asked.
“Shinshen. He’s here, in Petrograd.” His lips were chapped. Maybe he was a little feverish. I felt his forehead. He seemed hot and clammy. “Kids work for him. He cuts their throats if they do anything wrong. The cops take their bodies away and nobody ever sees it.”
I stroked his cheek as if soothing him, but really, I’d have preferred to press it over his mouth. I glanced over at Iskra in her basket by the stove, playing with her hands. I could see them dancing above the lip. “Sounds like the kind of thing kids make up to scare each other with.”
He gazed at me with his waxy skin and the shiny darkness of his eyes in the low light. “But it’s real. I know kids who’ve seen them.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him. “But you’re safe here, with us, da?”
He sighed. His sad smile, the skeptical look in his eyes, told me that at ten years old he already knew better. Even after I finished checking on the rest of the boys, I could feel him watching, begging me to believe him. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t have to be convinced. I couldn’t tell him, Hush. Speak the devil’s name, and he’s sure to appear.
21 The Devil’s Name
Meanwhile, General Yudenich burst out from his position behind Lake Peipus, on the border between Estonia and Russia. Within the week, he had taken Luga, one hundred miles away. He led German Freikorps troops, the very ones the German leftists had described on the train, the ones that had crushed the Munich Soviet. We’d beaten the Germans back last winter, and here they were again, under the Whites. But this year was different—in the depopulated city, people were listless, depressed, there was no fervor of resistance as there had been against the Germans. No one flooded out to build trenches, no rallies were called, no speeches. Where was the government, where was Trotsky to inspire us? Rykov, Zinoviev?
Only in the Shpalernaya apartment did excitement bubble like a forest spring. The aristocrats reacted as if they’d received a gilt-edged invitation to the grand duke’s ball, delivered by footmen in livery. Oh, happy days! Oh, the talk of what they would do when the general arrived, the revenge they might take upon the Bolsheviks. While in the bread queues, the women stood silent, backs bent in defeat. They didn’t even bother exchanging rumors. “Who’s going to want us?” said one old man, attempting to joke. “Whoever gets us has to feed us. Lenin’s probably begging them right now, Nikolai Nikolaevich, please, Petrograd’s so beautiful this time of year.”
I held Iskra closer. I could have stayed in Izhevsk. Or done as their factory committee had requested and toured the revolutionary cities talking about the Red October. But no, like a dove, I was driven to return here. I couldn’t resist seeking my native soil, Petersburg with its mirrors and passages, the smell of water and the cries of gulls. The trees knew me here. My footfalls echoed the city’s eternal name.
“We should be preparing, not sitting on our hands,” I said in the orphanage canteen before my shift, eating with the other caretakers. In the old tearoom the electric lights shone harshly on the women’s faces, each suffused with its own aura of expectation or dread. I let Iskra taste a little of the sweetened tea off my forefinger. “Why aren’t they mobilizing us? What’s wrong with the Petrograd Soviet? Are they so depressed that the capital moved?”
“They’re going to throw us to the dogs,”
said Alla Denisovna, studying the glowing tip of her cigarette.
I would go to the district soviet and sign up for the defense myself if it weren’t for Iskra. But the weight of her, the fact of her here in my lap, happy to be with the women, free from her carrying cloth, reminded me that if anything happened to me, it would be second floor, in the back for my little redheaded jewel. I wouldn’t risk that, not for anything. Ironic—people thought mothers were the bearers of all virtue, when mothers were the most selfish, the most venal people on earth. Naturally bourgeois. We didn’t care what happened to anyone but our own flesh and blood. Children are everyone’s responsibility, in theory. But in practice? As a category, mothers were endemically counterrevolutionary. My love was reserved for one little baby, a candle barely flickering. And yet, we could not divorce our future from the future of the country. What of the revolution? What of the city? What of this hell of abandoned children, guarding their food from one another at their benches under the absurd, bucolic-painted ceiling of the Europa Tea Room. Their accumulated sorrows should weigh so much it should sink this city back into the Finnish mud.
