I did, and when I opened them again he was holding out his hand to me. In his open palm were two eggs.
“They’re beautiful,” I said, running my finger lightly over their perfect shells.
“They’re duck eggs.”
“I know.”
“Shall I fry them up?”
I nodded, but as I ate I felt little enjoyment, despite my earlier hunger.
“Have you been stealing everything you bring back?” I whispered later as we huddled together in bed.
“What do you think?” he answered, sending through me a new wave of shame that he’d been risking arrest every day while I lay in his bed wrapped in blankets, that until then I had not opened my eyes to how he was keeping us alive. I was up and dressed before first light, ready to join the stream of residents who left the ravine every day to work, or look for it.
AS DIFFICULT AS CONDITIONS WERE IN THE RAVINE, I found it worse to leave it. The same streets that had so delighted me just half a year before seemed cold now and mined with a deadly indifference. Not one face flickered recognition of my own. Eyes I met shifted away. Where once I’d felt a freedom in being so unknown, a sense of possibility, now I only felt a danger. My smiles of greeting were not returned. I began to wonder what I looked like, how I smelled. I quickened my pace in response to my growing fear, and instead of going to the ribbon factory to ask about work, I turned into Bayla’s street.
“Oh my God,” she said when she saw me. She led me into a set of rooms as dark and cramped as the ones she’d lived in before. “I’ve been frantic with worry. No one’s known where you were. Your flatmates and some of the others have already been released, and still no word from you. I was afraid … where have you been?” she asked.
“In a ravine.”
“A ravine? Are you serious?”
I told her about going to the ravine for Esther’s fabric, about seeing a friend there, returning to him after the raid.
“A friend? What friend?”
“His name is Wolf.”
“Wolf? You’re staying with a man named Wolf in a ravine? Are you crazy?”
“I know him from home,” I said, and Bayla’s scowl deepened. “It’s not what you think.”
Bayla was eyeing me closely now. “We’ll get to what I think in a little while. In the meantime, you need a bath.”
“I do?”
She nodded, and I was mortified. I had been scrupulous about washing myself that morning despite the difficulty of procuring and heating water in our hut.
“Hey,” she said, softening as she saw my expression. “It’s only dirt.” I nodded, looking miserably at the floor. Bayla tugged lightly on my braid. “Come on now,” she said.
I CANNOT DESCRIBE TO YOU THE PLEASURE OF STEPPING into the bath that Bayla prepared for me in the middle of that tiny kitchen, the warmth that slowly engulfed me. I could not remember ever having been so warm, so comfortably drowsy. I steeped in it for a long while, my eyes closed, while Bayla sat beside me.
“Wolf was right,” I murmured sleepily at one point.
“Mmm?” Bayla responded, pouring a pitcher of warm water over my shoulders and neck.
“He told me everyone would be released.”
“Just who is this Wolf, anyway?” Bayla asked. “His last name isn’t Slatkin, by any chance, is it?”
“Zonnenberg,” I said. “Who’s Wolf Slatkin?”
“Oh, just an unfortunate who worked with us briefly. Wolf was his code name, actually. I suppose Slatkin was too, come to think of it.” She dipped the pitcher into the bath again and poured more water over me. “You should wash your hair. It smells like smoke. Then I’ll have to check you for lice, I’m afraid.”
“Did you ever hear a story about a boy from our village who died needlessly in a fire?” I asked her.
“What do you mean by needlessly?”
“No one cared enough about his life to save it. Because he was some sort of imbecile.”
“I know a hundred stories like that. A thousand. Why do you think I joined the movement? Dunk now.”
“But did you know there was a place in the swamp where people used to leave offerings to him?”
“I think I remember a bubbe meise like that. There were so many bubbe meises growing up it’s hard to keep them all straight.” She started soaping my hair. “Is that one of the things Lipsa told you when you were little? No, wait, let me guess. She took you there once and left an offering so that your luck would change for the better.”
“It was Tsila who took me.”
“What?”
I dunked and rinsed the soap from my hair.
“I don’t believe it,” Bayla said when I reemerged from the water.
“She wanted a baby.”
“I know, but …” She rose to get another kettleful of hot water from the stove. “I guess it’s no sillier than the appeals to God that she was always making.”
“Praying, you mean?”
“Mmm,” Bayla said. She started pouring warm water over my shoulders and I closed my eyes again.
“I know of a vacancy just two streets over,” Bayla said as I was drying myself.
“I’m fine where I am for now,” I said, and Bayla’s eyes widened. “It’s money I need, not a place to stay. I came in to tell you I’m okay and to start looking for a job.”
“Do you have any idea how dangerous the ravines are?”
“I feel safer there,” I said.
“Safer??” she repeated, but how could I explain the ease I felt with Wolf, the dissolving of the cold knot in my chest when he pressed the warmth of his palm against it? “You’ll catch your death there,” she said.
“God forbid. It’s brought me luck, if anything. Had I not been there on the day of the raid …,” I began, but then I remembered what Bayla had said earlier about my flatmates being released. “Everyone’s been freed now?” I asked. “Zelda, Esther, Nina?”
