by Janet Fitch
He looked to me again, shrugged. I touched my eyebrow, meaningfully. We would have been a good team, Makar and me. Who could have imagined this in the days when I told the boys the story of Shinshen, and Iskra and Maxim were still alive?
In the end we came down to eighty. “If you can be back in a half hour.”
“I’ll be right back. Don’t sell any of it, promise me.”
Where did these people come from? How had they survived the war ready to set up shop as soon as the season changed? Such strange times. Yes, perhaps it would all end well, just as Kolya hoped. But I felt the lid descending, the last door closing. Kolya had too much faith in himself, which was fine for him, but I could not make a life out of hope. Makar counted the money, smoking his dirty chinar—I’d given him a box of Egyptian ovals but he must have sold them. “Sure you want to leave?” he asked. “We could make a fortune together, and live like kings.” He handed me a pile of cash. “Here’s another hundred thousand. How much do we have altogether?”
“Almost a million and a half.” I’d sewn myself a wallet I could wear under my clothes, where I kept the bulk of the funds. He was an impressive salesman. I should introduce him to Kolya. I’d told him if he could find enough traders to empty the Preobrazhenskaya Square flat in two days, I’d give him ten percent. I’d been skeptical, but he said, “Give me one day.” All day yesterday, he’d brought people up to the flat, and today was even richer. How could an orphan know so many people with money to burn? I supposed that’s what you got when you moved from newspapers to galoshy. Two million would get me all the way to Helsinki. But I would be happy with Kuokkala, and had other plans for that extra cash. In just two more nights the moon would be dark. That’s when the Wolf did his fishing.
The portable phonograph and two pairs of silk stockings sold to a NEPman, Makar’s best condom customer, so he said. The man also bought the pretty dishes. He counted out the money with a flourish before his moonfaced girlfriend as my partner played lookout, watching for bandits. “How about the telephone?” he asked.
I hadn’t thought about it. Private phones were still rare. Kolya used it for work, but it was a traitor. Don’t answer the phone. “Two hundred thousand,” said the boy without blinking an eye, a boy who’d never held a thousand rubles of his own.
“Little swindler. I can get one for eighty,” the man said. “Real Ericsson, straight from Sweden.”
“So get one,” the kid said.
I was scared sick with what the Cheka might be thinking about all this coming and going in the apartment of the Angliysky spy Nikolai Shurov, furniture and rugs leaving out the front door in his absence. But the birds were flying, I had no choice. I had set my course.
In the end, he didn’t buy the telephone. But the woman came back for the liquor, with a bosomy girl in tow carrying two canvas bags. Did she want the telephone?
“I’m tapped out,” she said, as she filled her bags with bottles and handed them to the girl to lug home. “For God’s sake don’t drop them, Mila, whatever you do.”
The girl meekly carried the bags away.
We sat eating in the emptying flat when a knock on the door made us jump. Makar pressed his ear to the wood.
“It’s me, idiot.” A man’s voice. “Open the fucking door.”
He let in a burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard and heavy black eyebrows. I almost dropped my glass when I saw him, caught it before it fell. A face I never wanted to see again. Borya, Arkady’s lieutenant. Saint Peter at the gate. He wasn’t nearly the man he’d been, but who was? I still had the scar on the palm of my hand. Would he remember me, the girl locked in the room overlooking the Tauride Gardens, the one he almost threw out the window? Or that night in the woods when they shot at me as I ran?
He spat sunflower seeds onto the parquet, denuded of its rugs. “My friend says you have some goods to off-load. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“I remember you,” I said.
He gazed at me, not trying to place me. “Yeah, so what?”
“How about a telephone?” Makar said.
The big man glanced at the machine on the wall in its black lacquer case, curled his fat lip, shrugged. “How much?”
“Two hundred,” Makar said.
“Stop wasting my time,” he said. “You’re on my list, malysh.”
Something was wrong with his leg. He was sparing it. “What happened to you?” I asked.
He fixed me with a terrible gaze, an Evil Eye stare. “What do you think, shit for brains?”
