Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

We strolled along the Petrovskaya Embankment, where the river sparkled, shattering reflections of the lights from the bridges and the Winter Palace. The whole right side of my body turned rosy with this boy’s proximity. Walking with him was like standing next to a furnace. “I’ve seen you before, you know,” he said. Had he seen me that night at the Stray Dog after all? I didn’t reply. There was time. We had all the night ahead. “At Wolf’s bookstore. You wore a green coat and a white hat, and you were looking at poetry.”

I must have been hunting for my own book, seeing if any had sold. I wanted to tell him that, but it would seem like I was trying to impress him. And he probably wouldn’t consider my stuff poetry anyway—it wasn’t very futuristic. But this was poetry, too—this, the fragrance of sex and possibility. It was a scent that surrounded me ever since I’d started up with Kolya. As if I’d passed through a mirror and found I’d become beautiful, or interesting, something other than myself. It was foolish and vain of me, but right then I felt as if I could stretch out my arm and the bridge itself would sidle closer, rub up against me like a cat.

Genya Kuriakin leaned against the balustrade and reached out toward my face. I stood very still as he carefully picked up a lock of my hair that had fallen loose and tucked it back in. “Yes, a green coat and a white fur hat, a ribbon in your buttonhole. I wrote a poem about you. Do you want to hear it?”

“If it’s any good,” I teased him.

He stepped away from me and began:

Poor poet. I could well imagine his anguish as I examined his book, then put it back, unread. With that red ribbon in my buttonhole, waiting for Kolya. It was for valor in bed, Genya—that battleground. “Yes, I remember.”

He kissed my palm, as if he were drinking from it. “No, you don’t. But that’s all right. You can remember this instead.”

We continued walking along the quay. The stars were winking on, and the warmth of his arm around my shoulder made my coat unnecessary. Then the moon began to rise, fast, illuminating his face, his eyes. Were they green or brown? His nose was long and bumpy, it had been broken. When we stopped again, I pulled the carrot from his buttonhole, took a bite, and threw the rest into the water. He kissed me then, suddenly, carrot still in my mouth, with all the awkwardness of unstudied desire. This was what young people did, I thought—simple and open, not a practiced seduction. Not hidden away in some stranger’s decadent flat. I felt younger than I had before, lighter, as if I’d been allowed to go back and try a new path.

He talked and talked. He’d come from a town in the Volga called Puchezh, north of Nizhny-Novgorod, where his father was a priest. Genya was a Bolshevik, he’d been to jail or so he said, he hated religion. He lived with a group of poets in a flat near Haymarket Square, and contributed to a journal called Okno—The Window. He considered himself a futurist. He loved Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and with bashful pride he admitted that his Okno friends had published a volume of his poetry called The Brief Memoir of a Clay Pigeon, the very book I’d picked up and put down again.

I didn’t volunteer any information about my own family—it was too embarrassing to say that my father was a Kadet member of the Provisional Government, that my mother was a Golovin, that we lived in a twelve-room flat on Furshtatskaya Street. Instead, I told him about the poets I loved, that I was graduating soon, on my way to university. “I write, too. Poems. That’s what I was doing at Wolf’s that day. Seeing if any of my books had sold.”

“I should have known. I felt it. More than just a beauty.” He leaned his back against the balustrade, folded his arms. “Well? Let’s hear one.”

I loved that he assumed I could just rattle one off, that he assumed it would be worth hearing. But which? The poem I’d written about the death of the student at Znamenskaya Square? That would impress him with my revolutionary fervor. But instead, I recited one written by the girl in the white fur hat, so we could be formally introduced.

I couldn’t see his face in the dark. He was too quiet. I’d embarrassed him. Oh I should have done one about the insurrection. “You think it’s kitsch.”

He laughed, wrapping his heavy arm around me, resting his cheek against my hair. “No, it’s perfect. Just right. I was afraid you would be clever, all hard and brilliant. I hate cleverness. Without blood and bone, there’s no poetry—there’s nothing.”

What gods had favored me with this chance meeting? I felt I was teetering on top of a needle twenty feet in the air. The Neva flowed deep and wide before us, plashing, speaking its indecipherable truths, like Fate itself, unknown. Everything I’d thought about the future was dissolving in my hands. As Mina would say, I’d not taken variable x into account. And here he was, variable x. Genya plucked at my coat. “Why don’t you wear the green one? And the furry hat?”

“It’s spring,” I laughed. “And ermine would scarcely do for the Cirque Moderne. Trotsky would hardly approve.”

“He’d make an exception for you. Haven’t you heard of Marina Makarova, Comrade? The poet with the head of fire and the voice of flame? Surely you can’t begrudge her a hat. No? I didn’t think so. He says it’s all right.”

Who would have guessed it? A romantic. A man who wrote poems about burning police stations, a Bolshevik. He held me tight, buried his face in my neck. “I love you, Marina Makarova.”

How my body missed a man’s embrace. Kolya had never said he loved me. No one ever had. “You can’t love me. You just met me.”

“I don’t care. I love you. Just say my name.”

“Genya Kuriakin.”

“Say it again.” He picked me up as if I weighed nothing, as if I was a child, shouting, “Say it! I want to feel the syllables climbing your beautiful throat, the corners of my consonants stuck in your teeth, my vowels sticky on your tongue!” He spun me around, making me dizzy. His silky hair smelled of trees, of hay and meadows. When he slid me down his body, it was like sliding down the trunk of an oak.

He pressed my palm to his lips as if his face were freezing and my hand the only warmth. “Marry me, Marina. You will, won’t you?”

I laughed out of sheer happiness, the lunacy of it all. “But what shall be our wedding ring?”

“How about Saturn? He’s got rings to spare.” He reached up and pretended to grab Saturn out of the starry sky in one enormous fist and slid the ring onto my finger. “A perfect fit.”

And so we were wed.

HOW COULD I HAVE lived in the same city as Genya all these years and never seen him with his pack of fellow poets, conferring in cafés, reading on street corners? They called themselves the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now. They were everywhere, reading under the General Staff Building arch, in Haymarket Square, and on the banks of the Pryazhka River right under the windows of the great Alexander Blok, which is where I first met them. It was a clear provocation, one generation of artists trying to outrage their elders. A young man of twenty-five or so was reciting a zaum poem to the perplexity of the passersby—trans-sense language poetry invented by the avant-gardists Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, whom I already knew Genya adored.