“We have to go soon. Come on. I’ve drawn a bath for you.” He kissed the top of my head, got up, found his shirt on the floor, put it on.

It was almost six by the clock on the bedside table. If I missed dinner, my family would wonder what had happened to me. “I could call them, say I’m going to be late.”

“You don’t have to eat every chocolate in the box.” He squeezed my breast, slapped my bottom.

I took another chocolate, just for that. “Everybody always says that. But let’s stay here forever and eat every chocolate in the world.”

“I adore you, Marina,” he said, buttoning up his tunic. “But I’ve got some people I’m meeting in a few minutes. It’s why I’m in town. Not just to explore delectable young women.”

“What could be more important than that?” I wanted more. I wanted to take up residence in the nexus of pleasure called Kolya Shurov. “Take me with you.”

“It’s army business. I hardly think you’ll pass muster.”

Reluctant to move, yet knowing I must, I shuffled into the small bath perfumed with the fragrance of milled soap. I gingerly lowered myself into the water. It was just as well we had stopped when we did. My body probably couldn’t have stood another assault. I washed, wincing at the abrasions, dried myself off using the one bloodied towel in order not to shame the maids too much. The face before me in the mirror was bright, smudged, a little stunned. Who are you? I asked, touching my fat lips, gazing into my stupefied dark eyes. This is what a woman who has just made love looks like. The next room of the self.

“When will I see you again?” I asked, attempting to brush my tangled hair with the help of some borrowed brushes, my clothing mostly restored. Propriety was pure disguise.

“I’ll send you a message,” he said. “Wear a red ribbon in your green coat after school so the messenger will know you.”


Was Father looking at me strangely? Did Mother really not know? Couldn’t they smell him on me? Couldn’t they tell? I ate quickly and tried not to look at Seryozha. I was sure he’d noticed a change, if only because of the waves of happiness rising off me. Luckily Avdokia ate in the kitchen with the cook and Basya. My nanny was clairvoyant—she wouldn’t be fooled for an instant. I watched plain, good Miss Haddon-Finch debone her fish and wondered if she’d ever had such an afternoon. Or my parents, for that matter, seated at their two ends of the table. Had they ever been capable of such ardor? The shrieks, the groaning, the sweat, the torn-up bed. I doubted it. They didn’t even sleep in the same room.

Seryozha caught my eye, cocked his head. What? I smiled like the Mona Lisa—perhaps this was her secret. Father spoke of a conference with members of his political party, the liberal Kadets. Something about the tsar. “We’re offering the emperor a way out,” he said to Mother, spearing a piece of sturgeon and some potato on his fork. “Constitutional monarchy. He could preserve his crown, but he won’t see it that way…”

“Surely he will,” she replied.

I was usually quite interested in politics, especially after the bread riot—not to mention the rebuke from Marmelzadt and Varvara’s constant agitation—but tonight all I could think of was the feeling of my bare breasts pressed to Kolya’s chest, all the ways we explored our love in that white bed. I finished my meal as fast as I could, and excused myself. I would write a real aubade this time, an ode to those cropped curls, all the textures of him. I knew I would love hairy men for the rest of my life.

I sat at the vanity table in my salmon-pink bedroom, brushing my hair. It still smelled of him. Beneath the glass lay a picture of Kolya and Volodya taken in the south two years before, sitting on a rocky hillside. Such confident young officers in the pure hot sun. I was about to kiss his sweet face when Seryozha entered. He closed the door, stood behind me sternly, as if he were Father. “Who is it? Tell me.”

I coiled my hair back into its decorous coif, replaced the pins. There was no point in trying to conceal my love. I was too eager to talk about it. “It’s Kolya. He’s here on leave. He was waiting for me after school in a sleigh with a gray horse.”

My brother’s sternness softened, replaced by uncertainty, a flicker of pleasure, then envy, and back to uncertainty. “Did you…?”

I nodded.

He came closer, crouched to look over my shoulder, eye to eye with me in the vanity mirror. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. He put his head on my shoulder and we stayed that way for a long time. When he stood, I saw he was weeping, though whether it was from losing me and childhood or envy, it was hard to say.