Bayla nodded. “Within weeks of their arrest. It’s the reforms.”
It was as Wolf had said the night of the raid. The reforms instituted following Von Plehve’s assassination, the easing of restrictions on free association and speech, an adherence, in certain cases, to the rule of law.
“It shows the effectiveness of terror,” Bayla said as we sat down again at the table.
“How so?”
“Think it through for yourself.”
I did think about it then, how one assassination had managed to accomplish overnight what countless strikes and demonstrations had failed to bring about. I said this to Bayla.
“Exactly,” she responded, but her mind was already elsewhere. “I’m worried about you.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
“Just who is this Wolf?”
“I told you already. A boy I knew from home.”
“What boy from home? There were no Zonnenbergs.”
“I met him in the swamp.”
“In the swamp?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And then again in the ravine?”
I nodded. And before that in the forest, at night, I thought.
Bayla was looking at me closely now. “Just what is he doing in the ravine?”
“Living,” I said.
“And on what, exactly? How does he support himself?”
“He steals.”
“I see.” She nodded. “And you? Do you steal as well?” she asked, and then her face flamed with color as she remembered, perhaps, that she also stole, and from me, her own niece. She looked at me a moment longer, then reached for her purse. “I have some money I can give you, to tide you over until you find a job.” She reached across the table, took my hand, and filled it with silver rubles. “I owe you,” she said.
Siberia, May 1912
When I went out to the courtyard today I stood in the area that will be our garden this summer. It’s early spring and we’ve had three days of sun. Our garden is in a corner of the courtyard that’s protected from the worst of the w
inds by two of the walls that enclose us. The walls reflect the sun inward, creating an effect not unlike that of a greenhouse. I stood quietly and felt, for the first time in months, the warmth of the sun on my back. For one moment I was nothing but warmth. I had no thoughts, no hopes, no memories—just a fleeting sensation of warmth. It was happiness.
Then Natasha came out with the bag of potatoes we’d saved through the winter for planting. She was a beautiful woman once, and even now her eyes are clear and blue in a face delicate as porcelain. She reached into the bag and her mind shattered. I saw it happen. Nothing moved in her face, but at the back of her eyes there was a sudden shadow, a dark mass of matter: the pile of rubble that a moment before had been her mind.
She pulled a potato out of the bag and held it out to me. I took it from her and it collapsed into mush from the slight pressure of my fingers. She pulled out another potato as rotten as the first.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “We’ll compost these. Masha has another bag somewhere, I’m almost certain.”
She pulled out a third potato and crushed it in her hand. Slime seeped out from between her fingers and still she kept pulling more rot from the bag that should have held next year’s seed.
She took one of my hands then and placed it on the side of her head. She placed my other hand on the other side of her head.
“Press,” she said. My hands were dripping with slime.
“Stop it,” I said, dropping my hands.
“Press,” she said again, repositioning my hands on either side of her head.
I pressed lightly; her skull seemed soft.
“My head is filled with maggots,” she said to me. “While the rest of you dream of life, escape—who knows what else?—they crawl over my brain, devouring it. If you press harder they’ll stream from my eyes and nostrils.”
I dropped my hands, at a loss for what to say, how to comfort. I couldn’t shake the sensation I had had of her skull beginning to give way under the pressure of my touch.
“Soon there’ll be nothing left of me but seething maggots,” she said. “Compost. And for what?”
“For this,” I said. I scooped a handful of warm spring earth from the garden and pressed it into her hand.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1905
IT WAS A COLD EVENING IN EARLY JANUARY WHEN I arrived at Bayla’s apartment again. She embraced me when she opened the door. “You’ve heard, then,” she said.
“Heard what?”
“About the massacre.”
“What massacre?”
“What massacre? Where have you been?”
“In the ravine.”
“Yes, of course.” But her mind wasn’t on me or my whereabouts. “There was a massacre yesterday,” she told me. “In St. Petersburg. Thousands of peaceful demonstrators who had come to supplicate from the Tsar. I can’t believe you haven’t heard.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“I’ll read you the petition they brought to him, their cherished Tsar.” She disappeared into a back room and returned a moment later with a piece of paper, from which she read:
SIRE
We, the workers and inhabitants of St. Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated … We are suffocating in despotism and lawlessness. O SIRE we have no strength left, and our endurance is at an end. We have reached that frightful moment when death is better than the prolongation of unbearable sufferings …
Bayla looked up from the paper. She was exhausted, her eyes rimmed in pink, but her face, though drawn, was flushed with emotion.
“They came from all over the city, peaceful in their intentions, women and children at the front, dressed in their Sunday best, and giving the sign of the cross to the soldiers that they passed. Red flags had been banned so as not to inflame the forces of reaction. They carried only a portrait of the Tsar with a large white banner proclaiming, ‘Soldiers do not shoot at the people.’
“Masses of soldiers lined the route, barring the way to the Winter Palace. The marchers continued peacefully. They moved as one, forward, toward the wall of infantry that blocked their way, but as they approached the Narva Gates the first squadron of cavalry charged. Some of the marchers fled but most continued. Then, the first shots. Warning shots at first—two warning salvos were fired into the air, but then …” Bayla brought her hands to her face and dropped her head.
