The first cannon shot came around ten. We converged on the English Embankment with the excited, slightly menacing revolutionary crowd to watch the firefight. It wasn’t the Aurora after all. Stranger than that—it was the Peter and Paul Fortress firing across the wide Neva, pummeling the Winter Palace. To a native of this mirrored city, it was a sight unthinkable even twenty-four hours earlier. Like the fork running away with the spoon. This is really happening, I had to keep reminding myself.
“The Bolsheviks have to take the Winter Palace tonight,” said Zina, leaning on the parapet, vapor escaping her lips. “They’ll want to report a victory to the Congress of Soviets. That’s probably why they’re holding off the start. But they can’t keep the delegates waiting another day—there’ll be a riot.”
Gigo stamped his feet, put his collar up.
The rapid fire of machine guns added to the great boom of the cannons, a symphony. I shivered and pressed into Genya for warmth. If only we could just go home. I didn’t know if my trembling was from fear or exhaustion, but I couldn’t make it stop. Sweet Sasha asked if I was all right, if I needed to go home, but I shook my head.
Another burst of machine-gun fire—too loud, too fast, too close—made me jump. Above me, my lover’s nostrils flared, drinking in the smell of gun smoke. I could tell he wanted to get closer, to go right up to the cordon. I couldn’t stop seeing Znamenskaya Square, the bodies, and the men with the Red Cross armbands carrying away the wounded. I was in over my head, thinking I could keep up with Genya Kuriakin. I wanted to be like him—brave. I wanted him to think of me as worthy of his love.
Anton had had enough. They weren’t taking the Winter Palace fast enough for his liking. “I’m going back,” he said. “Let me know in the morning how it turned out.”
I could go with him. But I would not leave Genya. I wanted to see what he saw, go where he went, to prove I could, to myself as much as to anyone.
We didn’t return until early next morning. We stumbled in, laughing, bumping into the furniture as we tried to shed our coats and boots, stoke the fire. “Anton, wake up.” Genya kicked his bed. “They did it! While you were here keeping your fleas warm.”
I laughed. I was drunk—on wine and on our insane bravery. If I hadn’t been so tired, I never would have done it. Never would have had the nerve. But I was standing strangely outside myself. We had gone into the Winter Palace, had drunk its wine, had plumbed hell itself and returned.
“We got inside,” said Zina, bouncing on her heels. “All of us. Genya first.”
The soldiers were first, breaching the firewood barricades, hundreds of soldiers pouring in, and then Genya was up ahead, waving for us to follow him. Marinoushka, what do you have in that head of yours—straw? Yes, but it had been wonderful, strange beyond imagining, to enter the violated palace.
“It was fantastic. Pure madness,” Gigo said, turning a chair the wrong way around and lowering his slight frame into it.
“You should have been there,” Genya said, wrapping his arm around Anton’s neck where he sat up in his cot. The editor reached for the clock. It was around five. He groaned and let it fall to the floor.
I sank onto the divan, remembering all those corridors. The fine paintings, the Malachite Hall. Ballrooms used for barracks, dining rooms for offices. Everyone was lost—the soldiers, the cadets; people shot at each other out of sheer nerves and confusion. A revolutionary soldier dropped a grenade down a staircase—why? My ears still hadn’t stopped ringing.
Anton shoved his friend’s heavy arm from his shoulders. “Then you got drunk to celebrate?”
Sasha pulled up a chair to the messy table. “The soldiers broke into the tsar’s wine cellars. We heard they lost a whole battalion down there. They sent another in after them and they disappeared, too. They won’t be coming out anytime soon, either.”
Genya reached under his jacket and pulled out three bottles. Sasha produced four more.
Zina goggled. “So that’s where you were.”
We’d gone down just to see it. Now I would never get the picture out of my head, that Blakean hell: drunken soldiers bashing the necks off vintage bottles, lying on the floor as their mates poured wine into their open mouths. The cellars went on and on, a labyrinth under the palace, and the soldiers turned into animals before our eyes, like Odysseus’s men on Circe’s isle. The drunken men were more frightening than cannon fire. I slipped in the spilled wine and fell, cutting my knee. Genya and Sasha grabbed bottles and we departed, fighting our way back upstairs against a tide of descending celebrants. I looked at the tear in my stocking, the jagged sore, but it seemed like someone else’s leg. I still couldn’t feel it.
“Wine?” Genya held an old bottle against his forearm like a sommelier. It was a Madeira, 1848.
“A good year,” I said.
