Father watched Basya piling plates on a tray, and Mother frowned at her cap, sliding off her head. Basya kept clearing, her face impassive, as if she had no idea what Mother’s frown was about. She did it on purpose, the provocateur. She loathed that cap. I winked as I handed her my plate.

“Why don’t you people just pick him up?” said the British steel man. “It can’t be that hard. Surely hundreds of people know where he is. Pick up some other Bolshie and sweat it out of him.”

“You might find having Lenin is as bad as not having Lenin,” Sibley said thoughtfully. “Tiger by the tail. Arresting him could be the spark that sends the whole thing up.”

Father watched Basya depart, the door swinging closed behind the starched white bow of her apron. “We’re monitoring the situation quite closely. As we speak.”

Something about the look on his face, the way he tucked his chin toward his collar, caught my attention. They knew where Lenin was.

“How closely?” Cromie asked.

“We know he’s moved back into Petrograd,” Father said.

“Are you confident?” Cromie asked.

“We have a good idea,” Father said. “Let’s just say we’ll know where to find him.”

The government knew where Lenin was. Or at least the foreign office did. My breath stilled. I wanted to ask more, but I was afraid my questions would be too pointed. This was why I had spent all these evenings listening to dull, self-important men at this gleaming table.

“Well, that is good news. Nab him in his sleep—if a scoundrel like that ever does sleep,” said McDonegal.

“But why…” began Cromie, raising my hopes, only to fall silent again when Basya returned to collect the remains of the meal. She must have been aware of the tinkling of glasses, the pointed glances, but she took her time at it.

Finally, when she had gone, Father explained. “While there’s still a schism among the senior Bolsheviks, we need to wait. Lenin’s continuing to battle resistance. It’s still possible that Kamenev and his more sensible colleagues might prevail in the Soviet.”

“But how long are you going to wait?” Cromie asked. “My God, the man’s advocating overthrow.”

“Not much longer, I imagine,” Father said. “But as soon as we arrest Lenin, we’ll lose our source as well.”

They had someone inside the Bolshevik organization itself. My mouth ran dry. I stared into my empty water glass but was afraid to pour myself more and betray my shaking hands. When I looked up I noticed Cromie examining me. I smiled back, as if I thought he was just admiring the shape of my eyes, my brow, the style of my hair, instead of asking himself the same questions I was asking. Who are you? Why are you listening so closely? Father sat back in his chair, and I well knew the look on his face: the bland gravity he got just before he moved a piece for a checkmate.


I lay in bed in the dark, listening to my heart pound. I imagined them closing in on Lenin as he slept. How could I wait until morning? But Varvara had warned me against ever coming near her apartment on Vasilievsky—it would mean the arrest of them all. I wondered about that shadowy figure working his way into the Bolshevik camp, willing to risk all to report to the Provisional Government. What on earth could be his motivation—or hers—to risk Bolshevik reprisal in order to support this strange agglomeration of liberalism and cravenness, wild disorganization and indecision, ego and oratory?

I rolled over on the hot sheets and thought of Father. I couldn’t help remembering how he’d looked at dinner, smug, so sure he knew what was right for Russia. Yet what I was about to do left me queasy. I had more in common with that shadowy figure on the other side of the political fence than I had with him, so confident that his actions reflected his ideals, unable to see the chasm between them. Excited and angry and defiant, eluded by sleep, I read until daybreak.


In the morning, I stood outside Wolf’s bookshop, reading the handbills pasted onto a kiosk, anxiously checking for anyone watching me. What if the Bolsheviks were watching me? Maybe they’d been watching me all along. I hadn’t thought much about that. Or maybe the government, though I doubted that. Who would spy on us?

And it occurred to me: what if it wasn’t Varvara who was collecting my notes? Maybe she had handed me on to some other Bolshevik who wouldn’t understand why I was doing this. The idea made my stomach churn. I realized as soon as I thought it that it was probably true. She’d never promised it would stay just between us, I had simply assumed it. But I couldn’t walk away now. I had the note in my pocket, something essential for the revolution. It wasn’t personal. It was bigger than I was.

