“He’s still like that,” I said. “Teaching the world how to live.”

“So tell me about the boy.” Her wide-set blue eyes were eager for gossip.

“He’s a poet. A worker and a poet. He calls himself a bargeman-Keats.”

“What’s a Keats?” she asked.

I recited Keats’s love poem to Fanny Brawne, one of my favorites, and translated it roughly for her.

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest

Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,

Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,

Withhold no atom’s atom or I die…

She fell back on the tablecloth, pretending to swoon. “He really talks like that? The blacksmith can barely open his mouth. But why a bargeman-Keats?”

I pulled out the sandwiches Olya had made, black bread with smoked fish, handed her one. “Bargeman-Keats means that when people look at him, they see the bargeman, but not the Keats. He’s a giant. He could pull a plow without a horse. My father wants a son-in-law who will fit in his egg cup.”

Lyuda laughed open-mouthed, her head thrown back. What a fine-looking girl she was, wide hips and heavy breasts. More a match for Genya than I was. “All our boys are gone,” she said. “There’s only a bunch of ugly old men, halfwits and peewees. Why isn’t your bargeman-Keats in the war?”

There were several answers to that. Draft dodger, only son, Bolshevik. “He doesn’t believe in the war,” I said.

“Who does? It’s just that our lot can’t get away with it.” She licked her lip, a bit of sour cream from her sandwich escaping her mouth. “My mother thinks I should marry the blacksmith. What do you think? He makes a good living, but he’s old, thirty at least, and stupid as a sheep. Maybe I should run off to Petrograd,” she said. “Get a job in a factory, go dancing all night.”

I imagined those women at the pumps on the Vyborg side and the Belhausen women. Many had started out as peasant girls themselves. “You might not want to go dancing after standing in a dark barn all day, working at a loom until your legs swell and you can’t breathe for the dust in your lungs.”

“You think this is any better? Stuck with kids and old geezers, trying to bring in a harvest? Sending our money to you lot so you can drink champagne and eat roast beef?”

My face went fiery red. Before the revolution she wouldn’t have dared. But she was right. It was unfair, unjust, and yet it was how we lived. I never really explained that part to Genya. I lay back and watched the spruce boughs in their circles soughing in the wind. Maryino wasn’t just a beautiful retreat. It was a means of production, as Varvara would say. How Lyuda must hate me.

“Akh, don’t look like that.” She brushed crumbs off her lap, threw a bite of bread to the birds. “I’m just saying it’s pretty but no paradise. You’ll see me in Petrograd soon enough.”

I chewed on that as I ate my sandwich, then shimmied up the tilted trunk of one of the old birch trees, where I could sit in the fork about eight feet above ground over Lyuda and drop catkins down on her. The breeze sent the bright green of the boughs into motion.

She pulled the letters out of the basket and was looking at the words again. Running her fingers over the address. “Look, here’s something you can do for me,” she called up into the trees. “Teach me to read. Do that and I’ll send your letters for free.”


I’d brought a trunkful of poetry, but even I could see that none of it would be suitable for the purpose. Mother’s cache of Blavatsky and Steiner, doubly useless. If only Ginevra’s Austen and Dickens were in Russian, that would have been ideal. In the end I wrote a ballad for her myself, the story of a cow from Novinka who came to Petrograd to make her fortune. I had the cow fall in love with one of the horses on the Anichkov Bridge and become a singer at the Stray Dog Café. I was proud of how fast she caught on. Soon she was reading everything—labels on tooth powder, tins of sardines. It wouldn’t be long before she was reading my letters, if she hadn’t started already.

Replies began to arrive from Petrograd, from a “Nadezhda Lyubova”—Hope of Love.

Smuggler

          thief

                      red-headed

                                -handed

           where are my lips?

Where is delight?

