Meanwhile, Gigo bestowed a bag of walnuts on Sofia Yakovlevna. “With my compliments,” he said. Genya handed her a loaf of bread we’d all pitched in to buy and followed her into the kitchen. She was like catnip to all the boys, with her soft bosom and kind round face. I helped Mina clear off the table—chemistry volumes, journals, notes in her small, neat hand—and felt a tiny pang of envy. Was I still jealous of her being at the university? I played with the feeling as you would toy with a slice of lemon, deciding whether it was too sour to eat. A little, I decided, but I wouldn’t have traded places with her. I was a poet among poets now, living the revolution. I couldn’t have stuffed myself back into that book bag, that lecture-hall seat.

I went back to the kitchen to see if I could help. Sofia Yakovlevna had Genya stirring the soup while she cut up more vegetables, doubling the recipe to accommodate the unexpected guests. Seeing me there, she caught me by the sleeve and pulled me to the sink, where she could talk under the cover of running water. They still had running water—imagine. “So are you happy, Marina?” she asked.

I turned to watch Genya solemnly stirring the soup as if the future of mankind depended upon it. “Very happy,” I said.

Worry argued with hope across her face as she washed a dish, a knife. “Will you marry?”

“Marriage isn’t revolutionary,” I said.

She sighed and wiped her hands on a towel. I could tell she was about to say something, but she just shook her head and smiled.

Six Transrationalists and seven Katzevs gathered around the big table, passing bread and garlicky pickles as Sofia Yakovlevna ladled up the borscht. All here, all together, everyone I loved. Except for Seryozha. I’d been writing to him faithfully, telling him what was going on here, but all I had to go on was the name of the institution, the Bagration Military School, and the address in Moscow. Maybe they’d censored my letters. Maybe the postal system had broken down, but I never received a response. The papers said there’d been fighting in Moscow, where the anti-Bolshevik forces were more organized, but after a week, their cadets, too, surrendered, and now the city was coming around to the new way of life.

Looking around the table, I was amazed at how we’d all grown up this year—Shusha, Dunya… Mina was wearing lipstick, her hair in a soignée chignon. Genya sat beside me, and Solomon Moiseivich beside him. They’d fallen into conversation about the elections. Genya was furious about the Bolshevik loss. He attributed it to the fact that the lists, drawn up months earlier by the Provisional Government, didn’t properly represent the new coalition between leftist SRs and the Bolsheviks, which he was convinced would have won. But the Bolsheviks still didn’t have the numbers. “They’ll have to restage the election,” he insisted. “We didn’t get rid of landlords to be ruled by ignoramuses in bast shoes genuflecting to painted boards.”

“The SRs got the majority,” Mina’s father said. “It’s the will of the nation.”

“The Bolsheviks have to reach the villages if they want to win in Russia,” said Aunt Fanya.

“The hell with the villages. I’m sick of the villages. I’m so sick of them I could scream.” Genya’s deep-seated hatred of peasants, stemming from his childhood on the Volga, always caught me off guard. He was otherwise such a loving, enthusiastic man, so his hatreds seemed all the more shocking.

Zina, seated across the table, was quick to jump into the fray, pointing her spoon at Solomon Moiseivich. “The advanced proletariat is the revolutionary class,” she said. I hated the way she spouted stock phrases, like a child reciting her lesson. I could take that behavior from Varvara—she’d actually read Lenin and Plekhanov and Kropotkin, Das Kapital in German. Zina just memorized slogans.

“If it wasn’t for the Petrograd worker, there wouldn’t have been a revolution at all.” Genya swept his arm in a gesture that barely missed his water glass. “The worker made this happen. Without the proletariat, the peasant would still be asleep in the haystack scratching at his lice.”

Just the mention of lice made me itch. Gigo ignored all the fulminations. He was doing sleight-of-hand tricks with his napkin for Shusha.

“It’s a peasant country,” said Solomon Moiseivich thoughtfully. “You can’t make a revolution without them.”

“But who should lead?” Genya said, letting his heavy hand fall to the table, making our dishes jump. “It’s got to be the most advanced. The head has to lead.” He poked himself in the forehead, hard enough to drive a nail. “The revolution’s the future, and there aren’t any plows in it.” He rested his arm across the back of my chair, and I saw how Mina blanched to see this familiar gesture. So each of us had something the other had missed.

