Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Then Genya was shoving his way through the horde, pulling them out of his way, into the ugly inner circle. Their faces were so puffy with fury and a horrible glee that they were unrecognizable as human. He grabbed people by their collars and flung them aside to reveal a boy about Seryozha’s age, broken on the stones. “Isn’t that enough?” he shouted at the crowd. “Didn’t she get her miserable purse back?”

A man with a face like a knobby potato kicked the boy one more time. “That’s what we do with thieves. He’ll remember that the next time he thinks of stealing something.”

His face streaming with tears, twisted in pity, Genya picked up the limp and bleeding body, lurched to his feet, and carried the boy on his shoulder away from the crowd. I followed him through the square and he turned down a passage into a courtyard. A woman pumping water into a pail glanced up at us with little interest, as if we were hauling coal. Genya carried the battered boy up a steep stairway, arriving in a dark, dirty hall. I had to reach into his pants pocket for his key, at which he gave me a ghost of a smile. The boy moaned. I unlocked the door.

Here it was, the Poverty Artel. Three windows overlooking a courtyard. A divan and a cot, some mismatched chairs and stools, a table covered with manuscripts. Newspapers plastered the walls. But the divan had been neatly made up with sheets and a pillow. Genya lay the thief there, the boy’s purple face already swelling, his eyes shut tight as a newborn’s. “Stay with him. I’ll get some water.” My would-be lover grabbed a jug.

I sat next to the boy, praying he wasn’t terribly hurt. The thief keened and moaned. I took his hand—hard and dirty—and hummed a song my mother used to sing when I was small. Fais dodo, Colin, mon petit frère… While we were waiting for Genya to come back, the boy turned and squinted at me through terrible swollen eyes. “I don’t want to die. I’m afraid,” he whispered through his split lip, his broken teeth.

“You won’t,” I said, and tried to shape my face into a reassuring smile. “He’s getting you something to drink.” All I could do was hold his hand.

I thanked God when Genya finally returned with the pitcher of water. The urchin’s head was swelling into something unrecognizable. We switched seats. Genya took a rag—no, a nightshirt—and sponged the boy off.

“I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.”

I sang for a while, low, sad songs, until the boy’s breathing slowed. The bird nests, but I am an orphan, I have no home…

We spent the rest of the night watching him sleep, like worried parents. Was he asleep or unconscious? “Shouldn’t we get a doctor?” I asked. “What if he…” But I didn’t want to say die… dying was a matter for professionals, not poets.

“There’s no doctor,” Genya said gently.

“We could fetch him to the hospital…”

“They wouldn’t take him. Look, we’ll think of something in the morning.”

He held my hand, and recited the poem I had written about the light in the window—he remembered it. All we could do was keep this boy company. So that’s what we did. I couldn’t help but imagine how it would be to watch a child who was ill, a little boy with a fever. This was what was meant by love—not passion, not a game of pleasure.

I fell asleep on the cot, on top of the blankets—the sheets were far too grimy—but Genya stayed awake all night in the chair by the divan, putting cold compresses on the boy’s swollen head.

When I woke in the morning, Genya stood at the window. “He’s dead.” The frail lifeless body, the purple battered head, a pink stain on the pillowcase. “I’m going to take him down. Let them look at their handiwork.” He lifted the small form, the head flopping. I opened the door for him and locked it behind us, followed him down the narrow, foul-smelling stairs out into the courtyard, then the lane. As we walked, Genya began to sing “You Fell Victim,” the song they’d sung when they buried the martyrs of the revolution. People stared as he carried the fragile corpse through the workaday streets and into Haymarket Square, moving through the stalls selling hats and fruit and cucumbers, past tinkers and candle makers. His song gathered a crowd. He propped the boy up against a post and addressed them. His voice carried far into the square, reciting a poem he must have written while I slept:

The onlookers were silent. A middle-aged woman clutched a handkerchief to her mouth. A man in a leather apron took off his cap.

Genya left the boy to them and walked me back to Furshtatskaya Street.

THE SMELL OF PIPE tobacco lay thick in the hall that morning. I was hoping to go straight to my room—I was dead tired and smelled from sleeping in my clothes on that squalid cot—but Miss Haddon-Finch flew out from the salon and stopped me from getting any farther than the vestibule. “Marina!” Red-eyed and rumpled, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. “Where have you been? We’re all beside ourselves… your mother… your father! We thought you’d been murdered. Seryozha told us about the boy… what were you thinking? With everything else Dmitry Ivanovich has to worry about?”

“I’d like to go wash up now,” I said. “It’s been a terrible night.”

“He wants to talk to you. He’s in his study.”

They must have wrestled it out of my brother. He’d never have shared this unless coercion was involved. Well, they knew now. All right, so what? It wasn’t as though we’d done anything, much as we’d wanted to. Ironic. But even if we had… I was a grown woman now. I’d seen four people die right in front of me. I supposed I could face my father’s disapproval. I straightened myself, took a deep breath, wiped my hands on my coat.

He was waiting in his study, his cheek on his hand, elbow propped on the green leather top of his desk. Dressed, but not carefully. His collar was askew, and his skin looked rough and bloodless. This is what he’ll look like when he’s old. “Close the door,” he said.

I did. I decided to speak before he could, so he couldn’t draw out the suspense. “A boy was beaten last night on Haymarket Square. My friends took him back to their room, and we tried to save him. He died this morning.”

He gazed at me wearily across an open book… Dickens. I recognized the volume, one of a set. His eyes the same brown as my own, though this morning his were drooping and bloodshot, yellow in the whites. “Friends, you say. Your brother told us you’ve taken up with a self-proclaimed poet, some young roughneck you met at a radical meeting. Is that why you took off so quickly last night that you could hardly push in your chair?”

“Yes. But not the way you’re thinking.” Though it was, of course.

He rubbed his eyes, pulled his palms down his face, as if he could wipe off the sight of me. But there I was again. “Well, you’re a graduate now. A young woman. I just thought you had more respect for yourself. An awareness of your position in life.” He gestured for me to sit in a spindle-backed chair.

Were we really going to have this conversation? My position in life? I would not sit down. This was going to be a very short interview. “We sat with the boy, and that’s all.”

He tapped his letter opener on the desktop, turned it, tapped, and regarded me from under his curly eyebrows. “If you don’t understand what I’m saying, I don’t know how at this late date to convey it to you.”

I felt like I was being slowly rolled in slivers of glass. My palms sweated. My neck sweated. I could smell myself—I stank. “You can’t. It’s too late.”

“You didn’t think for a minute what a turmoil your behavior would cause.” He steepled his hands, matching fingertip to fingertip.

“I’m sorry. There was no telephone—”

“All that education, the talent, the brains—our confidence in you. For what? So you could run around the streets of Petrograd like a cheap slut?”

I was too tired to defend myself. I struggled not to cry. “Everyone grows up, Papa.”

“Running around with God knows what kind of hooligan—someone you picked up at the Cirque Moderne.” He snorted as if that was the rudest irony of all. “All those years of care, and you throw yourself away with both hands.” He’d never looked at me with such despair. It was like watching a carriage toppling over. I could do nothing to stop it. “It’s my fault, I know. We’re all so very modern now. Don’t discipline the children. It’s simply not done.” His mouth hooked downward in its nest of brown beard like a mask of tragedy. “Do we need to go out and get you a yellow card?” The document prostitutes carried to show they’d registered with the police.