Small and windowless, the anteroom was clad in peeling wallpaper the color of bread mold. No one sat at the counter. I didn’t know what to do next. “Hello?” I called out. An attendant, a female dwarf, stormed in from the other room. Then, taking a second look at me, she smiled. I supposed my coat and hat were of better quality than what was usually seen here. She instructed me on payment—fifty kopeks for the banya, fifty for soap and a towel—calling me milaya, pointing out the reasonable fee, “not like those fancy places on Sadovaya.” She led me into a dressing room, indicated the hook where I was to put my clothing, and waited—for a tip. But I could only give her a few small coins. She scowled when she looked at them, shoved me toward a wooden door.

On the other side it was—Goya. Twenty, twenty-five naked women crowded together in a large wet wooden washroom. A hideously fat woman scrubbed her neighbor’s bony back. A toothless granny held up the flab of her stomach to get at her hairless zhenshchinost’. Wrinkled, contorted feminine forms of every variety—hair, no hair… I wanted to run for the door, but I’d already paid my hard-earned ruble, and the dwarf would know what a coward I was. I would never be able to show my face here again.

The sight of them blistered my eyes. I’d seen a hundred paintings entitled In the Bath, where rosy beauties waded knee-deep in picturesque rivers and washed their long hair. Brown soap never appeared in Rubens. This was the thing itself, the squalor of human life. Age and decay. It was one thing to see bent backs under brown shawls, sagging stomachs faintly suggested by full dresses, breasts swinging low under bodices and aprons, genitals quite invisible, and another to see them revealed in their horrific variety. Bodies covered with wounds, with sores, rashes, bruises, welts, and worse. Bandages kicked into a corner. I could just imagine what Father would say, with his concern for public health. And Mother… I couldn’t stop looking at their tragic feet, their twisted toes like the claws of some horrible bird. I could see why Jesus would want to wash the feet of the poor.

Woman. How could one not pity her, with that forked stem, that tube for food and babies? This one—expanded like overyeasted bread. That one—contracted like a fallen soufflé. Emptied out, gouged like clay, clawed, bruised, imprinted with the devastation of gravity and years. I felt every inch the foreigner, visiting not from abroad but from the land of youth and beauty. They stared at me, too, at my smooth, pale flesh with its constellations of freckles, the wide-spaced breasts Genya found so stirring. The flame of my hair above and below. Conspicuous as an albino on safari. I moved to the buckets by the tap in the wall, filled one, and found a place on a bench where I could wash, concentrate on the steaming hot water and not the Rabelaisian sight all around me.

Hot water! Such luxury. I would not have imagined in my earlier life that someday it would make me weep with gratitude. I washed with the small bar of lye laundry soap the dwarf had sold me, imitating the others, squatting with the bucket between my legs, modestly scrubbing, then sudsing my neck, my short hair, rinsing again and again—what divinity, what bliss. I felt sorry for the women wrestling with their long skeins of hair. They must have to run home with it wet and dry it over the stove before they caught cold. Why didn’t they cut it?

But slowly, as I watched them patiently, proudly comb it out, I realized that lives so brutally hard might need such impractical beauty, that this little indulgence—long flowing hair—might be their sole grace note, to be savored rather than suffered.

I knew so little about life.

A cloud of billowing steam escaped from a wooden door. A woman staggered out, lay on a bench, pink as a salmon, steam rising from her skin as from a dish of noodles. It seemed there were more infernos to explore. I gathered my fortitude and my towel and pushed through into the mystery.

Searing steam, fragrant with the smell of green wood, revealed only vague smears of pink and motion, the sounds of rustling slaps as women flailed one another with bundles of birch twigs, leaves still attached. Through the mist, I found an empty place on a lower bench. My fellow bathers gradually materialized out of the blistering fog, like a photograph in a tank. An immense woman encased in fat like a walrus took center stage, flanked by an old woman who looked like a melting candle and a younger one whose shoulders and breasts revealed the shocking marks of repeated beatings—some bruises still livid, others already faded toward green and yellow like a forest floor. On the upper, hotter bench, shriveled old babas sat with backs like question marks, bent from a lifetime of standing over stoves, brooms, children.

