It was hard not to see it from Father’s point of view: the three of us tucked up over sweetened tea and butter cookies, petting Tulku, Mother’s little greyhound, and examining old photographs, while men slogged through the mud of Galicia and the Ukraine, leaving their arms and legs behind. “He’ll be sixteen soon, and clearly he’s not university material—”

“I’m going to art school,” my brother said, sitting up, putting a little space between himself and Mother. “I’ve decided. Golovin will recommend me.” Mother’s cousin, the scenic designer for the Alexandrinsky Theater.

Papa studied his youngest son over his pipe, removed it. “You’re talented enough, son, but I don’t see you with the ambition to launch a career. You’ll expect people to intercede on your behalf, open doors, make exceptions, do your talking for you.”

Mother turned the page in the photo album, her foot circling, like a cat twitching her tail. He had boxed us in, for which of us would dare speak up for Seryozha when to do so was to illustrate the correctness of his view?

“The sad truth is that there are only two people here who can make sure you find your way in the world, son. Yourself, and me. And as far as I can see, only one of us is taking that responsibility seriously.”

I ached for my brother—my father was always picking on him—but on the other hand, I couldn’t disagree. Seryozha could be both lazy and impervious to argument, his own worst enemy. Lying there, looking at picture albums… compared to those men in the Oborovsky Hospital, where I’d spent my summer, their stoic good humor, even when missing a leg or an eye—or even compared to Kolya or Volodya—he was a disaster.

Father took his pipe tool from his pocket and dug the ashes from the bowl, knocked them into the heavy ashtray. I gave Seryozha a look that meant “Say something.” If he didn’t want to be shipped off to military academy, he had better defend himself.

Seryozha tried his voice. “Look at Uncle Vadim. He’s got a career.” Our uncle traveled the world painting, taking photographs, illustrating articles in magazines—exactly the kind of life both Seryozha and I dreamed about.

“Vadim,” Father said disgustedly. “These are grave times. We need serious men now, not globe-trotting dilettantes.”

My mother blanched, closed the big album. “I find it… reprehensible that you would take out your feelings about my brother… on our son.” I knew what it cost her to state her feelings so openly. Propriety was as much a part of her as her own skin.

Seryozha set up very straight. Avdokia, behind my father and out of his view, crossed herself.

“We will not be raising any Vadims, my dear,” he said crisply, packing his pipe from a roll of tobacco he kept in his pocket. “Your brother has shirked every responsibility except for his own pleasure since the century turned.” He lit up with a flourish, puffed self-righteously, and sat back, gazing at her with the hard, cool expression he normally reserved for legal adversaries.

Mother sat very still, very erect, her mouth in a thin straight line, smoothing the cover of the album in her lap, a soft green calfskin.

But Seryozha heard the threat of the Bagration school quite clearly. “I can do better,” he said. “Two more years at Tenishev, and I’ll be out of there—it’s not so long, really. I guess I can stand it.”

“You guess?” Father’s eyebrows peaked.

“I mean, I will.” My brother stood. “Really, I will.”

Father let him stand there awhile, fixing him with his butterfly-pinning stare. “Give me your solemn word—as my son—that you will stop shaming your brother and the men who are out there dying for our country. I won’t have it.”

“I’ll go every day. I swear.” Wiping his hands on the sides of his pants.

“Good.” He shook out his paper with a snap. “Avdokia, I’d like some tea now.”

6 Bread, Give Us Bread

A BITTER COLD BUT windless day, a light snow sifting out of the fog like confectioner’s sugar. After school, the three of us were on our way to see a new Vera Kholodnaya picture. We passed a bread line outside a bakery—every day they seemed to get longer. So many sad, tired people, weary shoulders drooping, waiting for their daily loaves. The city had become a waiting room—the part not already a barracks or a hospital. Ever since the offensive broke in September, a gloom of hopelessness had fallen over the city. Strikes had become a regular feature of life.

Varvara stopped to talk to a woman near the head of the queue. “How long have you been standing here, Grandmother?”

The woman gave us a keen assessment with her small colorless eyes. “She asks how long we’ve been here, the little missy.” The women standing around her laughed. “Only since eight this morning, sweetheart,” she said sarcastically. “Nichevo.” It’s nothing.

“Worse every day,” said a sweet-faced woman in front of her in a badly knitted rose shawl. “Soon I won’t bother going home. I’ll just bring a cot and a stove and a chamber pot and have my mail forwarded.”