“They shot into the crowd?”
“At close range,” she said. “And the firing continued even as the people fled in panic. They were mown down by gunfire, trampled by the pursuing horses. Cossacks swooped down from their horses, slashing people with their sabers, cutting them open, letting loose with bloodcurdling cries of exhilaration as they did so.
“But, still, the people didn’t give up. Finding one way blocked, they took another, up the Nevsky Prospekt, pressing on to the Palace Square. Tens upon thousands of marchers. They arrived at the palace, where many believed they would be met with refreshments to celebrate their peaceful presentation of their just and worthy cause—they’re like children; I hate to have to say it—only to be met by cannons and cavalry. The crowd pressed forward, jeering now. The soldiers used whips at first to fend off the marchers, then they took up firing positions. The marchers dropped to their knees. Men, women, and children. The men removed their caps. They crossed themselves, on their knees. Then a bugle sounded and the soldiers fired. Into the crowd that knelt before them. The front lines fell, then the people behind. Young children, who had climbed trees for safety or a better view, fell from their perches like birds caught in a hunt.”
“Yesterday?” I asked. “This happened yesterday?”
It had been a beautiful day, sunny and bright. I had sat outside our shack feeling the winter sun on my face.
“There were riots all night after the carnage, windows smashed, policemen beaten, soldiers encircled by furious crowds, barricades built in the workers’ districts … a spontaneous outburst of revolutionary violence such as we’ve not seen until now.”
BAYLA AND I WERE ALONE IN THE APARTMENT WHEN I first came, but Leib arrived soon after, his cap and coat dusted with snow, his face flushed with cold and excitement. “What’s this?” he asked when he saw me sitting at the table.
“I believe you two have already met,” Bayla said.
“Last spring. On the Krestchatik,” I told him.
“Yes, I remember.” He approached the table, took my hand, and raised it to his lips. His mustache was frosted from the cold outside, but his lips were warm when they pressed against my skin. Then he took Bayla’s hand and did the same. Finally he pulled up a chair and joined us.
“What news, Leib?” Bayla asked, addressing him in Russian.
“The revolution has begun,” Leib announced, also in Russian. “The violence is spreading like wildfire in the wake of the news of the massacre. Riots, lootings, beatings …” Leib removed his wet cap and placed it on the table. Boorish crossed my mind as he did so, despite the import of the news he was bringing. He looked at Bayla with a long and steady gaze. His eyes were dark and serious, his lashes long as a girl’s. “The swell has finally broken, and it won’t be turned back now.”
“Is the violence … organized?” Bayla asked.
“Not yet. The people are too angry, their betrayal too raw. But it will be organized. Soon. Very soon.”
Bayla nodded.
“We’re to continue with our work as we’ve been doing. We can’t afford to let our excitement distract us. Our blows must be relentless, battering at them from all sides, all quarters.”
“Are you to return to Moscow, then?”
He flashed her a look I couldn’t interpret, then he looked at me.
“How did she find out where we’re living?” he asked Bayla.
“Oh, stop it, Leib. She’s more trustworthy th
an half our so-called comrades, and you know it.”
“Why are you here?” he asked me, switching back into Yiddish.
“I was hoping to stay the night with Bayla.”
I had spent the entire day in town, looking fruitlessly for work. By the time the last door shut in my face it was too late to walk alone back into the ravine.
“You can’t stay here,” he told me.
“I have no other place.”
“Why can’t you go home?”
“It’s too late in the evening. I’m living in a ravine.”
“A ravine? That’s unusual.” He was curious now, and I enjoyed the sharpening of his attention. “And what took you to Kiev’s infamous ravines?”
“A piece of blue fabric,” I said.
He looked at me closely, and a slow smile opened his face. He leaned back in his chair, which suddenly seemed too small for him. As he stretched out his long legs, melting snow slid off his boots into a small puddle on the floor.
“And did you find your blue fabric?”
“Not the one I was looking for.”
“Well, what did you find, then?”
I showed him the blue cashmere that I had brought with me that day. I had hoped Bayla might know Esther’s whereabouts so I could give it to her.
Leib leaned forward to look. Then he ran his finger along the fabric as gently as I had when I first saw it. “Beautiful,” he said. “There’s something about it that reminds me of The Blue Bird. Have you seen it?”
“She’s been living in a ravine, Leib,” Bayla said, a tightness in her voice.
“Of course. I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “It’s a play I had the opportunity to see in Moscow. It’s about … well, a blue bird, obviously.” He smiled again. “Which is a fabulous and fantastic creature that everyone covets. It’s kept in a cage, supposedly for its own protection. But really it’s because of the greed of people who can only take pleasure in its beauty if they own it exclusively and control it. At the end of the play, though, it escapes and flies free.”
The plot sounded as dull as Madame Sans-Gêne.
“It’s all in the staging, of course,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “And it’s symbolic, the bird representing the human spirit, which is imprisoned now … but I don’t have to explain that to you. You’re obviously an intelligent girl.
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