A strapping girl with long black braids and full ripe breasts like blue-veined planets emerged from the steam to throw a ladle of water onto the stove. It spat and hissed and clouds obscured the scene. I liked it better that way, though the heat was phenomenal. I felt less glaringly out of place. Just when I’d begun to relax and enjoy the feeling of being clean and safely invisible, the fat woman hawked and spat on my foot. Had she really? I stared at the thick yellow glob of phlegm oozing down my instep. “Burzhui,” she sneered. “I could eat you for breakfast.” The others tittered, waiting to see what I would do.

I’d been to a girls’ school—I knew she would keep it up unless I stopped her. I got up and washed it off with the dipper. “So that’s how you got so fat.”

The women hooted. The fat one narrowed her piggish eyes.

I sat back down. “Watch out for her,” said the woman to my left under her breath, a rangy woman of late middle age, long breasts scarred vertically—from nursing, I imagined. I recognized her. The woman from my courtyard. Put the legs of the beds in kerosene. “She runs a booth in the Haymarket. She’s mean as a bucket of snakes.”

“She lives with all those poets on Grivtsova,” said a voice down the bench. “They’re all crazy as bedbugs.”

I was shocked. I hadn’t imagined anyone knew who we were. No one ever talked to us.

“She take them one at a time or all at once?” said a woman in a felt hat. I would have liked a hat like that—my ears were burning up.

“In that dog kennel they live in?” said our neighbor. “It would have to be all at once. No place for the queue.”

Everyone laughed—even me, although the joke was at my expense.

The girl with the globelike breasts squealed. “Ooh, the blond—that’s my idea of a man.” I wondered if Sasha knew he had an admirer in the neighborhood. I hoped for Dunya’s sake he didn’t. Those breasts could smother him outright.

I slicked my hand down my arm, the sweat pouring. Was I getting dirtier or cleaner? I couldn’t resist licking it, tasting the salt.

“Give me the big one,” said a woman twice the girl’s age. “Prince Ivan. Now that’s a man.”

Sage nods all around. Clearly they knew whom she was talking about. Prince Ivan. I imagined how Genya would laugh.

How strange, though… they knew us. They had ideas about us. Here we thought we were living in a world of our own making. It never occurred to us that it was a fishbowl, that others saw everything, drew conclusions, too. We lived in a real world where our futurist experiments meant nothing, where nobody cared about Victor Shklovsky.

“One more bastard in the courtyard by summer—you heard it here first,” said the rangy woman, elbowing me goodheartedly. “Take my word for it and kiss those pretty girls goodbye.” My breasts.

Unlikely. It wasn’t easy to make love in the Poverty Artel, four or five people listening to your every breath. “In the future,” I said, “there won’t be bastards. People won’t even know what that means.”

The way the women stared, I wished I hadn’t spoken, that I’d just enjoyed the sweating and let them think what they liked. Now I had to explain myself. “Children won’t be the property of fathers. All children will be the same. The whole property basis of marriage is obsolete.”

“Intelligentka,” one said with a laugh. “Vote list number three!” another called out from the steam. List number 3 was the Bolshevik slate in the upcoming election.

Their disdain was a challenge. Who was a burzhui now? “Kollontai said that for a woman, love should be no more important than drinking a glass of water.” Something I remembered Varvara quoting.

“What, are we men now?” the spitting walrus demanded.

“Who drinks water anyway?” said a woman in the steam, her words punctuated by the slap of birch twigs. “Too much trouble. Pump and boil…”

A tiny babushka on the bench above me patted my shoulder. “I’ve been married three times. I’d rather have a glass of water.”

“I’d rather have a drink of vodka than a man,” said a blond woman combing her hair. “Though I hardly remember either one.”

“I’ll take Ivan,” said the woman in the felt hat. “And he can bring the vodka.”

“Actually, he’s mine,” I said. “But you can have one of the others. How about the tall skinny one? He could use a girlfriend.”

They howled. They all knew which one I was talking about. “He’s the craziest one of all,” said my neighbor. “I have to keep the milk covered when he goes by.”

I wondered if Anton knew that he’d been passed over by the wives of Grivtsova Alley.

“He goes with whores,” said a woman sitting on the bench across from me. Her thighs looked like they’d been eaten by mice. “I’ve seen him up the street.”