I waited a bit longer, saw nothing suspicious, so I stuck a pushpin into the door jamb of the bookstore, low down—my signal that there was a message—and entered the shop. At the sound of the little ringing bell, the clerk glanced up. I nodded and wound my way back through the rooms to a dusty alcove where the complete works of Plato in Greek awaited. Varvara and I had picked them as the books least likely to be purchased. I pulled out book 10 of the Republic—her sense of humor—and opened it to the section where Plato inveighs against poets, claiming that poetry disorients men and that the only poetry he’d allow in his ideal state would be hymns to the gods and the praise of famous men. I parted the book and inserted my note—

You have a spy. Either at Smolny or among the Bolsheviks. Govt knows Lenin’s in Petrograd, knows where.

New guest: with Second Secretary Sibley, Captain Cromie. British naval attaché. Seemed very interested in local affairs. His Russian suspiciously good.

Govt believes there will be no insurrection.

Then I reshelved the book out of order. The next time I returned, it would be back in its proper place.

With studied casualness, looking around again, I retreated to the history room, where I located Great Russian Discoveries in the Arctic and the Pacific 1696–1827: Accounts of Nautical Expeditions to Siberia and Russian America by F. G. Popov—another volume unlikely to find a buyer. I prayed there would be something in it for me that was not about treachery.

Inside, in Genya’s big, barely legible scrawl, a poem:

Who sentenced me

          to this jail?

The vandal

the thief

                          she jokes with fools

over salmon and wine

Leaves me to

                      yowl

with the cats.

Burn

                      the house down

                             with your arson-prone hair

                                          and fly to me, fly!

I’m drowning in air like a fish

               flip-flopping on deck.

Pity my lips.

In the agonies of waiting

                         they froze and fell off.

If you see them,

please send them back.

Pity my lungs

That can’t even whimper

Air does them no good

Kiss me alive again.

Madness is you

Somewhere that’s not here.

Sweeping the room once more for any suspicious loiterers, I stuck the poem in my pocket. Madness was me, just about anywhere.


In the hushed, scented precinct of Madame Landis’s boutique in the Nevsky Passazh, Mother and Madame were locked in discussing the minutiae of hats: the nostalgic virtues of yesterday’s styles—broad brims, egret plumes, veils—versus the utilitarian casquettes, turbans, and tricorns of today. Tricorns! The fashion of revolution secure on bourgeois heads. I kept touching the poem in my pocket. I am drowning, too, Genya, in this endless drivel and perfume and imposture. I had to see him, feel his solid form around me, talk honestly to someone.

I glanced at my watch and feigned surprise. What an actress I was becoming. “It’s almost four? I almost forgot—my friend Veronika’s family is leaving for Odessa. I told her I’d pay a call. Mama, take the tricorn. That’s the best.”

“So many leaving,” Mother sighed. “Soon we’ll be rattling around by ourselves, like buttons in an empty drawer.”

“I’ll be back by dinner,” I said, patting Tulku’s elegant little head.

“Remember we’re going to Viktor Vladimirovich’s.” Tripov’s. In the face of Father’s increasingly long working hours and the growing unrest, the all-night debates at the Pre-parliament—the new Duma—she expected me to be her evening escort.

Freed, I dashed down the glass arcade of the Passazh and out into the rain, crossed Nevsky Prospect, and dodged a tram, the angry driver ringing her bell at me. I raced behind the Gostinny Dvor department store toward Haymarket Square. In the absence of police the number of robberies had been rising all fall, and I looked a perfect fool in my bourgeois finery. But if someone wanted to rob me they’d have to catch me first. I pounded up Grivtsova Alley in my heeled shoes, up those wretched stairs two at a time, knocked, and tried the battered door. It opened, but it was only Anton, reading on the divan, a coat thrown over him as a blanket. He pretended not to recognize me. “Is it rent day already?” he asked, turning a page. “I don’t have it. Check back on Friday.”

I finally found Genya at a corner table with Zina and his other friends in a workingman’s café on Gorokhovaya Street, the greasy windows steamed over. Loath to go in dressed as I was, especially with Zina there, I tapped on the glass with the edge of a coin. When he saw me, he rushed out into the cold without his coat, wrapping himself around me in an enormous embrace. His jacket smelled of the café, greasy pirozhky and rough tobacco, cabbage and tea. “Look at you. You’re making me jealous of all those English diplomats. I’ll kill them one by one, dump them in the canal. You won’t be able to move a boat there’ll be so many of them.”