by Janet Fitch
She was a witty one. Alive, at least compared to me. “As a matter of fact.”
“Vot fashion plate.” She used the English.
Our crew was assigned to the power plant on the south bank of the Obvodny Canal. They’re gonna blow the power plant…Iskra had been alive when Nikita said it.
Iskra. I tucked her into a pocket under my heart with the ginger lock of her hair and thought of my hands, my shovel. Shoulder to shoulder, women and men from the southern factories dug and filled sandbags. The Skorokhod woman and I made a good team, same height, same energy level. We dug the half-frozen earth, and then one shoveled while the other held the bag open. Soon we were both covered in dirt, I could feel the fine particles coating my face, dirt in my eyes and nose and teeth, my snot black with it. I didn’t care that the raw wood of the spade’s handle blistered my gloveless hands, and that the cold made it hard to grip anything. I warmed my hands under my armpits, grateful for the work, grateful for the heaviness and the sweatiness of it. It was a drug against grief.
My partner’s name was Anya. She sewed boot uppers. The workers in her factory were hoping for a bonus ration of a pair of boots per family—they’d gone on strike over it earlier in the year, she told me. “We’re the shoemaker’s children, it’s ridiculous. How do they expect you to sew boots month after month when your own are falling apart?” We kept up a good rhythm as she talked, digging and filling and carrying the bag slung between us crabwise over the rough stones to where men tossed them with a grunt to the top of the growing wall. Other men caught them and ranged them into place. Each bag had to weigh at least sixty pounds. How light my baby had been by comparison. Yet the absence of her was heavier than this whole fortification.
We toiled all day, until the light began to fade. I knew they would blow this plant up rather than let it fall into the hands of the Whites, just as we’d done with Napoleon—but it would leave us to fight in the dark and the snow.
Coordinating our work was an old agitator from the soviet, a white-haired codger in overcoat and cap, red face and white moustache. “Look at our Soviet women! Worth a hundred bourgeoises in silk stockings!” he called out whenever we brought a fresh bag.
“Yeah, I’d rather have a hundred silk stockings than a shovel and a bag of dirt,” Anya called back.
The old man had Krasnaya Gazeta folded in his hands. He alternately read it and used it as a baton. “The paper says the Whites have already declared victory! They’re already popping champagne corks in London, telling everybody that Petrograd’s laid down and died. Well, Comrades, look around. They better drink that champagne quick ’cause that’s all they’re gonna get!”
“That’s the truth, brother.”
Our next delivery found him reading about a White conspiracy that had just been uncovered in the city. “Just waitin’ for the moment old Yudenich walks in. Keeping records on all the Bolsheviks and trade unionists—so they can finger us when their friends show up. Paid for by the English. Well, I hope they’ll like it in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Hope they’ll be nice and comfy.”
The English? Was Father’s group involved? Or just another rumor?
I liked working with Anya. She and I labored at a slow, steady pace all day long, while some of the other women started too fast, stopped, started again, and wearied as the day wore on. But working those weeks in the village, the round-the-clock harvest, had taught me to watch my back, let gravity do much of the work, use the weight of the shovel and the swing of the bag. There wasn’t much I could do about my hands—I had lost my gloves, and they were a mess of blisters and cuts. But I was grateful for the work—I didn’t think about Iskra for whole minutes at a time.
Round-faced Anya gazed at me pityingly. “You can borrow my gloves. We can share.” But I embraced the pain as punishment. I didn’t deserve anyone’s sacrifice.
Past us, rumbling over the Obvodny Canal, moving south, flowed lines of our troops, newly reconfigured, purged of unsound elements—infantry with their bayonets and bandoliers, cavalrymen. “Oooh look, it’s the Bashkirs,” said Anya. Leather-faced men from central Asia on their little shaggy horses. The revolution had turned the country over, shook it like marbles in a box. I could imagine these fierce riders from the steppe with falcons on their wrists. Some even wore skullcaps in the sleet. “Trotsky told the Finns he’d send ’em over if they kept supporting the Whites,” she said, watching them ride. “I heard they’re tearing up the town, beating the whores.”
