It wasn’t much warmer inside. The stale air smelled like feet, like ashtrays and people. In the dimness, I could only recognize rough shapes. Dawn hadn’t yet managed to penetrate the courtyard. “Genya?”

I heard someone turn over, call my name. “Over here.” I followed the voice, bumping into chairs in the close, stinking air, inching along stepping on things—a mumbled curse—to find my lover propping himself up on a pallet on the floor. He opened the covers, and I crawled in, boots and all, as if I could bury myself in his side, as if I could return to his body like Adam’s rib. “What happened?” he whispered. “Come on, don’t cry.” But I couldn’t answer or stop my tears. I just wanted to hold him. I was here, I was safe. He rocked me, stroking my hair. Eventually I fell asleep in his arms.

Sometime later, something woke me, a cough, a slammed door—and the first thing I saw in the dim room was Genya on one elbow, watching me. I smiled and touched his mouth. He kissed my hand. Then the shame of my exposure, the grief returned to me in a wave. “Varvara told him everything.” I shielded my eyes—I didn’t want him to see me crumble.

“I’m glad,” he whispered fiercely. “Now you’re here.”

I pressed my head to his chest, just listened to the steady hammer of his heartbeat.

“How touching,” a voice grumbled.

“Don’t be an ass,” someone else hissed.

The skritch and flare of a match. Cigarette smoke. Someone yawned. People began to move. A blanket-wrapped figure on lined-up chairs became Sasha, heavy arms stretching. Across the room, on the cot, someone groaned, sat up. Legs appeared in their white winter underwear, feet shoved into boots. Anton. From the divan above our heads, Gigo’s black eyes studied me. “Thought so.” Another floor sleeper stirred nearby, under the table—a feminine voice cursed. Zina.

One by one, they sat up, lit cigarettes, smoked, coughed, struggled into clothes. Sasha went outside, presumably to use the convenience. But Genya didn’t move. He lay next to me, gazing at me as if he had wished for a pony and had opened his eyes to a soft nose and long whisking tail. He was all I had now. I had never expected to be so fully in someone’s hands. I only hoped he was ready for this.

Anton poked the fire, letting a trickle of smoke escape into the room. He looked the perfect cartoon of an avant-garde poet—unshaved, scowling, his black hair sticking straight up as he clomped around in unlaced boots. “She’s not staying,” he said, shaving off pieces of kindling with a hatchet. “No women.”

“What does that make me?” Zina sat up in her quilt, her dark hair matted from sleep.

“No sweethearts. No innamorate, consorts, or girlfriends,” said the editor, letting his smoke express his feelings.

“Anton doesn’t like people to have girlfriends,” explained Sasha, closing the door, taking a chair, stretching his bony wrists out from his raveling sleeves. “He thinks it distracts us from our misery.”

“And misery is to poets as milk is to babes,” pronounced Gigo, his face above mine, sticking over the side of the divan. “Why keep it all to ourselves?”

“Don’t listen to him,” said Genya, kissing my temple, pulling me close. “You’re staying and that’s it. She’s got nowhere to go, Anton. Her parents threw her out.”

“That’s why they invented bridges.” Anton lit a spirit lamp with a match, set a kettle on it. “For bourgeois girls… to jump. Off. Of. It’s my flat, and I say no.”

“Vote.” Genya sat up, raised his arm. “Show of hands. All in favor.”

Hands went up. Genya. Sasha. Gigo. Zina’s black eyes flashed from me to Genya, calculating. She loathed me but pursued Genya’s favor like a starving dog. “Why can’t she go to a hotel? She’s got money. It’s already too crowded.”

“She’s one of us,” Genya said. “She was working for the Bolsheviks. That’s why they gave her the boot.”

Reluctantly, Zina raised her hand—halfway.

Anton slammed the screechy stove door. “What’s next—elephants? Giraffes? High-wire walkers?”

Genya grinned triumphantly, kissed my brow. “You see?” With a mixture of relief and apprehension, I surveyed my new home. No more napkins and polite handshakes and marcelled hair. A new life. A life of poetry—wasn’t that what I’d always wanted? With Genya? And I would show Anton just who was a poet.