Comrade Nadezhda and I put the boys to bed. At least half of them were missing. This was happening regularly, now that Yudenich had begun his march. They were too restless, preferring to be out prowling, listening to rumors, poking around corners. My story—Snezhana’s imprisonment in the magical palace of Shinshen—evidently paled in comparison to the story unfolding outside the orphanage walls. The boys wanted to talk about nothing but Yudenich, and why our Red troops kept falling back, and what would happen if the Whites took Petrograd. “Will they kill us?” asked Grisha, an outcast who ate his boogers if not closely watched. “Nikita says they’ll throw us out the windows.”
Stolid Nadezhda cleaned the corner of her lips with a fingernail, gazing at her pretty mouth in a little mirror. “Nobody’s going to kill besprizorniki. Who would bother?”
“If they gave us guns, we’d be the best guerrillas,” said Ilyusha, as I snugged the blanket around him. “We’re everywhere.”
“Comrade Tanya’s a Communist,” said Cross-Eyes. “She’s the one better watch out. They’ll be stringing ’em up.”
“One good thing about being orphans,” said Nazar from an upper bunk, “is that you can’t be an orphan twice.”
The rest trickled back after lights out in twos and threes, laying their coats on their blankets, bringing their boots to bed. I’d tried to discourage that practice but Maxim explained that in the detsky dom the staff took the orphans’ shoes away, so if they ran away they’d have to do it barefoot, even in the snow. It made me recall Comrade Tanya’s advice.
“I heard the soldiers talking,” said Makar, the cardsharp, sitting down on his bunk. Boys stirred around him. “They said this is the end. The Whites gonna take Petrograd by the end of the week and you might as well kiss your little asses goodbye.”
Squatting by the stove, warming his hands like a grown man, Nikita was not to be topped. “I have a friend who knows this guy in the Cheka. And he told my friend they’re gonna blow up the power plant and sink all the ships at Kronstadt so Yudenich doesn’t get ’em.”
Normally I’d think he was lying, but it sounded about right. A twelve-year-old wouldn’t think about blowing up the city’s power plant, let alone sinking the fleet. But no electricity? Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more grim. With a mixture of dread and admiration, I watched the late arrivals getting into bed with their dirty boots tucked under their arms. Such swagger, all that brave talk, at ten, twelve years old. What did life mean to them? Ilyusha was right, Lenin should arm them. They wouldn’t mind dying in a hail of clean, hot gunfire. There was manhood in that.
Iskra was restless, fretful. The temper of the city had infected her as well. I paced the floor, trying to soothe her and reassuring the boys as well as I could. “They won’t let them take Petrograd,” I said. “The Germans couldn’t do it last year, and these ones won’t either.” Big talk from a girl who couldn’t even quiet her baby. “We’ll fight them on Nevsky if we have to. You’ll see.”
The long shadows from the lamp licked the bunks, the bare floors, some of the smaller boys two to a bunk, the flotsam of revolution. And this was just a tiny slice of the millions of children set adrift in this starving, disease-riddled, army-cursed Russia of October 1919. The flame and its shadows jiddered across the silent rows of beds, each boy thinking his own gloomy or heroic thoughts.
Maxim’s bunk lay conspicuously empty. I was worried. It was unlike him to stay out wandering after everyone else had come in. I paced with Iskra on my shoulder, calming her, hoping to get her to fall asleep, sat for a while sewing rips in the boys’ laundry by lantern light until her fretfulness had me on my feet again. When he finally appeared after midnight, I wanted to embrace him and scold him all at once, but he marched up to me, and his face stopped the words in my mouth. It was white, as if carved in snow. “They found one, Comrade Marina. Come on.” Plucking my sleeve, his teeth audibly chattering. “Come see for yourself.”
“See what?” I said, resisting his urgency.