Trucks roared by, crammed with sailors. Handsome and hearty, they called out to us. “Hi, darling! Wait up for me, I’ll be home by midnight!” One of the sailors was a big blond like Slava from the agit-train. How kind he’d been when I was having Iskra, when everyone else was so useless. He’d remembered my sheepskin…Let me ride on top of the train, pregnant as I was. I wondered if he’d come home. All these men, streaming out to meet Yudenich somewhere between here and Gatchina—many would not return. “Good luck, brothers!” Anya shouted back. “Keep your shoes tied!”
What would they find when they entered the towns of the White advance? Hangings, mass executions? I thought of the steel spine of Trotsky’s armored train. The old agitator said that when Trotsky heard a division was dissolving before the Whites, he grabbed a horse and rode out himself, turned the troops back to the fight. “Drivin’ ’em like cattle. Just like he said he was going to.”
By three in the afternoon, we’d enclosed the power plant in a sandbag fortress nine feet high, just in time for the arrival of a detachment of Red cadets looking pale and heartbreakingly young, armed with bayonets and two machine guns. Tender, afraid, and afraid of looking afraid—that bravado, each some mother’s son, someone’s precious jewel, the light of someone’s heart. Each could be snuffed out like a candle.
When it became apparent I had nowhere else to go, Anya invited me home with her, to a second-story room in a house on a muddy, snow-dusted lane near Skorokhod, where she lived with her mother and three children. Children, everywhere. I couldn’t stand to look at them. They looked like accidents waiting to happen. Her husband was in the army, like all the husbands except mine. She and I shared our defense rations with her mother and the children, accompanied by tea and saccharine. The ration provided was heartier than expected. Perhaps supplies were getting through from Moscow—for some reason Yudenich hadn’t cut the railway line. Was Vikzhel up to its clever tricks?
Anya’s mother made a great fuss over my torn hands, cleaning and bandaging them. She gave me a pair of old mittens she had clearly knitted herself. I didn’t want to take them, they could well be her only pair, but she insisted. “If the Whites get through, what good will gloves be to me?” After our small supper, the mother bustled about, packing for evacuation. Soon the family would move up inside the ring of fortified canals. Anya’s older sister lived in Kolomna, by the wharves, near where I’d once mooned under Blok’s windows. And once delivered a package for Arkady.
“Come with us,” Anya said. “You don’t take up much room.”
But I would stay down here as long as I could.
Everyone was anxious, we jumped at noises in the street, a bit of gunfire. “When do you think they’ll get here?” her mother asked. “Will they come tonight? That’s what the papers are saying. And they’ll slit our throats in our sleep.”
The boys played at shooting out the window.
I sipped tea. My breasts were hard and hot, I chewed the last stems of sage and hoped for relief. I could nurse one of the boys, but then I would just keep producing more milk. I had to get past this—the readiness to nourish someone who was no longer able to be fed. The body was such an idiot. The way it bravely persisted. It didn’t know she was gone. I didn’t tell Anya about Iskra. I washed my face and hands in cold water—they had no soap—and crawled into bed with the two older boys. I fell into sleep like a cut pine.
For three days we labored along the Obvodny Canal, the first ring of defense, sandbagging the bridges, the only approach to the cit
y from the south. In certain places we rolled sections of giant pipe from the water system, taller than our heads, into place, barring passage over the bridges. Hair-raising, twenty women on a section, everyone knowing that if one of these pipes rolled back on us, it would smash us flat like bits of butter under a rolling pin. In most places, though, we filled sandbags sewn that very night in the district artels. Men with sledgehammers broke up paving, and we filled barrows with rubble, made waist-high piles of it across the streets, shoving bits of siding onto it, fences, broken carts, barbed wire, anything we could get our hands on. Three days we worked in the wet falling snow, shoveling, carrying the bags, which grew heavier by the hour, and every minute I blessed Anya’s mother for the mittens. Three nights running, I slept with her boys and dreamed of dirt. Sometimes I was burying Iskra. Other times, digging her up. Or looking for her in the graveyard. I had to move her, the Whites were coming, but I couldn’t find the monument. One night I dug a ditch six feet down, a trap for the Whites, only to be buried myself in a collapsing wall of mud.
