Together we walked to the building’s front door and up a short flight of stairs. I would tell no one about this—not Varvara, not Mina. Part of being a woman would be to have just such secrets. He unlocked a door on the second floor. We hung our coats and hats in the entry. He removed his tall boots, and I my slushy overshoes. I threw my book bag in the corner. Inside, a warm sitting room awaited us, with small side chairs and a wide divan covered in olive velvet. Would it happen here? My heart pounded so hard I missed what he said. He repeated himself—“It’s too hot, don’t you think?”—and opened the fortochka in the tall casement window overlooking the Catherine Canal. The delicious coolness mixed with the heat was like a cold cloth in a fever. He bent over and touched my heavy coiled hair, breathed in the scent as if it were a flower. I offered my lips, but he only touched them with a finger, rolling the lower one down ever so slightly.

I hadn’t even noticed the gramophone with its green bell until he went to it and, after cranking it vigorously, lowered the arm. Strains of the tango from New Year’s Eve emerged into the air. He held out his hands to me, he in his cavalry uniform, khaki tunic with gold buttons, blue breeches with their double red stripe, standing in his gray socks, perhaps knitted by one of my classmates. His cropped brown curls lay flat to his scalp, the moustache he sported nestled into the corners of his upturned mouth like twin commas, those clever blue eyes alight…

We began to dance. Not the relatively decorous tango of that New Year’s salon, but pressed together from breast to knee. I felt him hard against me, the full length of him. Now it was not the suggestion of lovemaking, but the thing itself. He pressed me back, our feet turning but deftly, never tangling. I surprised him with a tango kick. He laughed. Better watch me, Kolya. I could follow, but there were other sides to me as well, even as a sixteen-year-old virgin. The play of the gaze—the look away, then suddenly, nakedly, back. The very air leaned against us like a dog hoping to be petted.

“I knew it would be like this,” he whispered into my hair. “I could dance with you to the end of time. Remember how you danced Swan Lake?”

I was seven years old. I’d just seen the ballet, had to show everybody the white swan and the black. “I’m a glutton for attention.”

“You believed it—that’s what I loved. The way you threw yourself into it. I knew you were those swans. I saw how you would be someday. Glorious. I’ve been waiting for you, Marina.”

I had been waiting as well. All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk. And he knew me—he had always known this lay under school uniforms and children’s party clothes, inside the camisole with the blue ribbon. He knew me at six, had waited for me as a peasant waits for the pears to ripen in summertime, watching that tree all the time he goes about his hoeing and reaping. Now he would reap the rewards of his patience.

He pulled a tortoiseshell hairpin from my coif, then another. My hair started to fall, uncoiling heavily over my shoulders, the great mass of it, a Niagara of russet. I had never imagined inspiring the look on a man’s face that he beheld me with right now, the wonder with which he touched my thick locks, lifting them in his palms like a bouquet of roses. He hadn’t seen my hair down in years. He buried his face in it, his hands. It was going to be hopelessly tangled—I helped him tangle it more. It would be a nest for us, like two thrushes in a thicket.

He unbuttoned my brown school dress, pushed it from my shoulders, let it fall to the floor, and traced my bared, lightly freckled shoulders with his fingertips. Touching the ribbon on the front of my slip, untying it, pulling it from me, kneeling before me. I stepped out of it and he pressed the fabric to his face. I thought I would faint with the pleasure. When had I ever seen anything so erotic? He ran his hands up my thick wool stockings, pressed his cheek against the plush of my Venus mount. I held him there, knew he could smell me through the cotton lisle. He rubbed his face, his head, like a cat in catnip. I wished I had worn newer underwear.

Suddenly he lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder—the Rape of the Sabines!—and carried me, laughing and shrieking, into the other room. He dropped me onto a white eiderdown with enormous pillows. The brass bedstead knocked on the wall. Outside, snow fell into the frozen canal, onto the griffins of the bridge, and beyond, softening the lit windows of the Assignation Bank Building. I felt sorry for those people bent over their ledgers. Poor everyone who wasn’t us.

Kolya sat on the edge of the bed, untied the bow of my corselette. Finally, fear came licking at me, as I perceived for a moment the seriousness of my position. I rolled away from him, sat up. “You won’t make me pregnant? I would die. I’d kill myself.”

