“At work, missus,” Basya said. “Where else would he be?”

Missus. Mother took her hat off very, very slowly, put it on the hall table, removed her gloves finger by finger. Surrendering to this new rudeness by quarter inches.

“It’s only a cold dinner I can get you,” the maid continued, as if she hadn’t noticed a thing. “He doesn’t eat at home now, and we weren’t expecting you till tomorrow.”

“Yes, all right,” Mother said. “I’ll take it in my room.” She retreated to her bedroom, closely followed by Avdokia, muttering curses under her breath. Ginevra, however, sighed with pleasure at the end of our journey. I supposed she had found the separation from the city harder than even I had. The dvornik and his son carted our trunks in. I slipped out to the kitchen, where Basya was resting, watching Vaula chop cucumbers for a salad, and eased past them, heading for the back stairs.

“Look at the little chit,” Basya said. “Going out already. Go then. Don’t mind me.”

“Murders on this very block,” Vaula said, looking up from her cutting board, her round blue eyes drooping a warning. “Things have changed since you left. You might not want to go out there by yourself.”

“Maybe I’ve changed a little, too.” I stole a slice of cucumber from the board. “Anybody come looking for me?”

“Who could the girl be talking about?” Basya said to the cook.

Vaula laughed, salting the sliced rounds.

“You know very well who.” I would have twisted her scrawny arm if I thought it would help.

A bell rang on the bell board: my mother’s room. Basya snickered as she passed me, her breath smelling of cinnamon and tobacco. “Ivan Tsarevich, you mean? That big hooligan shouting poems at the windows? Sure, he stood out there caterwauling until your father threatened to call the police on him if he ever saw him again. The idiot came back a few more times just to be sure. Foma saw him out there after midnight, at two, maybe three in the morning, watching your windows.”

I kissed her on both cheeks and ran out the back door, down the stairs, into the courtyard, and out to the street.

The city was even shabbier than I remembered it—perhaps I’d sprinkled it with a bit of Lyuda’s imagined glamour in my mind. But it was still Petrograd and I loved every dirty beggar as I ran toward Sadovaya and Haymarket Square. The noise, the shops, the miraculous automobiles rushing through the streets. It was September, and the cool river air had swept summer from the pavement. I ran all the way to Grivtsova Alley, racing up the stinking stairs to the Poverty Artel. I knocked, called out. “Genya! Open up!” I could not wait for him to touch me, to feel his arms again, his kiss. I knocked again. Nothing. This was it, wasn’t it? The worn door—number 8.

But there was no one home. They’d probably gone to shout their poetry from the rooftops, I told myself, but anything could have happened. They might have been drafted or evicted. The mail took forever to arrive. Yet why should they be home this time of the evening? Genya had no idea I was returning today. Still, I could not keep tears from rising. The mountains I’d had to climb to get here, the plots I’d had to orchestrate! I descended the stairs at half the pace I’d flown up them. Out in the courtyard, women waiting to pump water followed me with their eyes. I called to them, “Do the boys on the second floor still live here? The poets?”

“Who else would have them?” one of the women called out and the others laughed.

I couldn’t run around Petrograd looking for them. Instead I stopped in at the one place where I was certain someone would be home. From the hall, I could hear lively hands playing ragtime on the piano. Shusha’s skills had certainly progressed since spring. I knocked hard and Dunya answered the door. She was wearing a rust-colored dress with an embroidered sunflower on the pocket—Seryozha’s handwork. I burst into tears.

She threw her arms around me, pulled me inside. The smell of soup, of kasha embraced me as ever. Shusha jumped up from the piano—“Mariiiina!”—and hugged me hard. “Did you hear me? It’s the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’! Mama just got it for me.” She sat back down and began again.

Now I saw Mina—she’d been hidden behind a heap of books like a barricade. She rose and kissed me. “She can’t stop playing it. I could kill her. Look at you—you’re a peasant now.” She tugged at my braid, which I hadn’t bothered to put up before I ran out of the house.

My friend looked older, prettier, in a crisp white blouse and necktie, her hair worn in a fashionable coil instead of its old-fashioned crown. A studentka. I realized with a surge of panic that she’d begun university. I’d come home too late. But I refused to mourn. I was back, that was the thing. If Genya was still in Petrograd, if he still wanted me, that would be enough.

