I’d never heard her speak about anything so personal. Though I couldn’t have disagreed with her more, I wanted to hear what she actually thought about love. “What is important then?”

“Harmony,” she said. She stroked her fingertips along a white aspen trunk. “Nature. One’s feeling for deeper things.” Tulku disappeared into the bushes—after a rabbit most likely. “Your father never cared for the country. I wouldn’t mind staying on here.” She reached down and plucked a dandelion, held the head without blowing the floss, twirling it in her hand. “Actually, I’m dreading going back into that hurricane. It’s so peaceful here. Don’t you feel it? It reminds me of so many things.”

I felt it myself, this nostalgia, but I waved it away. “You’d miss your friends if you didn’t go back.”

“They can take care of themselves,” she said.

I ate a blackberry, but it was too sour. I spit it out. “I start university in a few weeks, remember?”

“If there’s a university left,” she said.

Whether or not there was a university, there was Gennady Kuriakin. My university. My Petrograd. Nadezhda Lyubova, my hope, my love.


I sat in the kitchen watching Annoushka make bread, the room dim compared to the brightness outside. She was a fount of information, had opinions about everything. “What if we just stopped paying taxes? What’s Russia to us? What’s this war to us? Nobody asked us what we thought.” She turned the loaf over, kneading it, pummeling it. “When is this repartition going to happen? That’s what I want to know. The tsar’s gone. What are they waiting for?” It was on everybody’s mind, the division of the land. She stopped to wipe sweat from her brow with the back of a floury hand. “What does Dmitry Ivanovich say?”

I knew exactly what he would say because I’d asked him that myself. These things take time. The landowner has to be compensated. If she and the others were looking for the land to be seized and distributed into peasant hands, they shouldn’t be looking to the Provisional Government. Even the SRs in power now didn’t have the nerve. “I don’t think they’re any closer,” I admitted. “Only the Soviet is talking about it seriously.”

“Well, bless you for telling the truth,” she said, turning the loaf over and punching it down. “We’ve heard the peasants in Ryazan are taking the land and the hell with the landowner. They’re burning them out down there. Killing them in their beds, so they say.” Annoushka cut her wicked eyes at me, just to make sure I got the message, then fell dutifully to her task.

Ever since the tsar’s fall, the peasants had been waiting for the redistribution of the land. Soldiers were deserting so they could come home and be part of it. They believed that if they weren’t physically present when the land was parceled out, they wouldn’t get their share. They were deserting by the tens of thousands. I watched Annoushka finish the bread and slide it into the oven with a paddle. Although I didn’t believe she and Grigorii were going to slit our throats as we slept, change was in the wind. Sooner or later, I saw, we were going to lose Maryino. We were living on borrowed time.

I asked if she’d heard anything about the food situation in the capital. Were provisions from here getting into the city? Something had to relieve those bread queues. Father said the Provisional Government could do nothing because the railways were so poor and the army was eating most of the bread. Anything that got on the trains came off before it got to us in the city.

“It’s all going to the army, isn’t it?” Annoushka said, wiping the table down. “The pirates. They come and take what they want, pay us a few kopeks. Over in Alekhovshchina, they refused to go along with one bunch. Cut off their heads with scythes, they say.” The musky scent of yeast and the wood burning in the big oven smelled like home—yet the terrible things she was saying took away all familiarity.

I thought of Kolya and his provisioning unit. Was that what he was doing all this time—robbing the peasants for the army? Yes, I imagined that was exactly what he was doing. He was completely capable of seizing a village’s grain if they refused to accept the price he offered. I had seen the toughness behind the charm.

I had to get back to Petrograd. Somehow I had to tear Mother away from her nostalgic dream—though first I had to put it away myself.


As the light changed and the days shortened, we still heard nothing from Father, and my urgency grew sharper. Mother began to talk about having our winter clothes shipped to us. I had to do something or all would be lost. One afternoon I found her on the porch, where she sat in Grandmère’s rocker, listening to the harvest songs coming from the fields with a pleasure deeper than joy. How could I rob her of this? Yet it had to come. It would have been so much easier if we’d been quarreling, but I felt closer to her than I had in years. “I hope Father calls us home soon,” I said. “Annoushka says the peasants are speaking out against the estates.”

