15 Visitors

GUNFIRE SOUNDED THROUGHOUT THE following day. Whoever was shooting—police, officers who’d escaped the mutineers, workers—it was clear that the regime wasn’t handing over the keys to the tsar’s washroom quite so easily. Varvara never returned, and gunfire or not, Seryozha had left with Solomon Moiseivich, propping a note on the divan where he’d slept, a drawing of him bearing the film case behind the bearded photographer, followed by a parade of armed mice.

I did my best to be cooperative, to make it easier and more fun for everybody to be locked up in the apartment. I played poker with the girls and Aunt Fanya, rounds of chess with Mina. I even let her win. She was a sulky loser and hadn’t had Dmitry Makarov to teach her the moves of the masters. I taught Dunya to waltz as her little sister banged out Tales from the Vienna Woods on the piano. I won a bet with young Shusha by walking on my hands all the way down the hall. All this was to make it up to Sofia Yakovlevna for defying her the day before. She was always so kind, so tolerant. But she was accustomed to her own girls, who did exactly what she said.

I even offered to help with lunch. I stood in the small kitchen, chopping cabbage inelegantly before a tall window filled with plants in pots. I’d never cooked anything in my life. Sofia Yakovlevna chopped onions the way a gambler shuffles cards, not even looking at her hands and the flashing knife. “You let that girl influence you too much,” she scolded me as we worked. “We love Varvara, but such an angry girl I’ve never seen. You be careful. She’s going to bring such trouble down around her. I can see it as if it were written on her face.”

“She’s more bark than bite,” I said, sucking my finger where I’d nicked it with my knife—it was scalpel-sharp.

The older woman wagged her head, neither yes nor no. Lifting the cutting board over a pan smoking with oil, she scraped the onions in with a whoosh and a sizzle, the delicious smell blooming. Steam coated the window. Broth boiled in another kettle. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Listen to me. I know she’s your friend, but she’s going to bring misery to everyone around her. You keep doing what you’re doing. Go to school, write your poems. You’re not a revolutionary—you’re a girl from a good family who has such wonderful prospects if she doesn’t get swept away by all this.”

She looked at my pile of mangled cabbage and sighed. “Like this.” She took the knife from me, cut an even wedge from a second cabbage, and began slicing it so thinly you’d think she was shaving its face. She watched me as I tried again, using the blade as she’d showed me. Uniform shreds of cabbage peeled off the wedge. Her smile worked its way from behind her sternness like sun from behind a cloud. “See? You’re not so hopeless. You should get that cook of your parents’ to show you a few things—someday you might have to live in this world.”

Just the words I’d thrown at my great-aunt.


We sat down to lunch, jumpy from the sound of gunfire in the street. Suddenly shots rang out above our heads. Were they shooting from the roof? Now it was returned, and bullets shattered the masonry around our windows. One broke an upper pane. Dunya screamed. “Get down!” Uncle Aaron shouted, and we all dived under the table, grabbing for each other’s hands. Dunya was crying. Her aunt held her. “Tishe, tishe…” Sofia Yakovlevna prayed a Jewish prayer. I had never heard her speak in the language I assumed was Hebrew. We waited to see if there would be more gunfire, but it seemed to be over. We had just begun crawling out from under the table when we heard the thunder of booted feet in the hall. Fists pounded on the door, then something harder—a rifle butt.

“Oh God, here they come,” Mina whispered and we crawled back under. “Shh,” her mother whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”

“Search party,” a man called out. “By the power of the Military Revolutionary Committee, open this door!”

“I’ll get it,” Uncle Aaron said, crawling out backward. I could see his feet in their worn slippers, the heels he never pulled up when he donned them. “Coming, Comrades!” Cold air wafted in from the hall, and heavy boots stamped into the flat, all we could see from under the tablecloth.

“Are you here alone, Grandpa?”

“The family’s under the table.”

“Tell them to come out.”

Dunya and Shusha were crying. Mina held my hand tightly as we came out to face five unshaved, grim soldiers, three with rifles, bayonets fixed, two with pistols, drawn and ready. Crude red armbands decorated the sleeves of their patched greatcoats. It was one thing to see mutineers on the street busy breaking into a police station or throwing rifles to a crowd, but quite another to have them just a few feet away pointing their guns at you. Mina was crushing my hand.