A rare autumn sun bestowed benedictions upon a huge armored car blocking the entrance to the telephone exchange building and the soldiers surrounding it. They eyed passersby mistrustfully. But where were their loyalties? To the government or to the revolution? “All Power to the Soviets!” Zina shouted, and a young soldier nodded. Revolution. Just as they’d done in February, the soldiers were taking the communications points. Only this time they weren’t going to beg any bourgeois politicians to lead them. Oh please, Mr. Lawyer, Mr. Banker, Prince Lvov, Paul Miliukov, show us the way. This was the real revolution, the one we’d been waiting for.

Theater Square gleamed under a tender frost. Sun glanced off the bayonets of Red Guards, burnished the gold dome of St. Isaac’s in the distance. We watched members of the Pre-parliament arrive at the Mariinsky Palace for the noon session. But I thought the government had fallen. Had Varvara’s imagination gotten the better of her? Gigo stepped in front of one of the delegates, who wore a high white collar and regarded the pale, excitable poet with alarm. “What’s the order of the day, sir?” the mad Georgian asked. The man glanced at the rest of us and his face composed itself into a weary amusement, but he regarded the Red Guards more soberly. “I believe we’ll be discussing procedural issues,” he said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “We may be adjourning early.”

We moved up into St. Isaac’s Square, bristling with Red Guards. They seemed to be coming from the Nikolaevsky Bridge. The cathedral drew up its gold cap like a dowager pulling away from a pack of clamoring beggars.

But the most astonishing sight by far awaited us on the Neva shore. The embankment teemed with people in the sea wind—soldiers and sailors, workers and students. And opposite the Winter Palace—a warship. The Aurora, she was called. The Dawn. Huge, with her three smokestacks and two masts, rows of portholes, her seven big guns leveled at the Winter Palace. I couldn’t get my mind around her presence. A battleship in the Neva. Poised to fire. Would they really do it? Blow holes in the palace’s half mile of Italianate flank? Nothing much seemed to be happening on deck, yet the mere fact of her meant that our naval base at Kronstadt was already in the hands of the Soviet. Kerensky had thrown down the gauntlet and the Kronstadt sailors had picked it up.

On impulse, Genya clambered onto the narrow embankment railing and balancing there, shouted at the steel bulk, his hand outstretched.

Aurora!

let loose your thunder!

                        Awaken all these sleepwalkers

                 Free us

                         From yesterday’s nightmare and all the

                         little tsars.

                                    We’re ready for your fury

                                    Those with ears to hear

                                                 awaken!

He teetered and almost fell, jumped down to finish his poem on solid ground. His seaward lines rolled like waves hitting granite cliffs on a northern shore. Gigo and Zina each took a turn reciting, then Genya pulled me forward. The crowd watched me expectantly, happy to be entertained while they waited for the revolution to begin. I gave them my poem about the massacre at Znamenskaya Square, but I had nothing to follow it with. I had to put something more up into the air. So I began to sing the first song that came into my mind, “Dubinushka.” Little Hammer. “Strike harder, strike harder, da ukhnem!” My singing teacher, Herr Dietrich, would have had a heart attack if he heard what I was doing with all that training, but some listeners tossed coins, which my friends picked up from between the cobbles.

A strange moment, entertaining the revolutionary crowd with their own work songs, receiving their hard-earned kopeks in return. For the sailors in the crowd in their flat white caps and striped jerseys, I began another—“The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” My friend, we’re on a long journey, far from our dear land we go… A blond sailor came forward and pressed a silver ruble into the palm of my hand. His hatband read AURORA.

I wish I could say I still had that ruble, but we spent it on dinner.


In the afternoon, we tramped out to Smolny, a good three miles away, to see what the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was doing about the insurrection. Delegates had converged from soviets all over the country, but the start had been delayed and delayed again and the delegates were getting restless. Gunners stood poised at their machine-gun stations flanking the entrance to the building, exactly where tenderly brought-up young noblewomen once walked when it was a convent school. The gardens teemed with armed workers and rough men in red armbands—Red Guards—who had come on their own to help with the insurrection. Thousands of them were camping out, waiting for instructions. There were too many—we heard revolutionary soldiers trying to send them home, but few left. The tension was thick. Evidently the Bolsheviks had announced they were pushing back the starting time for the congress yet again. We tried to talk our way in, to no avail, and now the sun was going down. I was tired and hungry but I had no home to go to besides the Poverty Artel, and the poets were in no mood to abandon the streets. Genya certainly showed no signs of flagging. We ate in a nearby café, lingered over our tea, then set out again. I drifted along in a fog of exhaustion, Genya’s arm around me the only thing between me and collapse.