He sneezed, wiped his nose on his frozen hand. “I’ll show you. Hurry.” Pulling at me. “Before they get rid of him.”
“Who?” Oh God, oh Christ. “I can’t, I’m on duty. And what about Iskra…”
He glared at me. He could see my cowardice as plainly as if it were a yellow-dyed sheet. “Leave her with Hopeless.” Nadezhda, it meant hope. “It’s just across the street.” He was begging me to join him in his nightmares.
I saw no way to avoid it. I was the one who had called the devil out of the darkness with my stories. Maxim trusted me. I couldn’t pretend his fears were just the product of an overactive imagination, couldn’t leave him alone with his truth. I owed him this. So I snugged Iskra into her basket, ignoring her squalls, and planted her next to Comrade Nadezhda, who was reading a pamphlet, curling a lock of hair around her finger. “I’ll be right back.”
“Then I get a break. Fair’s fair.”
I threw on my sheepskin and hat and shawl, followed Maxim down through the dimly lit lobby, past the blind eye of the desk comrade and out into the night, my hand through the pocket in my sheepskin, touching the gun that I always brought with me, though I knew it was dangerous. If the boys ever found it, Nikita or Makar, someone was sure to get shot, and there would be one more death on my head. But I walked too often through these dark streets, home to Shpalernaya up by the Tauride Palace.
Nevsky lay wrapped in an ice fog. Scarf across my nose and mouth, my eyes in slits, I crossed the wide boulevard, pulled along by my determined charge. Shadows grew in the thin illumination of widely spaced streetlights. The statue of the great Catherine rose like a bell before the ghost of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater, and a cluster of dark figures huddled in the faint light of a streetlamp. Maxim shoved his way to the front, dragging me along. I clutched the gun. All around us ranged prostitutes and drunks and the elbow-high faces of the besprizorniki, frozen in postures of morbid curiosity as they gazed down at a form slumped against the statue’s base.
Someone lit a match, and in the flickering moment I saw the thing they were staring at. A small boy lolled against the base of the statue, legs spread like a discarded doll’s, legs ending in bare blue feet. But that was not what they were looking at. At the end of each arm, where hands should have been, a white patch of bone. A cigarette was lit, the flame died.
“What happened?” I asked, or thought I asked, though I could not be sure.
A boy took a drag on his chinar—as the kids called their foul butts collected off the streets and out of gutters—and replied out of the side of his mouth. “The Archangel.”
I was falling backward into the black void of a dream that I’d kept at bay for so long. The wolf, the colonnade…the rising waters. The hyacinths. He was here. Run, run, but there was no place to run. I was glad the light had gone out. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see my face, my terror. “Any
body know him?”
“It’s Eel. One of his crew,” said the smoker, glancing nervously toward Nevsky, then up in the other direction, toward Znamenskaya Square.
“Probably stole somethin’,” the boys ventured, shivering. “Maybe he didn’t want to do a job.” “Or ratted on him.” “Stupid runt.” “It’s a sign.” “He wants us to know.”
What was Arkady doing with the besprizorniki? Using them—as foot soldiers? As burglars? As anything he wanted. In a sober light, you had to admit, it made perfect sense. They were everywhere, and no one was protecting them. They could easily be swept into criminal life. They lived halfway in the world of myth already, and they had less morality than the most hardened criminal. “Let’s go,” I told Maxim. If Arkady was here, he would be excited to see this crowd trembling with fear and in awe of his audacity, leaving that child right out on Nevsky Prospect. I knew the man. Perhaps even now he stood among the pillars on the Alexandrinsky porch watching us, smiling that awful ghoul’s smile. I made sure my head was completely covered, the scarf leaving my face in shadow as I took Maxim away, his cold, small hand in mine, tight, as together we returned to the orphanage.
“What will they do with him?” he whispered.
He meant the orphan, what would they do with his body. “Bury him.”