“It’s the Jews,” an old woman said. She pulled something from her handbag, held it out to us. A pamphlet, worn and badly printed: THE JEWS ARE PROFITING FROM YOUR BLOOD AND SWEAT. THEY BOUGHT OFF THE DUMA! SHUT DOWN THE JEWISH DUMA!

As a Jew, Mina turned away, disgust and a trace of fear on her face. I, too, felt the assault. Father was a member of the Duma—a legislative body of limited powers dominated by businessmen, landowners, and aristocrats. It was hardly a “Jewish Duma,” and shutting it down wouldn’t do anyone any good. But neither of us said anything.

Varvara held up the leaflet and shredded it slowly before the woman’s eyes, letting the pieces fall like big, untidy snowflakes. “What garbage.” She sniffed her glove. “Protopopov’s stink is all over it.” The emperor’s reactionary minister of the interior, a well-known anti-Semite. “The government waves the Jews in your faces to distract you. Can’t you see? They don’t want you to think about how the war’s going. It’s the government that’s sending all the food to the front, and the hell with us. This line wasn’t here two years ago, was it? It’s all going to the war.”

The women glanced about them uneasily. To have someone speak like this on the street was dangerous for all concerned. But Varvara persisted. “Yes, your husbands, your sons. For what? Do you know what this war is about? It’s a big land grab. The tsar and the king of England, the kaiser—all cousins, squabbling among themselves. Dragging us along behind them. Ask yourself, who’s making the money here? Nobel, Putilov, Westinghouse, Dinamo.” The big factories, manufacturing munitions. “They’re the ones who want this. They don’t care how hungry you are.”

These women were actually listening to her. It did my heart good to see that old harridan chewing her cheek in fury.

“You want to shut down the Duma?” my friend scolded her. “Fine, shut down the Duma. Cut your own throats while you’re at it.”

The woman in front of the anti-Semite, a blond housewife with dark circles under her eyes, spoke up. “They say he’s got syphilis, Protopopov. That he’s completely insane.”

“Protopopov’s not going to stop until there’s no food left in the country,” Varvara said. Funny, Father had said the same thing just the night before.

The old hag chimed in. “They say the Germans are giving the Jews a million rubles to get us out of the war.”

“I’m leaving,” said Mina, her gray eyes burning behind her glasses. “I’ll see you at the theater.”

But Varvara barely heard her. She was just getting started. “The Germans don’t have to pay anybody. Are you joking?” she shouted. “We’re losing the war all by ourselves!”

Behind her, a raw-boned baba with a mottled face leaned in. “I heard the grand dukes are sending all the gold to Germany—in coffins of dead prisoners of war. For when Germany wins the war.” I hadn’t heard this one yet. The rumors never ceased to amaze me.

The old Jew hater revved up again. “If only the tsar would come back from the front. He doesn’t know what’s happening here.”

“He doesn’t?” Varvara spat. “With police spies everywhere? Nothing happens in this country he doesn’t know about.”

With the mention of police spies, the women quickly dropped their gazes and clamped their lips together.

Suddenly, a woman shouted back to the queue from the bakery’s doorway. “They say there’s no more bread. They’re completely out.”

The women pressed closer. “Sure they are.” “Hoarders!” “Thieves!”

“They’ve still got food!” “Speculators!” “If we had a fat wallet, they’d find some!”

The women crowded forward as someone inside struggled vainly to lock the doors. The women beat on the metal, shouting, “We want bread!” “Hoarders!” “Scum!”

I thought that we should leave, too. Something was about to break. Women put their shoulders to the door, ten of them, twelve. They heaved against it—one, two, three—and finally burst into the shop. In a moment, they dragged the owner out, a tubby, bald man in an apron, bellowing and threatening, waving his meaty arms to try to free himself from the crowd of babushkas. “There’s nothing, I swear on my children’s heads! You can’t squeeze blood from a rock!”

“Yes, but you can squeeze our blood!” a woman cried out. “Speculator!” Someone hit him over the head with her handbag, and they began to claw at him. It was terrible. The poor man could hardly help it that he’d run out of bread. Others who’d rushed inside wrestled a big bag out into the doorway, tore it open, and began scooping flour into upturned skirts and aprons, into purses and hats. There was flour after all! There was flour—and sugar, too! Here were more women, more sacks, everything covered in flour. Women hunched over, scurrying away with their prizes. How stupid, how credulous I’d been for having believed the man when he said he had nothing, for having worried about him! For people like you, things appear by magic from under the counter, from a back room. I’ve seen it. It’s disgusting. He had been holding back flour for the rich, who could pay double, quadruple the price, just as Varvara had said. A speculator! In wartime!