Arkady. The men deserting him, he must have shot him, struck him, beat him. But this was the world I was moving back into. The world where anything was possible. “Listen, I’ll trade you that phone for a gun. Something small. And ammunition. A straight-up trade. Something that won’t blow up in my hand. Can you do it?”
Makar stared at this woman, his little comrade matron. He didn’t know me after all. Borya laughed, a small and joyless snort. Can I do it? Yes, I’d asked the right man. He turned to Makar. “Ten tomorrow.”
I lifted the telephone down from the wall, held it out. The big man took his knife and cut its throat.
“You still out on Kamenny? St. John the Baptist?”
He hoisted the phone under his arm. “The kid knows where.”
67 The Émigré
I stood out on Nevsky in the dark, watching Anton in his lit window. I knew he’d be up. The other passengers already asleep, only a window here and there still glowing in the velvet night. He didn’t sleep soundly, and so preferred to work until he was exhausted, then slept hard, grinding his teeth, well into the morning. I wondered if he could see me down here, though I knew the reflection of himself and his own flickering lamp in the window glass would be his only view. I wanted to touch him, to put my cool hand on his hot brow, lead him to safety. Soon this whole ark would list, would founder, and drown in the rising waters of control and mediocrity. I watched and waited, but I saw no one. I was betting the Cheka didn’t have enough manpower to surveil the House of Arts all night. Not for one girl poet, one insignificant nobody.
I slipped into the sleeping house through the Bolshaya Morskaya entrance. I wondered what the Cheka had been looking for in my room, searching my papers that night. Some link between me and Gumilev and Pasha. Actively helped create counterrevolutionary content…Something on which they could base a case against me. Or strengthen the one against Nikolai Stepanovich. And yet, what corroboration did they really need? Their law wasn’t the foundation of a civil society, it was simply pretext, as easy to shift as a pair of slippers.
As I quietly threaded my way through the halls, I wondered again why Gumilev had picked me to teach at the sailors’ club. We weren’t close, I wasn’t one of his students, there were certainly more masculine poets than me. Was it because I was expendable? Because we didn’t have any connection? Or had he seen something else in me, something more incendiary? Or was it just luck? I remembered how he’d pretended indifference to the sailors’ plight during the siege. He was telling me, Don’t moan, don’t wring your hands. Watch, hang on to yourself.
Up the stairs and down the hall, the route I traveled in my dreams. These halls, these doors, the heaven of my poet’s life. Here was Khodasevich, there Kuzmin, a light wheeze. And Inna…I prayed that anyone who saw me now would wait until tomorrow to gossip about it. One more day, and the dark face of the moon would turn to this earth, and I would be gone. They had an informer here—how else would they have known about Pasha? But I doubted anyone would be energetic enough to call the ravens tonight. Human torpor, that great Law of Laws. One more day, and I would be gone. In Finland, or robbed and thrown overboard by the Wolf into the deep and silent waters of the gulf.
When I got to Anton’s, I silently pushed open the door and I found him just where I’d seen him from the street—at his desk, lantern fluttering, working in a haze of foul tobacco. When he saw me, he stopped his pencil, cigarette dangling from his mouth. Whiter than usual, the color of paper. He
stood as if levitating, the smoke still rising.
“Turn off the light,” I said softly.
He doused the lamp.
I walked to him in the illumination from the street. He was just a silhouette, tall and thin. Under my shoes, sunflower husks—up to his old tricks. I pulled him away from the window, plucked the burning cigarette from between his fingers, took a puff and ground it out on the floor. I kissed him, his ashtray breath. He seized my hand, pressed it to his mouth. “Marina,” he breathed into it. “I saw you at the funeral.” He held me as if he thought he might break me, one arm around me, the other hand buried in my hair. “Are you real?” he whispered, his unshaven cheek against mine. “I wanted so much to talk to you that day. It’s been absolute hell, knowing you were somewhere, but not being able to see you. Where’ve you been all this time, at the orphanage? Why didn’t you contact me?”
“Shh…shh…shhh…” I pressed my mouth to his, to stop his questions. What did it matter where I’d been? What mattered was where we were going.
