They needed a birth certificate?

“It’s been lost,” said the woman with a tremulous voice. “There was a house fire. My father was a carpenter. Mother—laundress.”

“Next,” the soldier said, indicating a woman two places in front of me.

I had to think of another story. I, too, had been planning on claiming proletarian origins, changing my name to Marina Moryeva. I’d practiced my story. Born Harbin, China. Father, printer. Mother, seamstress. Let them try to track that down.

“Please, Comrade.” The woman with the bird hat would not move on. Now she started crying in earnest. “I have to work. No one’s hiring us.”

“Lady, look at all these people. Most of ’em worked all their lives. They’ve got skills. They haven’t been lying around, living off our sweat. Now move along.”

It was my turn. “Papers?” he asked, extending his hand, not looking at me.

I gave him my form but I didn’t have any personal papers. They were all back on Furshtatskaya Street. My birth certificate, baptismal records, school transcripts. I didn’t have a single one.

“My bag was stolen,” I said. “On the tram. Please, what should I do?”

The soldier appeared to have some sort of indigestion, belching and thumping his chest with his fist. It was the bad bread we all ate. “Guess you’ll have to write to China,” he said with a smirk. “We’re not handing out labor books like they’re posies.” Those small books, our very lifeline.

“But it’s China.”

“China,” the comrade sighed. “That’s a new one.” He indicated the door with a disgusted thumb. “Next.”


So it came to pass that on a bitter snowy January evening I swallowed my pride with a cup of barley soup and, together with Genya, crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge over the frozen Neva to enter the broad, dark Lines of Vasilievsky Island—specifically, the Seventh Line, where Varvara had brought me to the illegal print shop that day. I knocked, and a pale suspicious face appeared in the doorway. Steel-rimmed glasses, pallid blue eyes. I asked for Varvara. “I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.

Another man took the place of the first. “I’m looking for Varvara Razrushenskaya,” I tried again. “I’m a friend of hers. We were distributing leaflets before the insurrection.”

The second man squinted at me. “She’s back in her mother’s old flat,” he said. “If you’re her friend—you must know where it is.”

“On the Sixteenth Line,” I said.

The comrade nodded and closed the door.

Varvara’s old building was more than a mile farther west. Half the streetlights were out on Bolshoy Prospect as we trudged and slipped along, trying not to break our necks. I was glad to have Genya by my side. I recognized the dark hulk of the brothel opposite Varvara’s apartment house, but there were no women outside or in the windows. Was it the revolution or just the cold? Inside her building, the stairs had grown gap-toothed just like ours. It seemed strangely quiet after our noisy tenement. People here were hunched behind their doors over their scraps of food, listening for criminals or for the step of the Cheka making a raid. Our building was too poor for raids, so we’d escaped the worst of it. I stopped at her flat. I could hear voices inside. As soon as I knocked, they stopped talking. I knocked again. A familiar lean, sneering mug answered the door—the printer Kraskin—formerly Marmelzadt—smoking a crooked little cigar.

Varvara sat at the table, wearing a black sweater with a ragged collar, among six or seven comrades perched on stools and hunched on old tattered chairs, young men and women startled at the interruption. When I approached her, she stuck out her hand like a man. Her palm felt very dry. She nodded at Genya, and they, too, shook hands.

“Where’s the countess?” I said, lowering the shawl from my head but not taking off my coat—it was almost as cold in the flat as it was in the hall.

“Dead,” Varvara said. She examined the ember on her hand-rolled cigarette. I couldn’t tell whether her bluntness was to impress me or Kraskin, leaning against her chair back, or the cluster of comrades. “Vot tak.” Like that. “She got into bed one day and turned her face to the wall. Said, ‘I don’t care to see any more of this.’” My infuriating friend considered me with a slightly amused, cruel expression, the same one that Kraskin wore. “So what brings you to this side of the river?”

“I’ve been looking for work,” I said.

Kraskin’s smirk toyed with his thin lips like a scrap of paper circling in dirty water. “Does this look like an employment agency?” he said.

“Excuse me, but I was talking to… her.” Friend was out of the question.

Varvara leaned her chair back on its hind legs and planted her boots on the table. They were in terrible shape. “Try the telephone company. That’s the place for nice bourgeois girls like you.”