“Marina!” Now I saw Solomon Moiseivich on the divan with his foot up on a stool. “I’d get up but gout’s got me. I thought it was the province of kings, but Fate says, ‘For you, Solomon, we’ll make an exception.’”

Sofia Yakovlevna bustled out from the kitchen. “Marina! Welcome home, welcome back.” She wiped her hands on her apron, and then gave me a squeeze and a kiss. “We were wondering whether you’d come home. Your letters didn’t say. Look how healthy you are! Brown as a nut. Where’s your brother?”

“Yes—how’s my favorite assistant?” the photographer inquired.

They didn’t know. I looked again at Dunya’s dress, thinking of how he’d sewn those flowers. “They sent him to Moscow, to a military school. To become an engineer.”

“You’re joking,” Mina said.  She pushed her glasses up on her nose, the better to study me. I shook my head.

Solomon Moiseivich rounded his eyes at his wife, speaking whole treatises in that single glance. “Well. Engineering’s a good trade.”

“I’m sure Dmitry Ivanovich has his reasons,” Sofia Yakovlevna said quickly, then patted my shoulder. “Sit down, Marina. I’ll get you a glass of tea.” But a note of worry hung in the air.

I took a chair next to Mina. “So you’ve started without me.” I picked up one of her heavy books—chemistry. I would not cry. I was home, that was the important thing. “How is it?”

“Lots of work.” She shrugged, pretending it was all such a burden, but I could tell how proud she was. “Rumor has it they might cancel the term because of the food shortages. I’m trying to get as much done as I can.”

I laid the book back down on the pile. “It’s that bad?”

She nodded. “People are leaving every day. Going south. Going abroad. We were wondering if you’d even be back.”

“Did you deliver my letters?” I asked under my breath.

Mina smiled, showing her pretty small teeth. “What do you think, that I’d stand in the way of true love?” She tugged at my long braid again. “Actually I didn’t even need to deliver them. He comes by with his friends—at dinnertime, naturally. Dunya’s got a crazy crush on the painter.”

“Oh, so I’ve got the crush.” Dunya threw a wadded-up paper at her. “Tell her about Nikolai Shurov.”

Mina’s cheeks blazed.

I could feel myself go pale in equal measure. “What about him?”

“He came to town is all,” Mina answered, studying her smooth hands, the little sapphire ring she wore. “I ran into him at the pharmacy.” She shrugged again. “He’d gone to your parents’ looking for you.”

A sudden tightness in my throat, down to my solar plexus. Why should I care, when I had Genya? But on some level I still did. Look at her face. Had he made love to her? No, he wouldn’t have. Though he couldn’t resist an admiring female, even if she was chubby and wore glasses and talked about integers and valences. And she had beautiful skin, and her gray eyes were shaded by long, white-tipped lashes. In fact, she wasn’t even fat anymore. She looked… pretty.

She gazed toward the hall that led to the kitchen, where her mother had returned to her cooking; to her father, reading on the divan; to her sisters; then back to me, pleading with me not to say anything more.

I lowered my voice. “Is he here in Petrograd?”

“No,” she whispered. “He went back to the front. That was months ago—in July, before the offensive.”

I could feel my eyes stinging. He’d been here, while I was out in the country mowing weeds.

“Do you mind?” she whispered, touching my sleeve. Her bottom lip trembled.

“No,” I said and tried to smile. What was done was done, and anyway I had Genya. In just a few minutes, I would see him. The hell with Kolya.

“I told him about Genya. Was that right?”

“Of course.” A soothing thought. He deserved that, for leaving me alone for all those months. Did he think I would wait forever?

Sofia Yakovlevna asked us to clear the table for dinner. I knew I should leave—not impose myself on their hospitality—but Genya might be coming, so when she asked me to dinner, I agreed with alacrity. I was going to see Genya. And Kolya? Kolya was the past. Ancient history. I telephoned home, told Ginevra where I was, that I’d be home later. I was in no hurry to see Father, and had seen enough of Mother and my governess to last a decade.

We sat down to eat, dragging Solomon Moiseivich’s footstool into place so that he could keep his foot up. It was so good to see the whole family again. Mina told me about all the people who had come to pose for photographs since I’d been gone—Tereshchenko and the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet both! Kerensky himself had come the day before yesterday. “Talked without stopping,” said Solomon Moiseivich. “He’s due for a nervous collapse, if you ask me. But the picture turned out well.”