Mina’s father sipped his tea with an indulgent smile. “There will always be plows, sinok.” Little son. “Someone has to bring in a crop. Unless you’re going to eat Bolshevik handbills.”

“Now there’s a field of plenty,” Mina said.

“I’ve lived out there.” Genya’s voice rising, his former good-fellow expression gone. “None of you have lived like that. The peasant doesn’t care about socialism. Land and Freedom? Once the peasant gets his land, he’ll consider himself free, and the hell with you. Just you watch.”

I waited for the echo of his voice to die down before I said, “You have to agree that the peasants should have the land. Without the soldiers, there would have been no revolution, and they’re all peasants. God knows they’ve waited long enough.”

He turned to me, hurt and surprised. “They only want to be the next landlord, don’t you see?” He backed away from the table to give his gestures more room. “They all have capitalist aspirations. The workers are the only ones who will protect the revolution.”

Sofia Yakovlevna watched me, and the expression on her face had nothing to do with the revolution and everything to do with my new life—to wit, Genya. Is he always like this?

“Whoever gets power will find a way to keep it,” Anton said from the foot of the table, where he perched on a footstool between Dunya and Shusha, enveloping them in a haze of cigarette smoke. “Bolshevik, Menshevik, the Committee for the Preservation of Wigs—they’ll set up a nice system of privilege for themselves and their friends.”

“Finally, a man to make some sense,” said Uncle Aaron, the old-time anarchist. “I’m with Mephistopheles over there.”

“The workers are no geniuses,” Anton continued, dropping ashes into his soup. The younger Katzev girls watched, horrified and fascinated.

Dunya stole shy glances down the table at Sasha. He smiled at her, wiping his moustache on the back of his hand. Gigo pulled a walnut out of Shusha’s ear, then a spoon out of his nose, making her laugh.

Now Genya couldn’t sit still anymore, he was up and pacing behind Anton, who turned around to speak to him. “You’re all mistaken if you think the worker is going to create a utopia,” Anton said. “Once you have a concentration of power, you’re screwed no matter who’s in charge.”

Uncle Aaron picked up the black flag of anarchism where he sat at the corner of the table. “The state’s a flawed tool. But I have more confidence in the people than you do, my smoky friend.”

“The people are a monster,” said Anton. “Individually bad enough, but once there’s a committee, you’re sunk.”

“I for one will take whoever clears the garbage.” Sofia Yakovlevna surprised us by the sharpness of her tone. She ladled a bit more soup into her husband’s bowl. “The SRs knew how to keep the streets clean.” It was true. Municipal services had almost ceased since the Bolshevik takeover, and the city was rapidly becoming a rotting trash heap. Everyone prayed for a good heavy snow. “And we could use some police protection while they’re at it. It’s one thing to take the Palais de Justice, but to fire the police? These Red Guards are hopeless. I’m afraid to leave the apartment.”

The common sense of this was undebatable. It’s what they talked about in the bathhouse as well—not the future but the present, the one outside the door. Where was that in the Bolshevik schema? Yet it was almost counterrevolutionary to mention it.

“They can only do so much,” Zina explained. “If we wanted just clean streets and police, we could have kept the tsar.”

Luckily for us, we lived in revolutionary times, which meant that the trash and the police would have to wait for bigger things. Jam tomorrow, as Alice would have said.


The Constituent Assembly walked into the Tauride Palace for the first time on an ice-covered January day. The snow glittered pink and lilac. We had turned out with thousands of others to watch the delegates arrive. I wondered if Father was here. I bet he was, hiding somewhere in the crowd. He wouldn’t want to miss this historic moment, a freely elected democratic body to rule Russia. Genya was still angry about the Bolshevik loss. Like many of the spectators, he and Zina shouted, “Soviet power!” and “We demand new elections!” but I felt tears welling up, seeing the solemn representatives of the Constituent Assembly move into the palace, preparing to sit for the first time in history.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the presence of the Red Guards that day. I assumed they were part of the grand occasion. But the next morning, I read on a wall poster that the Red Guards had taken over the first session of the Constituent Assembly and that it would remain closed thereafter. The workers’ militia hadn’t been there to protect the assembly but to close it down, lock it out. The Bolsheviks had never intended to give up power, whether the transition was legitimate or not.