On the fourth day, the fighting was so close we could hear the guns. We finished the last barricade, and as dusk fell, they told us that if we knew people living north of Obvodny, to go there now. Anya and I kissed one another goodbye. “Come with us,” she said, holding my hands in their ragged wool mitts. But the district soviet was looking for volunteers to man rifle outposts, and it sounded like something I could do.
Four of us followed a leather-clad girl through the dusk and wet falling snow to a building at Moskovsky Prospect and Detskoselsky Prospect, a middling kind of building that had had a pharmacy on the ground floor, a tailor, and a bakery, but now all were empty. My comrades—a dark-eyed man with sallow skin, a bandy-legged codger, and a woman factory worker a few years my senior—and I struggled under the weight of small sandbags we’d been given while the girl from the soviet shouldered a long burlap sack and led us up a rickety, banister-robbed staircase, opening the door of a modest room on the top floor. Two windows overlooked the intersection. About twelve feet square, board flooring, peeling pink wallpaper. It still had its flowered curtains, its tables and chairs, a child’s iron cot. Requisitioned, and recently. Where had the family gone? The girl comrade just shrugged.
She showed us how to pile the sandbags onto the windowsills, creating squared openings through which we could fire. The girl explained the tactic. “See, there’s a barricade up ahead on Moskovsky. So your White tanks, your White cavalry, they see the barricade and turn up here, thinking they can get around it—and then we give it to ’em. POW. Look, there’s another installation across the street.” She waved, and we saw a white hand in a third-story window wave back.
From her sack, like a magician, she produced a dazzling array of grenades, boxes of shells, two rifles and two revolvers, a package tied in string, bottles of water, and piled them on the scarred table like gifts at Christmastime. The sour metallic scent of guns was becoming familiar. The rifles looked new—I wondered why they weren’t up at the front. The revolvers, on the other hand, were old and dirty, their grips worn—I doubted they would even work when the time came. Now I wished I hadn’t given mine to the gravedigger. It would have been better. At least I knew it worked.
I picked up one of the rifles, and both men stared in surprise—as if I’d sat at the head of the table in a peasant izba. Just plunked myself down in the master’s seat. I ignored their reactionary disapproval. “Show me how to load it,” I said to the comrade.
The girl cocked the bolt, slid it back, clicked five shells into the magazine, locked the bolt back down again, and rammed it into place. “That’s loaded.” She handed it to me. “If it jams, empty it—and make sure the one in the barrel comes out too. Then go ahead and reload.”
The ammunition boxes were marked IZHEVSK.
The solemn, dark-eyed man picked out the other rifle, and the woman in her patched coat and the old man had to settle for revolvers, the old man sulky with wounded pride. The girl showed the woman how to handle her gun, where the safety was, how to cock the hammer, suggesting she use both hands, resting her forearms on the sandbags to shoot, so the recoil wouldn’t spoil the shot. “It won’t be long now.” The girl put her own rifle over her shoulder. “No one’s going to leave, not till it’s over, understand?” She gazed into each of our faces. “Anybody leaves, shoot him. I’m serious. No runnin’ down to the drugstore. The rest of you, assume he’s on his way to tell the Whites where we’ve set our traps.”
We peered uneasily at one another. Would I be able to shoot that old man if he decided to go home? That patched-coated woman? I’m sure they were thinking the same of me. Which of us might be a White spy. I was the most likely candidate—from the wrong district, no family, no story. My diction too mannered. “Reinforcements are on their way, but Yudenich may get here first. I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after. Good luck.”
We sat around the scarred table on the cheap rickety chairs. Night fell quickly. We started a fire in the little stove. We could hear the shelling outside, it sounded louder now, maybe because we were high up and facing south, or perhaps it was just the quiet of the evening. “They’re already at Pulkovo,” said the old man, lines like seams in his weathered face. “They’re fighting on the heights. They could be here in three hours.” He looked into our eyes craftily, as if scaring us made him more important. “And they got tanks, those sons of whores. To a tank, what’s a barricade? They can crawl right over those piles of sticks and stones like kids over a stile.”