He put his fingers across my lips. “I wouldn’t. I’m not some sweaty ignoramus. I never leave it to chance.” He reached into his tunic and pulled out small square packages, put them on the bedside table. Rezinky. Preservativy. I knew what they were, I’d seen them in my father’s drawer. “I’ll never hurt you, Marina, I promise you that.”

I got up and stood before him, suddenly serious—grave, even—and undid the buttons of my corselette, watching him as I opened them one by one. To hear him inhale as he saw my breasts, I knew they were beautiful. Not apple-round, like the Venus de Milo’s, but wide set and full at the sides. Now I unbuttoned his tunic, then his shirt, pulled it off. The intoxicating smell of him, warm honey and musk, rose from his chest. He was hairier than I had imagined, gold and curly. I ran my hands over him, the miracle. I pulled him to his feet so I could press my breasts against him. So many textures—the cropped hair, the shaved face, that curly moustache, the softness between his shoulder and chest, the nubs of nipples standing up now, yearning for mine. I brushed against them with my own.

We shucked off the rest of our clothes, which tangled and gripped us as if they didn’t want to allow the final frankness, but soon we achieved our undressing—admiring one another in flesh so long guessed at. Of course I had two brothers, so the male member was no mystery to me, but never had I seen one rampant, not in life. I had once stumbled on a book of Japanese pornography in the library of one of my mother’s arty friends. That shock, the giant hairy mollusks of the women and the stair banisters of the men. Kolya was, happily, neither outsize nor frightening but rather thick, in a nest of golden brown. I thought it would be hard to the touch, but it was velvet, like the inside of my arm, or a horse’s nose. Veined and soon moist. He pushed my hand away.

“Don’t you like it?”

He laughed, rolling his head, his eyes to the ceiling with my ignorance. “Yes, but a man can only take so much before he goes off.”

So much to know. We knelt on the bed, thigh to thigh, our kisses deep and hungry, while a kaleidoscope of sharp feelings tumbled within me: Would it hurt? Would it be the same after? Would he boast? Laugh at me? Ah, but I had waited my whole life for this pleasure, my bottom in his hands, the bright universe of his touch, this lively desirous body, the muscular flesh, the intensity of my own sensations as his fingers moved, guiding me in the tiniest tango, my body impulsively kicking and gripping as he talked to me as though I were a skittish horse. “You’re so passionate. I knew it would be like this. Don’t stop, I want to see you…” A warmth passed through me, so explosive he had to hold me up.

What is virginity? Is it innocence? Ignorance? Fear? Unripeness? I was his pear, dragging down the branch with all my ripeness. I wanted his teeth to burst my skin, his hot mouth to tear me apart. And yet he ate slowly, with exquisite attention.

There was no end to the surprises. I lay upon the hill of huge pillows, and watched him smooth the preservativ over himself. He traced me like an artist with his brush. While his fingers had been surprising, his sex felt enormous—would it really all fit? He pushed, then stopped and rubbed me gently. I didn’t care if it hurt, I wanted him. I pulled him down onto me. I wanted to feel his full weight on me, embrace the length of him, his chest flat against my breasts. Was I too small? It turned out I was equal to the task. A sensation not like anything in a book. Stretched beyond myself, intense, not wanting to stop, wanted him all inside me, not just his member but his whole body. Who needed flesh if it was going to keep me from merging with absolute sweetness? Now we rolled and switched places, me on him, urging him with my hips as I’d urge a horse from trot to canter. Then the darkness took me again, a sparkling wave from groin to head, and gasping, I sagged onto his chest like a drowned woman flung onto a beach.

Afterward, we lay together, his flagpole clad in the preservativ bright with my blood. He handed me a towel with which to clean myself, but I was too lazy. I wrapped my legs around it and lay there with my head on his shoulder, drunk with the smell of him and the slow ticking of my body unwinding. So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge. I dozed, inhaling him—the scent came from his armpits, that honey musk smell, and a muskier one from the nest down below. I fell asleep wrapped in my own hair.

He woke me sometime later. He’d lit the lamp, was passing a box of chocolates before my face like smelling salts. Swiss chocolate, a big red box. I took one, and it was all part of the afternoon, the chocolate melting in my mouth, the fragrant bed, the liquid between my legs, the reflection of us in the bare window. My hair was an explosion of tangled red. It looked like we’d fought a war on the white sheets, completely untucked from the striped mattress ticking, the puffy eiderdown crushed, everything soaked with our sweat.