I could not stop thinking about sex. I imagined everyone naked—Vaula, the dvornik, people in the street. I imagined them making love and tried to decide which ones were still virgins. My new eyes caught couples who had clearly just made love saying goodbye at cabs and couples on street corners preparing for an assignation. Their energy set them apart, brightness bursting from them like little colorful suns. I imagined who would be prim and who would be passionate. I felt my way into the lives of old couples strolling along, fires dampened but still slightly warm. The ugliest sight: couples who had not made love for years. You could see it by how they walked together. No affectionate touch. No tango. How could they bear it, linked to a person for whose body you didn’t yearn? No one escaped my scrutiny—bourgeois men and women, my own father and mother. The unemployed, my teachers, people in the shops.

How loathsome suddenly became the routine of schoolgirl life. Geometry, French, Russian literature, English. Voice lesson with Herr Dietrich, dancing class with M. Dornais. It seemed like a joke. Although I enjoyed being handled by those nervous boys in dancing class as much as I ever did. Perhaps more. I felt them so keenly now, the hands on my skin, a glance to my bosom. I imagined undressing Danya Bolechevsky, pimply but receptive, and Sasha Trigorsky—his erect carriage, what else might be erect? Men in the streets, at Wolf’s bookstore—no one escaped my lascivious scrutiny.

Every day I wore a red ribbon through the buttonhole of my green coat no matter how bitter the cold: twelve degrees below zero. It had been a terrible winter, but I was a furnace. I emerged through the school gates in a fever, head held high, so the ribbon would be visible. Walking down to Mina’s apartment, or to Konditerskaya Sever on Nevsky for chocolate, I waited for his summons. Who would it be today? He liked to use the most outlandish people he could find, it was part of the surprise. Would it be the cripple dragging himself along on a sledge? The freezing newsboy? The man with a great red birthmark? I stopped on the Anichkov Bridge, where the four bronze statues of horse tamers struggled with their mounts—two of them were very much in danger of being trampled. And I wondered who I was in this drama—horse or a groom? Straining at the bridle or trying not to be trampled as I attempted to turn that great passion to my own purposes? Everything seemed like a metaphor these days. I was wide open to the world, waiting for the one who would stop me and hand me a small white envelope. At last, a Nevsky prostitute approached and handed me an envelope with a red seal. I tore it open—his paper, the finest, from Michelet’s. Just like Pushkin’s.

Today is impossible. I’m devastated. I can’t stop thinking of you, Marina. I see you everywhere. Think of me with you right now. Tomorrow, I promise.

Underneath the words, a little drawing—a nude girl dancing with a bushy-tailed fox. I had to laugh, though the message wounded me. How could he not be as eager as I to spend every moment in bed? Still, when we did meet, my anger would be quickly absorbed in the unfolding desire. Our passion took more weight and dimension each day, like a fast-growing young bear.


One night, our family attended the ballet—with our parents’ friends the Gromitskys. It was Karsavina in Les millions d’Arléquin. Both Seryozha and I had been besotted with her, ever since that night at the Stray Dog. “I wish we could have The Firebird,” Mother complained to Madame Gromitsky. “It’s not right that the French should get all our moderns.” The Mariinsky Theater, under imperial patronage, had to follow imperial taste, and thus far the tsar only endorsed the classics. Even the Harlequin was a stretch. Balletomanes like Mother resented the fact that the Parisians were able to delight in the bright creations of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—productions never staged in Russia.

Karsavina, I decided, had definitely torn some bedsheets.

In the interval, Seryozha and I remained in our seats. I hated breaking the lingering trance and Seryozha was finishing some sketches. Now Mother exclaimed, “Oh look, it’s Kolya. What a pretty girl—Kolya!”

My lover was coming up the aisle escorting a beautiful woman in a low-necked black gown, his hand on her back. I wanted to vomit. As they approached, I held my hand over my eyes as if to cut the glare of the lights. Where could I hide myself? Go away, Kolya! How could he? So much for the fox and the girl. Was this what he was doing instead of meeting with me? If I hadn’t been caught in the row, I would have run away weeping. Shamelessly he approached, broke out in a grin. Now he was greeting my parents, introducing this creature, Valentina somebody. I tried not to look, but how could I not? It was like an overturned cart, an auto wreck. And the beast winked at me! As if we were in collusion. As if this were all a great joke! As if I were so sophisticated that I would know it was still the two of us and not give a thought to the exquisite woman he stood next to. “Are you enjoying the ballet, Marina Dmitrievna?” he asked me.