She said nothing, just kept rocking.

“The deserters are coming back. They’re tired of waiting for the repartition. They’re taking the land on their own. Annoushka says they’re burning the manor houses.”

“Annoushka’s imagination is running away with her,” Mother said.

“It’s already happening in Babayevo.” Babayevo was a hundred versts away—hours on horseback, yet close enough for ideas to spread.

Her eyes slowly opened, the long lashes just like Seryozha’s. “Our peasants won’t do that. We’ve known them for four generations. They can barely sharpen a scythe let alone take over Maryino.”

I shrugged. “The revolution’s not just in the city. It’s in the izbas, in the fields. They’re talking about it. They’ve been waiting since Emancipation.”

Mother shaded her eyes against the glare. The pines rustled behind me, throwing their patterns of sun and shade on the side of the house. “You’re on their side, aren’t you?”

“You can’t support the peasant in the abstract and deny him in fact,” I said. “This is the reality—the soldiers are coming back and they’re armed. They want the land.”

I saw how she clutched at the pendant around her neck. “Even Kerensky said that there would be no expropriations.”

She’d become too attached to the illusion of safety, as if Maryino could sink beneath the waters and life could continue as it always had been. Illusion and nostalgia surrounded her like a fog. I felt it myself, but I had to shake it off. “The peasants are tired of waiting. The deserters are taking matters into their own hands. Annoushka said they’re nailing the landlords into their manor houses and setting them on fire.”

“Wishful thinking,” she said. But she was sitting up straight now, brushing off her skirt in irritated little gestures. Probably remembering all the insolences of Grigorii and the coachman and the way the peasants didn’t bow when she rode through the fields.

“We don’t want to be here when the division comes, Mama. We can’t stop them, but we don’t have be here when it happens.”

We heard the dog barking at something in the woods. She clapped her hands and called until he broke from the trees and raced onto the porch. She petted his narrow head. “Your father would never expose us to any danger,” she said, but she was only reassuring herself. “He would have sent for us.”

I was about to mention that he’d sent Seryozha to Moscow, too, recklessly, but Mother looked so pained every time I brought that up. “He’s distracted. He’s got the whole country to think about. But you see how they look at us—Grigorii, Annoushka. They’re already thinking it’s theirs.”

“Stop it.” She lifted Tulku onto her lap and kissed his hard little head. “They’ve got their revolution. What more do they want?”

A woodsman was felling a tree somewhere. She flinched at the resonating blows of the ax.

“If we were murdered, Papa might not know for weeks,” I added.

“Don’t exaggerate,” she snapped. But the skin had drawn tighter over her cheekbones. Her nose seemed suddenly sharp.

That night she penned a letter. I watched her at Grandfather’s desk, stopping to wipe her eyes with a handkerchief, blow her nose. It had finally sunk in that she might well be losing Maryino. She scratched out a passage, rewrote something on the back, took out a new sheet, recopied. I think she was trying for a reasonable tone to plead our case, one that would convey the seriousness of our situation here without opening her up to ridicule. Then she started crying again, her forehead against her balled-up fist. I wanted to run to her, embrace her, and tell her I’d made it all up. But everything was true, except for the bit about Babayevo. And who knew? That, too, could be true by now. There was no helping it. All the signs said it was time to go.

In the morning, she called Grigorii and gave him the letter, even said “please” when she sent him off, coins jingling in his pocket, to catch the first post.

23 Return to Petrograd

I WAS NEVER SO happy to see the slums of the Vyborg side as I was that September day. The autumn sun shone on the gold spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the panorama as we crossed over the Neva at the Liteiny Bridge was more breathtaking than ever. A tram rattled by—trams! This wonderful noise—traffic, crowds, shops. How I loved this city, the smell of its smoke, the throngs milling on the wide sidewalks, the shimmering canals. My city, my Petrograd.

But on Furshtatskaya Street all that awaited us in greeting were twelve slightly dirty rooms and Basya. “Where is Dmitry Ivanovich?” Mother asked as our bags were carried in.