“As if you’re not one,” I snapped back. I didn’t need her supercilious attitude. If I was going to claim proletarian status, change my biography, I needed industrial labor, not association with the anti-Bolshevik class. She owed me this. I wouldn’t let her play with me to show off for Kraskin. I wondered what their relationship was. Though I couldn’t really imagine her with a lover, he did seem to show up in too many places for them to be just comrades.

“Try the banks. The bourgeois workers are still on strike,” she said.

“They’ll show us, eh?” Genya laughed. “As if the Soviet’s going to disappear without bank clerks and telephone operators.”

“I don’t want to be a bank clerk.” I plucked the cigarette from Varvara’s fingers and took a deep puff of the cheap makhorka. Remember me? I wanted to scream. “Find me a metal factory. A printworks. I’ll make shoes, work in a tannery, weave.”

“Bourgeois baby wants to play the proletarian,” Kraskin mocked. “Oh what would Papa say?”

Genya clapped his hand on Kraskin’s little bony shoulder. The top of the printer’s head barely reached my lover’s chin. “Hey, brother, who are you again? And why is this any of your business?”

“This isn’t a game,” Varvara stated flatly. “We can’t fill these clerical jobs. And we can’t take factory jobs from workers to flatter your revolutionary romanticism.”

“Maybe I can be a robber,” I said. “How’s that for romantic?”

She let loose a great cloud of smoke above her head. “Better start soon, the field’s getting crowded.” It was true, more and more audacious criminal gangs were robbing apartment houses, bakeries, theaters—even in daylight. Krestovskaya’s husband’s snack bars were regular targets. Just the other day there had been an out-and-out gunfight in a theater between a gang and the Red Guards.

“I already went to the district soviet, but they wanted to see my papers.”

“So?”

“I don’t have any.” I glared at her, not wanting to say, You remember why, don’t you? “In any case, I need better ones.” Ones that wouldn’t scream Class: bourgeois. “You’ve got to help me.”

Kraskin shook his head over his cigar. “Smolny’ll love that.”

Varvara turned on the sour-faced printer. “Why don’t you show Genya what we’re working on? He’s a poet. Maybe he can make it sound better.”

He took his arms off the back of her chair and touched his cap, ironically, and he and Genya drifted over to the group huddling by the stove and making notes on some pages. I sat down next to Varvara, shoulder to shoulder. She sighed, swung her booted feet to the floor, let her chair fall back to all four of its rickety legs. “All right. Get me your birth certificate, et cetera. I’ll see what I can do. But it’s going to be the telephone company, something like that. We need people on our side who can read and write, do sums. Unemployment’s over the moon in the industrial sector. No materiel, no fuel. We need those jobs for the workers.”

I could smell her scent, slightly sour, dirty hair plus graphite and paper, apple cores. “I’m never going to forgive you, you know.”

Her mouth twisted, trying to suppress a smile. “You can’t play both sides. I just gave you a push. Don’t be so sore. Look, if you’re interested, he’s still out there, making trouble, as you can imagine. He’s on the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland and the Revolution as well as the Committee for the Defense of the Constituent Assembly. Tenacious, you have to give him that. But go back and get your papers. I’ll see what I can do.”


I had little choice but to return to Furshtatskaya Street and hope my papers were still there. They were like soap—essential, yet a part of life I’d never considered while I packed my pictures and poetry that night three months earlier. A whole world had passed away since I’d last walked down this broad avenue. The sidewalk had barely been cleared, the snow piled into high tunnels of icy white. So many things I hadn’t known back then. What it was to be hungry, and tired, and bug-bitten, and restless for a moment of privacy. Looking down the block, I could easily see which apartments were still occupied and which had been abandoned—the exterior walls of the living flats showed dark, while the “dead” ones gleamed with silvery frost. So many dead buildings. Here was ours, still blue with white plasterwork, elegant even now, though I noticed the pipes of the little bourgeoika tin stoves dribbling smoke through some of the windows. Not enough coal or wood to stoke the big porcelain stoves anymore, not even up in this part of town.

I felt my way up the back stairs from the courtyard, tried the kitchen door. It swung open. The very path Varvara had taken that night in October. With all the robberies, I was amazed it was left unlocked. Frost grew thick on the windows of the large tiled kitchen. The stove, ice cold. All down the back hall, the doors to the servants’ rooms stood open, revealing beds without mattresses, empty wardrobes. We’d read that the Red Guards had been carrying out a general confiscation of furniture and clothing from the bourgeoisie, to be redistributed to the poor. So it had happened here, too. Feelings warred inside me. I was all for redistribution, yet I couldn’t help feeling robbed.