“I saved all your things,” he whispered into my hair. “Your coat, your books…Look.” He handed me a folded piece of paper. The lock of Iskra’s hair. “It was on the floor.” Then he clasped me again, overcome with emotion, hurting me in his awkward grip. “Come back, Marina. There haven’t been any more searches. I think it’s over for now. They’ve made their point.”
It would never be over. Whether it was a matter of weeks or years, they’d be back. And back and back.
He stroked my hair, rubbing his face in it. We sat on the sagging bed in the dim room the color of the inside of a jar. The bedding emitted a lonely, sad smell. I turned the small packet of her hair over and over in my hands. “I’ve missed you so much,” he whispered. The squeak of the bed as he crossed his long legs. I could see his profile as he turned his head to the window. “Every night since you left. I’ve sat in that window. Hoping you’d see me.”
“I have.”
“Sometimes, I think I see you. But it’s the way a woman walks, or holds her head. A word someone says in the street. But you’re always just out of reach, rounding a corner, disappearing into a shop. I’ve been out of my mind.” He laughed, an unnatural, forced laugh. “Like a tormented girl suffering over a crush. My writing is crap. Zhili, razdavili…” We lived, we crushed. “Look what you’ve done to me! I’ve become Semyon Nadson.”
“I’m leaving, Anton,” I said. “And I want you to come with me.”
The big house creaked, stretching in its sleep. “Leaving Petrograd?” he whispered. How bewildered he sounded.
“Leaving the country,” I said.
The bed squeaked. He scratched, turned toward the window. I could see him in profile, his sharp nose, his hair a messy haystack in silhouette. “When?”
“Tomorrow night. I’ve got the money. Everything’s set.” I took his hand, dry and papery.
“Tomorrow? So fast?” He took both my hands. “What about Anvil? The first issue’s scheduled for October. Eikhenbaum’s even contributing an essay.” Pleading with me. “It’s not just a Living Almanac anymore. They’re giving us print. You know what this means? It’s the future of Russian literature. Petrov-Vodkin’s doing the cover.” He had a life, right here, that’s what he was telling me. He didn’t want to go. I hadn’t imagined he’d refuse.
“Think about Gumilev,” I said. “It’s not going to stop.”
I could hear him breathing, a rapid pant. There was a catch in his lungs from all the smoking. “Gumilev was taunting them. Wearing his crosses, talking about restoration. He forgot they could bite.”
Anton thought there was a difference between Gumilev and me, Gumilev and him, Gumilev and the rest. There was no difference. We were all only as good as our freedom to think. “There’s a boat leaving tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ve got enough money for both of us. By the end of the week, we’ll be in Finland, Anton. We’ll be free.”
He sucked in a breath. It rattled as he let it out. He stood, walked to his desk, and slumped into the chair. I could see his body against the window, hands rolling another stinking makhorka. The scratch of the match lighting his face, the slope of the nose, the small unhappy mouth. “We’ve got the Blok memorial coming up. We’re just planning it. Akhmatova’s coming—she’s got a whole new book coming out, she’s writing like mad. She and Shileiko split up—”
“Anton, are you listening to me?” Was I shouting? I lowered my voice. “Blok is dead. We lost. It’s over.”
He sat in the chair, smoking and pulling on his forelock as he did when he was unhappy. He blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “Have you thought about what it would be like, being an exile?”
I hadn’t given it a thought. “I only know I can’t be here.”
“It’s going to be like being adrift on a raft. We’ll be people fallen out of time. Cut off.” His smoke painted arabesques in the windowlight. “We’ll become ridiculous. Who would we write for? Other émigrés? People on the same small, crowded raft? Soon we’ll be the only ones who can understand our antiquated tongue. Growing old, dying a bit more every day. While all around us, people will be writing in living languages. Who would publish us? We’d be as useless as vestigial tails.” He’d thought about this far more than I’d imagined. “I don’t want to be a French writer, Marina. A German writer, Swedish, Portuguese. I’m Russian—I don’t translate. If only we were painters, or musicians, it would mean nothing. We could walk down the Champs-Elysées. But we aren’t. I can’t leave.”