“Someone’s firing from these windows,” shouted the eldest, with a squared-off beard and close-set eyes, his cap cocked back on his head. “Hands where I can see them.”

We held our hands in the air. “Please… there’s no one but us, Officer,” begged Sofia Yakovlevna. “I swear to God.”

The man laughed harshly. “No more officers now, Mama. Only men. Spread out, boys. Rykov—you watch them.”

A red-eyed boy who looked like he hadn’t slept in days pointed his pistol at each of us in turn as we all listened, following the crashing progress of the searchers through the flat. I silently prayed we would live through this. The gun jerked from me to Sofia Yakovlevna to Shusha in her red ribbons—as if any one of us might attack him if he blinked. He was going to kill us by accident. “We’re not going to hurt you, son,” said little, hunchbacked Aunt Fanya. “You don’t have to keep pointing that thing at us.”

“You shut up, Grandma, unless you want to eat a lead sandwich,” he said.

Then we heard it. Gunfire, directly above us. Whoever was shooting had made it to the roof. The mutineers emerged from the rooms at a run and thundered back through the front door. “Sorry, citizens!” shouted the square-bearded one as they flew from the flat.

It took a moment for the blood to return to my head. I felt dizzy. My hands shook. They’d only been in the flat a minute, two at most, like a vicious thunderstorm. We could hear their boots on the roof. Shots. Scuffling, screams. It went on and on—what were they doing to him? Finally, we saw the body, flung off the roof and down into the street. Now the sound of their boots, clattering back down the staircase, and the slam of the door as they left the building.

Uncle Aaron and Aunt Fanya went back to their bedroom to lie down, and Sofia Yakovlevna moved the rest of us into the photography studio with its black curtains, its windows facing away from Liteiny, where most of the gunfire was coming from. She built a fire in the studio stove to take off the chill, though our mood was damp as the Baltic. I peered through the gaps in the curtains, watching people moving along the sidewalks. One group was busy breaking into a food store. Soldiers came out of a wine shop, their arms full of bottles. I felt less like the girl who’d burned the police files and more like I had yesterday—vulnerable, overwhelmed. Uncle Aaron thought the shooter was an officer enraged at the mutineers, deciding to revenge himself on the disloyal troops.

I thought about Volodya, handsome in his fur-lined greatcoat. What would he do if his troops mutinied? Would he bend, like the little birches? Would he understand the great sea change that had come, that the masses could not suffer anymore, that they’d risen up? Or would he insist on discipline? O Holy Theotokos, I prayed, let him be wounded… not really wounded, just a graze, or a touch of fever… lying in a tent, out of the way in some field hospital. Let him not be telling his men to get back in line, to salute and march on.

Shusha curled up in an armchair and mournfully ran her red hair ribbon through her fingers, sucking her thumb as she hadn’t done for years. Mina went into the darkroom to investigate the damage. Dunya sat with her mother, staring sad-eyed at the door. I could still hear the man’s screaming. What was he thinking, shooting at the soldiers? How many of them did he think he could kill? A whole revolution? Yet I would never forget the vicious reprisal, either. One death did not salve another.

We could hear Mina sweeping up glass, the delicate clatter as she deposited it in the waste can. I knew Sofia Yakovlevna was thinking of her husband, in the thick of it with his camera. And my brother, having at last found something he would die for.

Dunya started weeping again. “They didn’t have to kill him.”

“It’s out of our hands, Dunya, dear.”

Dunya wrapped her arms around her mother and pressed their foreheads together. I envied them.

“Shushele, why don’t you get the magic lantern? We haven’t seen that in a long time.”

The girl jumped to her feet and ran to the shelf where the lantern and the slides were kept. Yes, it was exactly what we needed. The Katzevs had a marvelous collection of hand-painted glass slides from their mother’s own childhood—of Afanasyev fairy tales and Jewish stories and travelogues. As Shusha set up the old projector, Mina emerged from the darkroom, smelling of the vinegary stop bath. “Aren’t we a little old for this?” she said when she saw the projector.

“You don’t have to watch if you don’t like it,” said her little sister. “Dunya, you choose.”

It was nice of Shusha. After the afternoon’s incursion the gentle middle sister seemed the hardest hit.

“Vasilisa the Beautiful,” Dunya said softly.