The house seemed so empty once Mother’s guests departed, leaving behind a slight air of mourning, though summer was still high. After dinner, we sat on the porch listening to the nightingales, Mother curled in Grandmère’s rocking chair, Avdokia with her pipe, Olya on the old bench by the door. Ginevra wrote a letter by lamplight, waving the moths away, while Mother rocked, her eyes half-closed, humming, then began to sing in her pure, lovely voice, “Au clair de la lune / Mon ami Pierrot, / Prête-moi ta plume / Pour écrire un mot…”

The tune enveloped me. She used to sing when I was young, but rarely did anymore. I listened, then quietly, hoping she wouldn’t stop, started to accompany her. My voice was lower than hers now, and she began to improvise harmony above, her voice embroidering itself through my melody like silk thread through plain cotton. I could recall how fiercely I had once loved her, the most beautiful of all the mothers, the most talented, the most sophisticated. The other girls envied me. She invented games for us, fashioned puppets and creations in paper—it was how Seryozha got his taste for constructions. She read to us, and sang. If she had not settled for becoming an ornament, a fashionable wife, she might have been an artist herself. Tonight she let down her talent, like the hair of Rapunzel. We sang “Gentil Coquelicot” and “Fais Dodo, Colin,” as the crickets chirped and fireflies winked in the long grass.

Lyuda joined us on the porch after the washing up, and she and Olya sang an old song about sweethearts parted by war, how youth would be wasted and lovers would die, the world would ever come between them. When Avdokia sang with them, their harmonies blended with hair-raising beauty, like one woman at three stages of life. Their song shook tears from me. Then Annoushka started one, even sadder—“I Walk Alone upon the Road”—and each woman, joining, added her own unique timbre and temperament. In the glowing half-light, we drank from the ancient spring that ran, deep and sweet and cold, beneath us all.

22 The Harvest

SUMMER EDGED TOWARD FALL, filled with checkered lilies and cornflowers, and still we remained at Maryino. I’d lost Lyuda to the hard labor of the wheat harvest and began to wonder if Father was ever going to bring us home. Letters arrived for Mother from her friends in Petrograd, and for me from Nadezhda Lyubova. I can’t think about anything but your hair. But bad news came from Father. His letters complained about Kerensky and the difficulties faced by the new government: coup attempts first by Lenin’s gang, then by the rightists led by General Kornilov. Kerensky’s appointed himself commander in chief, he wrote. It’s Alice down the rabbit hole. The Kadets resigned en masse, but I continue in harness. I’ll stay until I’m fired. Boycotts and walkouts make a splash, but then where are you? Tereshchenko manages to navigate the zigs and zags, but the situation’s volatile. A Bolshevik demonstration was recently fired upon, and of course they’re making political hay of it. I recommend that you stay in Maryino until things settle down.

Mother and I strolled along a path that had already begun to close in now that the harvest was taking priority. The wind set the aspen leaves to rustling on their white branches. “You don’t put your hair up anymore,” Mother said, touching the long braids I wore. “You look like a little girl again. Sweet years…”

I laced my arm through hers. Her perfume was still the same. But now we were two women, the same height, though she was the slimmer, the more ethereal. “A little change is a good thing, Marina,” she said. “But one needs tranquillity to absorb it. Too much change and it’s just a hurricane. We don’t have time to make sense of it as we’re tumbling down the street.” She peered into a thicket. “Those blackberries are ripe. Pick some.”

I went into the deep grass and picked the black ones into my old straw hat, trying not to let the wicked thorns tear at me and avoiding the wasps growing drunk around the burst fruit. “Mama, what is it you think Papa is so mad about? Is it Genya? Or is it me? He’s not really a worker, you know. He’s a priest’s son and a poet.”

The wind in the trees was an ocean’s rumble, that wide, many-voiced murmur—like a rumor moving through a crowd. She sighed, pushing her hair back under her hat. “Can’t you see how impossible it is? Although I’m sure it’s exciting… the lure of the forbidden. You’re curious. You were always sensitive about the lower classes. Worrying about the coachmen out in the snow, remember? And there’s the revolutionary cachet…”

She thought I was in love with Genya because it was fashionable. But he was hardly representative of “the lower classes” as she so horrifyingly put it. I popped a blackberry in my mouth, sweet and sour, and brought the rest to her. She ate them as we continued our walk.

“Was there no one before you and Papa married?” It was something I’d always wanted to know but never dared ask.

The trees shimmered in a sudden burst of wind. She had to hold her hat to keep it from taking off like a gull. How could she still be so beautiful, that elegant profile with the straight, sculpted nose, the finely turned mouth? “A boy came to visit one summer. He was staying on the Zarkovskys’ estate. Grisha, his name was. He played tennis very beautifully. He moved like it was music.” She frowned. “But relations between men and women are overemphasized, in my opinion. It’s not as important as you think it is right now.”