“But if we stay, what then?” I whispered urgently. “We’ll have journals and books, memorials for the dead, but we won’t be able to say anything. We’ll be speaking in code, for people who can understand us. And there’ll be fewer and fewer. We’ll be exiles in our own country.”
He started to pace, smoking, footsteps crunching the layer of sunflower-seed shells into powder. “What would we do abroad? How would we work? How would we live?”
“We’d find something. There’s always work of some kind.”
“Who do we know in Finland? I hate Finland. What’s in Finland? Trees. I don’t even like trees. They give me hay fever. We don’t speak the language, what would we do, raise reindeer?” He was getting hysterical.
“We’ll do whatever we like,” I said. “It’s not the Transbaikal. It doesn’t have to be Finland. We can live anywhere.”
“A couple of exiles. Foreigners. We’d always be foreigners—subject to suspicion. And here, they’ll forget about us. Unknown there, forgotten here—we’ll cease to exist.” He waved his hands like he was dissipating smoke. Poof, we’re gone.
“If we stay, we’ll cease to exist,” I said. In a pool of blood. “And you know what? If I’m forgotten, so be it.” I sat cross-legged on the sagging bed.
“It’s not the same for you,” he said. “You have English and French and German, you could start over like that.” He snapped his fingers. “What are you, twenty-one? You’re a baby. Me, I’m already going bald.”
He was what, twenty-nine? “Your French isn’t so bad. You’d pick it up fast if you spoke it every day. They have bald people in France. You could set up a press, publish what you like.”
“You know that’s not the way it’d be.” I could see his outline, clutching his hair in his hands. “We’d be broke and friendless, misunderstood by everyone, starving in some freezing room.”
“Just like the Poverty Artel. We’ll still be the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.”
“It would be a desert.” He picked up a thick pile of papers from his desk, and shook it at me. “I’d die without this. In the West, who would I be? Just another Russian crackpot. Ivan the Futurist. A joke. Nobody would understand a thing about new prosody, about our new poets. Nobody needs a lousy translator of Apollinaire in France, do they? I’d be superfluous. The new superfluous man.” He leaned against the window, his lanky frame transformed into just a pair of legs. “Always the extra man. Well, I finally found a place for myself here
. I’m known. I’m on the board of the House of Arts now, right along with Chukovsky and Shklovsky.”
He’d come up in the world. Even if it meant Gumilev and Blok had to die.
“I’m from Orel—do you know what that means? A schoolmaster’s son from Orel? I know what it’s like to be circling the outer planets. This”—he gestured to Nevsky Prospect out the window—“this is my place in the world.” He laid his forearm on top of his head, an awkward gesture that was as much a part of him as his stinking tobacco. “We’re going to have a reading at the end of September. Sasha and I are designing the poster. I can’t leave. People depend upon me.”
Pacing, haloed in smoke, he was not talking to me anymore but arguing with himself. “Russian literature depends on us. How can we just leave? What’s going to happen to it if everybody runs for the doors? We’re opening the gallery again, we’re going to sell prints, the concert section’s starting up. It’s going to be…”
Then he remembered me. “Don’t leave, Marina. You’re panicking. This is all going to blow over. You’ll see.” He was running out of arguments.
“It’s not going to blow over,” I said quietly but firmly, and hooked his sleeve as he passed by me. “Anton, stop it.”
“My French stinks!” He waved his arms in the air. “I know you think I’m a coward. But I’m just an ordinary man. Nothing scares you, that’s the problem. You don’t know what life is like for the rest of us. This is my world. This!” I could see his arm shoot out. His voice rising again. “This room, this desk, the hall outside. The canteen. Sasha and Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum. Russian poetry, Russian problems, the Russian mind—that’s my dowry, that’s my bank account. Yes, there’s no more Gumilev, there’s no more Blok. It’s horrible, like having our lungs cut out, but this means it’s up to us, our generation, to keep it alive.”
I smelled his fear, felt his frenzied piling up of obligations and reasons into a barricade, fortifications around his position. He was throwing everything he had onto the pile. As afraid of the unknown as I was afraid of the known. Maybe he was more of a poet than I was. I remembered when Kolya asked me what it was I really wanted, poetry wasn’t my answer. Freedom trumped even that.