Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“Why not?” the man said. “I have a few moments.” He put his book on the gray sheet, his cigar stuck between his teeth.

His name: Evgeny Isaakovich Marmelzadt. From Petrograd. Unmarried. No children. Profession, typesetter. Literate. “Why aren’t you an officer?”

“Steblov, tell her why I’m not an officer.”

“’Cause he’s a Jew, barynya. Who’d follow him anywhere except to the pawnshop?” The blond-bearded soldier laughed.

Marmelzadt took his cigar from his teeth. “I rest my case.”

An odd little man, rude and yet willing to talk. Thinning sandy hair, a wide bony jaw. Unlike the other men, he wasn’t intimidated by my clean clothes and educated speech. In fact I had the feeling he considered himself superior to me. “Excuse me, Evgeny Isaakovich, can I ask you one more question?”

“Maybe. Let’s hear it.”

“Do you think the offensive will succeed? That we’ll win the war?”

He smiled a rancid little smile, reading the tip of his cigar as if a joke nested in its glowing nib. “Everyone’s going to lose this war, little missy.” He squinted, sticking it back between his teeth. “Walk away from your pretty streets, your Nevsky Prospect. Stop looking at yourself in the mirror long enough to take a good look around.”

“But Brusilov—”

“Forget your Brusilov. He can’t save it. This whole country is sinking like a stone. It’s rotten, everything in it is rotten. These poor fools can hang on to their saints and their tsar as much as they like, but when this offensive fails, then you watch. You heard it here first. Thank me later.”

I felt his disapproval like a lash—especially the part about looking at myself in the mirror, which of course I did constantly. But I needed to know what someone other than my father thought. I wanted to argue with him—his words cast such a chill, even on a hot day. As I moved on, I felt his gaze following me. I thought of him as we took a cab all the way back to Furshtatskaya Street.

AUTUMN. THE BRUSILOV OFFENSIVE died and crumbled in the mud of Galicia—just as the sour-faced soldier had predicted. Not enough support at the right time, Father said. Territoriality, shortsightedness, and squabbling among the generals had undermined our best hope for victory. Gloom pervaded the house—gloom at school, irritability in the street and in the classrooms. Mother decided to cheer us one night by pulling out an old photo album with silver hasps. We curled up with her in the little sitting room that served as our library, me on one side, Seryozha on the other. Above her hung the Vrubel portrait of her as Igraine, all sea and mist. Near the Russian stove with its blue tiles, Miss Haddon-Finch worked on a jigsaw puzzle while Avdokia sat on a little rush-bottomed chair mending a hem. The scent of cherry tobacco wafted down the hall. All was as it used to be when we were small, and we sat next to Mother, watching her turn the big black pages of the old album like pages in a book of fairy tales. For a moment, I could forget the war, the men, even Kolya, just to dwell there, a little girl, smelling Mother’s perfume.

Verushka and Vadik, Maryino, 1879. Two small children, regal in their little chairs in a garden shaded by an arbor, having their tea under a much younger Avdokia’s watchful eye. “We were considered the prettiest children in St. Petersburg,” Mother said, as if it were a simple fact, like days in the week or the orbit of Mars. “People used to stop us in the street to admire us.”

Our nanny, now old and stooped in her little chair, smiled down at her mending. “Such a pair. Little Vadik—akh, there was a handful. And you weren’t so easy yourself. Our little tsarevna.”

Old photographs tipped in against the large black pages, each image titled in white ink, first in Grandmère’s spidery writing, then later in Mother’s pretty Catherine Institute hand.

“Your brother, where is he now?” Miss Haddon-Finch paused, a piece still in hand, above her jigsaw puzzle—the Houses of Parliament. Father had it sent from England for her birthday. She had a bit of a crush on him.

“In America.” Mother sighed, turning the page. “Last we heard. But the war…” We hadn’t seen him since the summer he’d taken a dacha on the Gulf of Finland, ten years ago. He didn’t come back when war broke out, and Father saw that as tantamount to treason. In Vadim’s last letter—sent from California—he’d included a photograph of himself painting on a stony beach. Dressed in a pair of pants tied at the waist with a rope, he was lithe and finely sculpted as an Assyrian bas-relief.

“You must miss him very much,” said Miss Haddon-Finch.

Vera and Vadim, The Lido, Venice, 1891.

“Yes, I do,” Mother said.