That’s all we needed, a defeatist in our ranks. Why had he bothered to come, then? He should have stayed in his rocking chair and waited for the Whites with a plate of cookies. So they’d made it to Pulkovo. I wondered how my Ancients were—my stargazers, those Five precious heads. I prayed they’d been allowed to return to the observatory, that they’d found a safe spot to ride this out as the war was fought around them. How many lives ago was that? The astronomer’s son, buried in his grave up there in the shadow of the observatory. Had the grass grown over it? So many graves now, so many ghosts, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into one. There were more dead than living in Petrograd now. I prayed for the safety of those snowy heads. Let them pursue the stars in peace. But nobody would be left in peace, and the observatory was high ground, it would be a coveted artillery position.
“Tikhonov,” said the old man to the dark-eyed one, holding his hand out. “Skorokhod.”
“Slansky,” said the dark-eyed man. “Dinamo.” The electronics plant. They shook hands.
“I’m Irina. Chizhova,” said the woman in the tattered coat, her hair in a worker’s scarf, her large gray eyes. “From the tanning factory.”
“Kuriakina,” I said, unbolting the rifle. “Orphanage No. 6.” Pulled out the shells, loaded them again.
They began to chat, politely at first, then more intimately, as people do in a queue, exploring the packages, which proved to be rations of bread and salt herring. They wondered how long it would last us, how many tanks the Whites had. They discussed the rumors that Zinoviev and the Bolshevik big shots had already packed up when Trotsky arrived. All the heads nodding like wooden toys. More rumors—someone’s sister knew someone somewhere who worked in one of the commissariats…so on and so on. The same talk that took place in every canteen and queue, at every kitchen table in Petrograd. The old man had to urinate. It was a problem. Chizhova solved it with a pitcher that we christened the latrine, and stuck in the next room. We’d worry about disposal later.
I carried my chair over to the window, where I could see down into the intersection and along Moskovsky Prospect toward the cemetery, the Moscow Gate, and Yudenich. I was just glad I had somewhere to be, something useful to do, and living, breathing bodies around me. Now that I was no longer carrying sandbags, my body felt as stiff as a woman’s of eighty, and I had nothing to keep my mind off my dead redheaded girl, my sweet green-eyed baby, and my own powerlessness in the face of the cruelest fate, the worst cards turn
ing over on the green baize of my life.
Yet some part of me still couldn’t fully take in what had happened, that she was really gone. It remained as stupid as a mule. As loyal as a dog that sits at the door after the master is buried, waiting for him to come out in the morning. I didn’t believe in her death. Even though I had buried her myself, even though a paper containing her curls weighed down my heart, a part of me could not accept that it was forever. I felt wrong. Without her in my arms, I was too light. I had too much time. She’d always been with me, right on me—in her cloth, or in my lap. It was like losing an arm. Digging, filling sandbags, with Anya in her small crowded flat, there had been something to keep my mind occupied, but now, staring down into the dark street, it hit me like a blizzard—No, a blizzard was too dense, too absorbing, it obscured vision. This was the opposite, a great shock of consciousness. I could hardly bear to sit in this chair. To listen to their chatter.
Flashes of gunfire twinkled through the big flakes of wet autumn snow—they were close. I could feel Petrograd holding its breath. Our fate, the fate of a city, was being decided. Wagered on a round of cards. I stared down the empty boulevard. The building across the way, on Detskoselsky, was dark except for a scattering of windows lit behind curtains. I listened to my comrades the way one listens to birds, their voices filling the air with basic sounds—hello, hello hello, I’m here I’m here. Danger, danger, pretty bird, come love me. Humans tell stories about themselves, where they’re from, what they do in their work, what they’re doing here instead of home with their families. Everyone has some sort of story. Each human being walks around with an epic poem of himself, just waiting to stand up after dinner and recite it, poor bards that we are. Something about humans, we want to be known. We think we’re a story: beginning, middle, and end—and this is how it ended up. But of course, our stories have no sense, no rhythm, no meaning—an unfolded fan made more sense than a human life. In any case, I didn’t want to tell my story. It was as bitter as uncured olives.