Varvara was the one who heard about the revolutionaries returning from Siberia, where many had been in exile for decades. We bought flowers and trooped down to the Nikolaevsky station—now called Moskovsky—to wait for them. Znamenskaya Square was full of people holding flowers and banners and singing “La Marseillaise.” It still made me queasy to be here, I couldn’t stop seeing the dying student, the snow scattered with bodies. I wished I had known his name. I wished I could tell him that today we would welcome the exiles home and that his death had been part of that. I wished I could tell him I would never forget him, never.

We worked our way through the crowd to the station only to find that the militia was keeping spectators out. Standing to one side, we watched groups of dignitaries arrive. I recognized Kerensky—now the minister of justice—with his military tunic and brush-cut hair. Varvara elbowed me as a handsome old woman in a big fur hat was ushered inside. “Vera Figner,” she said. She’d been part of the conspiracy to assassinate Alexander II, an act Father thought had done more to hurt progress in Russia than anything Nikolas II could have dreamed of. But Varvara stared in wonder. “Twenty months in solitary in the Peter and Paul Fortress,” she said. “Twenty years in the Shlisselburg.”

Now a good-looking but rather messy woman with a cigarette in her mouth approached the guards. Her appearance raised cheers from the crowd. “Vera Zasulich, the writer,” Varvara shouted in my ear. I recognized the name—a radical writer whose work my friend admired, one of a group of Marxist socialists who’d broken with their Bolshevik brothers and joined the more inclusive Mensheviks. Behind her, a group of young people demanded entry. “Delegation from Petrograd University and from the polytechnic college,” their leader announced, unfolding some papers. The militiaman studied the documents with the elaborately thoughtful expression of someone who could not read. “Pass,” he said, and in they went.

Suddenly Varvara was on the move, her arm linked in mine. I clutched the flowers I’d brought and Mina clung to the belt of my coat. “Delegation from Petrograd Tagantsev Gymnasium,” my friend shouted over the din, and showed what looked like a hall pass. The militiaman glanced at it, then at us—at me with my flowers; at Mina, the intellectual, with her glasses; at Varvara, confident with her red armband—and waved us inside.

Following Varvara like ships behind an icebreaker, we threaded our way through the throng and out onto the platform. The station was less crowded than the square outside, but it teemed with people holding bouquets and banners, civilians and students and soldiers alike. The dignitaries spoke cordially among themselves on the platform. Paul Miliukov and Vera Figner eyed each other nervously. We could hear the crowds outside singing.

At last a train came rumbling in, brakes screeching against the great iron wheels filling the air with hot ozone, the cars grimy with mud and soot, the windows frosted over. The crowd pushed forward in anticipation of the doors being opened. Then the exiles emerged holding their pitiful sacks of belongings. Thin, worn, exultant, each stopped in the doorway for a moment as he or she took in the size of the welcome. I could see they were overcome with emotion. These men and women had been exiled for ten, twenty, thirty years. Now they were home. Not only home but welcomed by an entire city. Lovers who had not seen one another in half a lifetime embraced. Families and old comrades pounded one another on the back. I held my gloved hand over my mouth and wept as people around me shouted and cheered.

An elderly woman emerged from one of the cars, pausing on the step.

“Urah!” the crowd roared. Varvara shook me, pounded my back. “It’s Breshkovskaya!” This was the one we’d all been waiting for. The Grandmother of the Revolution, the newspapers called her. This squat, wall-faced woman, born to nobility, had already spent twenty years in Siberian exile by the time I was born. In her few short years of freedom, she’d founded the Socialist-Revolutionary Party—the SRs, the original party of radical rebellion—just before she was rearrested, in 1905. She’d been in Siberia ever since. And here was Kerensky, kissing her three times. I’d forgotten he was an SR. As justice minister, he was the one most responsible for this amnesty.

“What an ungodly idea,” my father had said. “Bringing the revolutionaries back to Petrograd. That man is a menace.”

How old she was, standing in the train doorway, her white hair under her crushed hat. What a life she had lived. What courage, what fortitude. She waved to us with a white handkerchief clutched in one hand, carpetbag in the other. And so the revolution emerged from the train to meet the revolution. I felt as though we were her brilliant child, showing our fine work to our teacher, bathing in her esteem. We did listen, the crowd was saying. We never forgot you.