Young, on a boardwalk, Uncle Vadim in a white suit with a straw hat, looking exactly like Seryozha. And Mother, simply garbed in a long white dress, carried a hat as big as a carriage wheel. How relaxed and happy she looked that long-ago day, like a Manet, her hair in the breeze. She always looked happiest with her brother. In pictures with Father, she appeared elegant but always slightly tense. In this picture, she was sixteen, just my age. Two years later, she married Father. It gave me a haunted feeling, that someday I would see pictures of myself as I’d been this year and turn the page to find myself at university. And then what? A wedding picture with Kolya? Posing with a group of fellow poets on the Black Sea? Living on foreign shores, like Uncle Vadim? I imagined the album would end with me, fat and gray-haired, my descendants gathered around me.

Dmitry and Vera, St. Petersburg, 24 June 1893. Their wedding portrait. They stood side by side: Father, the young lawyer, his gaze leveled at the camera, with his well-modeled face and clever dark eyes, hair combed back, sensual lips—before the beard shielded them—in a bit of a smile, and Mother ethereal in her wedding kokoshnik, the Russian-style crown threaded with pearls. Her expression was a bit more guarded in her oval face, her large clear pale eyes. They were both so supremely confident for such young people, gazing out from the picture as if they knew they would be the center of whatever circles they found themselves in. But gone was the freedom my mother embodied in the picture with her brother in Venice two years before. This photograph spoke more of ambition than affection or affinity.

“Your school called today,” Mother said to Seryozha as he turned the page, toying absently with his unruly blond hair. “Unfortunately your father was home to take the call.”

Seryozha winced. Mother’s disapproval was one thing, but Father’s was of a different order of magnitude. Father had done well in school and loved every moment of it. He had been president of the debating society, the geography club, the English club, and editor of the school literary journal. He’d dismissed Seryozha’s tales of boys who mocked him, tripped him, made sure his books fell in the mud, and the jaded or aggressive schoolmasters from whom little help was forthcoming when this bullying was reported. As a woman from minor aristocracy, Mother didn’t care much about academics and liked having her youngest at home, sketching, amusing her. Consequently, my brother had developed a repertoire of mysterious ailments, most of which required a great deal of bed rest.

“I think I have that disease they have in Africa, where they fall asleep right where they stand,” Seryozha said, turning the page. “In the middle of walking to work or milking a goat.”

“Oblomovka,” she said. Oblomov, the hero of the famous Goncharov novel, about a useless young nobleman who can’t get out of bed. She kissed him on the cheek. She never petted me or Volodya this way, but Seryozha was the baby of the family, her special pet. For my part, I would rather go to school every day of the year—even if I were beaten bloody—than sit at home day after day. If it had been me, I would have taken up Father’s offer of boxing lessons. But avoidance was Seryozha’s way, and there was no talking to him about it. His stubbornness was a strange bedrock beneath his seeming weakness and passivity. He could not be forced into anything.

A strong waft of cherry tobacco entered the room, followed by Father in a dark red-and-blue dressing jacket and slippers of Morocco leather. He settled into an armchair and flicked on the reading light. We all tensed a bit, watching as he unfolded his paper and began to read with an exaggeratedly casual air. A lawyer at heart, Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov liked to surprise his prey.

“I’ve been talking to Konstantin Guchkov down in Moscow,” he said, shaking out the page. “He’s offered to arrange a spot at the Bagration Military School. Just as soon as we’re ready.”

Seryozha kept his head down and pretended to study a photograph of Volodya on a rocking horse.

“The school tells me you’ve been absent four times in the last month,” he continued. “Really, it’s got to stop.”

Miss Haddon-Finch rose and excused herself for bed. She didn’t care for family quarrels. Avdokia, however, remained stubbornly in her chair.

Father put down the paper and took out his gold Breguet pocket watch, which Mother had given him as a wedding present, and checked the time against the clock on the wall. He wound it, placed it back in his pocket. “Lying in bed when good men are at the front. It’s a disgrace.”

I could see the life draining out of Mother’s face. “He needs time to develop,” she said. “Surely certain allowances can be made. You know how horrid those boys are.”

Father turned the page of the newspaper on his knee. “All boys are horrid. Trust me, my dear. He’s got to get used to it. The best thing about this Moscow idea is getting him away from you. You coddle him as if he were six.” He nodded at us on the settee. “Look at him. Do you think that’s good for him?”