He handed it to Sasha, who began working its cork with his penknife, as Genya continued his story about our adventures conquering the Winter Palace. “We found the meeting room where the ministers were holed up. The Red Guards were just marching them out when we got there.”
Actually we hadn’t seen them. Genya was painting a picture now. We came upon the room by accident, wandering among soldiers and looters grabbing plumes and statuettes, clocks and miniatures, the Red Guards trying to stop them. These things belong to the people! Shots firing, people running, smoke. We passed through ruined chambers that had been used as barracks. Suddenly we found ourselves in a dining room, rather plain compared with the outer galleries, its long table scattered with pens and pads bearing the scribblings and drafts of proclamations. The ministers had been trying to find a course for themselves and the country up to the last moment, when the Red Guards had arrived to arrest them. Waiting for the inevitable. What a fitting finale it was for the Provisional Government. True to form, they’d conferred to the very end. Talk, that was their forte, while they waited for someone else to act. But I wondered what had happened to one dignified gentleman in particular, a man with a reddish-brown beard and eyes like my own. I prayed he’d listened to Varvara, but I doubted he did. Perhaps going down with the ship seemed more noble than what had occurred that night on Furshtatskaya Street.
Finally Sasha got the stopper out of the bottle. Zina found glasses of varying sizes and degrees of cleanliness. We poured and toasted the revolution, the sailors, and, finally, poetry. I thought of those hundreds of soldiers swilling priceless wine as if it were kvas. Some bottles probably dated from the reign of Peter the Great. Then I shook myself. Who had tears for vintage wine when men were still dying in a war nobody wanted? Let them drink. I raised my glass, the oval of Madeira like a fine red fire.
Genya held his hand behind his back. “Guess what I found,” he said, his eyes shining but a bit blurred by drink.
“The Orlov diamond?” Anton ventured, squinting against the smoke spewing from the stove.
“The tsar’s truss,” suggested Sasha, sniffing the wine.
Genya brought his big hand around and displayed on his palm… an ordinary fountain pen. He grinned, triumphant. “Kerensky’s pen.”
“How do you know?” Anton asked. Despite his blasé air, he was intrigued. He grabbed it, tried it out on a scrap of paper. There was still ink in it.
Genya snatched it back. “It was at the head of the table, wasn’t it?” He held the pen before my eyes. “With this pen, I swear I’m going to write the most revolutionary poems the world has ever seen.”
Sasha divvied up the rest of the Madeira, which had been waiting for us in that bottle since before Alexander II freed the serfs. “To Kerensky’s pen.”
Then it really struck me, the gravity of what we had seen, where we had been, what we had done. The Soviet had taken the Winter Palace. Dual power was over. My father and the government, our class, the liberals, had had their moment and had bungled it sorely. Now the Bolsheviks and the workers would have their chance to drink that wine.
“You think the ministers will be all right?” I asked. “They won’t shoot them, will they?”
“They’re probably becoming poets and moving in here,” Anton sighed. “Along with the Kronstadt sailors and Lenin’s mother.”
Genya sat down heavily next to me on the divan. “Someone said they took them to the Peter and Paul Fortress. But there was an explosion, maybe a grenade, and a bunch of them scampered off.”
“And the cadets?” I whispered. Those boys, guarding the palace.
“I see them more as essayists,” Gigo said. “I don’t think they’re much for poetry.”
“A whole group of them left when we went in,” Genya said, nuzzling me. He knew what I was worried about. “I heard the rest came out after the ministers. They’re fine. No one’s going to shoot a bunch of kids.”
They opened another bottle. I’d never drunk wine so fine. It sent its dizzying thickness all through my tired body. After that, all I remember was Gigo singing the Georgian national anthem and Zina demonstrating the cancan. Genya offered up a toast. “To the revolution! May the last be first and the first be damned.”
28 Grivtsova Alley
THE WHEEL OF REVOLUTION whirled on with a speed that made our heads spin. Within hours of the fall of the Winter Palace, the Congress of Soviets had already named the new ministers, to be called commissars. And what a list! Lenin, chairman; Trotsky, foreign affairs; Rykov, internal affairs; Kollontai, public welfare; Lunacharsky, education; Stalin, nationalities; and so on. I laughed as I read the names in the afternoon papers. Many were familiar to me from the Cirque Moderne, people I’d never have imagined would one day be running a nation that encompassed one-sixth of the globe. A woman minister—Varvara’s beloved Kollontai! And Trotsky as foreign minister. Changes were coming that would make the February Revolution look like a snoozy afternoon in a gentlemen’s club.
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