17 White Swans and Black Sheep

EVERYTHING AT THE MARIINSKY Theater spoke of the new era. Workers and soldiers I’d marched with now sat on gilded chairs, shoulder to shoulder with my bourgeois family, waiting for the performance of Swan Lake. Mother chatted self-consciously with our guests, the English second secretary, his wife, and an attaché, but I noticed she’d left her sealskin coat on, so she would not have to reveal the cut of her elegant clothes. The bones of her face stood out anxiously, and small lines grooved her mouth. The group exchanged commonplaces about mutual friends, as if nothing in the least bit extraordinary was happening, while the shabbily clad women workers seated in front of us estimated aloud how much fabric it must have taken to create the ornate curtain. I tried to imagine how it must feel to enter this gilded hall after a long shift at Okhta or Belhausen. Their factory committees had evidently distributed free tickets. “I thought it would be bigger, didn’t you?” said one in a red scarf. An older woman examined the tiers of loges. “Glad I’m not up there. I’d be afraid to open my eyes.”

I felt suddenly protective of the ballet. Would they like it? Would they find it stilted and ridiculous? What if they didn’t understand? Would there be a riot? Or would they love it, these workers, these soldiers, who might only have ever heard a guitar or a wheezy accordion? I couldn’t wait for them to witness the power of the orchestra, the artistry of the dancers. This was their culture, their birthright. I prayed the introduction would go well.

Seryozha, next to me, drew the trio of women before us in their scarves, posed against the backdrop of the baroque curtain’s swags and tassels. I Thought It Would Be Bigger, he titled it. Behind us, the imperial box, whose coat of arms lay shrouded in white, was filled with the exiles I recognized from the train station: Breshkovskaya, in the same crushed hat she’d worn when she arrived. I couldn’t stop turning and staring, so miraculous to see them in seats just a month ago reserved exclusively for the imperial family.

The soldier next to Father chewed handfuls of sunflower seeds and spit the shells on the floor. My father surreptitiously kicked them off his shoes while keeping his careful composure. I understood why the man did it—to show that the place didn’t intimidate him, when clearly it did. Suddenly, the attaché flinched, as if stung by a bee, and recovered a paper airplane that had hit him in the back of his head. We turned to see who’d thrown it. Pavlik Gershon waved from the balcony.

My brother eyed him. “What happened to Kolya?”

“You mind your own business,” I said.

The lights dimmed. People called out as if some trick was about to be played on them, and the jarring notes of the orchestra tuning added to their anxiety. But with the tapping of the conductor’s baton and the first woodwind notes of the overture, they quieted down, and at last the curtain rose. First there were gasps, whispers, then laughter as the new audience beheld the stylized movements and the men in hose. The soldier next to my father hooted merrily, “Hey, Prince, you forgot your pants!” The dancers in the corps bravely forged ahead despite the catcalls. Father’s face betrayed nothing, but if Mother had been a horse she would have bolted.

Soon the grace of the ballerinas began to charm the newcomers, and the jester’s athletic leaps drew vigorous shouts of approval. What a thrill for the dancer—knowing that this was a spontaneous, visceral reaction to his art! Audience and performers were getting to know each other, minute by minute gaining respect for one another. When the soldier next to Father called for the dancers to drink from their goblets instead of twirling around—“You’ll never get drunk that way, Ivan!”—others shushed him. Yet I sensed the orchestra rushing, trying to get through it. When the curtain closed, Mother sat back as if she’d just run a mile and fanned herself with the program.

I prayed that the second act, with its brooding music and mysterious dark woods, would be more gripping. The sighs as the curtain rose were as sweet as music to me as the viewers beheld the blue enchanted trees, the lake of the stage. The company’s von Rothbart performed in fine, defiant form with bravura leaps and wonderfully evil wings. Poor Prince Siegfried, however, was catcalled for his handling of the hunter’s bow. At last Karsavina entered as Odette, the enchanted swan. Oh, her slim white-clad figure with its crown of feathers, so pale against that otherworldly background. She balanced en pointe on those impossibly slender legs, alone in the center of the big stage. Even the soldier who had been spitting sunflower-seed shells on Father’s shoes stopped to gape. I watched the returnees. Had they ever dreamed, in their prison cells and cold nights of exile, that someday they would watch Swan Lake from the tsar’s own box, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd all around them?