Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Seryozha was in the ground in Moscow. Volodya was fighting against the revolution. My lungs couldn’t expand. They’d been frozen solid.

My mother looked up from the tangle of chains. “Where’s Tulku?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She still hadn’t noticed I was here, but she wanted her little greyhound.

“Avdokia’s taking him for a walk, dear,” said the Englishwoman. She turned to me, whispered, “They shot Tulku during the first search, poor thing. He growled at one of the Red Guards and the man shot him the way you’d swat a fly. Frankly, it was just as well. We couldn’t have kept feeding him.”

Why was she talking to me about a dog? I had to get out of there while I could, while I still had the strength.

My mother turned to me, her eyes big and uncomprehending as a squid’s. The heat was unbearable in here, the closeness, the lavender, their helplessness. My brother was gone. My sensitive, anxious brother who had never wanted to climb beyond the first branch of the maple that grew in the Tauride Gardens. Even then you’d have to hold him on. Killed defending the Kremlin. I pictured the dead in Znamenskaya Square, a blond head, the cap fallen off. I put the letter in the bag with Seryozha’s pictures and my papers and left the flat before I turned to stone.

BIG FLAKES SIFTED ACROSS the windows. Down in the courtyard, a woman pumped water, and a crow picked disconsolately at some kind of rag. The same snow was falling in Moscow, deep, deep over his grave. Falling as it had in the snow globe music box Avdokia would wind for us, gnarled hands turning the key and shaking the encased wintry scene—St. Basil’s, a troika rushing. Seryozha in his nightshirt, I in my flannel gown, Volodya pretending he was too old for such things but watching all the same. “That’s you three,” she would say, pointing to the horses pulling the troika. It had played “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” little tinkling bells, over and over. Warm from our Sunday night baths, we would watch the snow fall together. Moscow seemed a magical place then, not a backdrop to murder.

Moscow.

           Crow among cities

                        I curse your churches

40 times 40

           their funeral bells

                        I curse your Kremlin towers

Spasskaya,

            Blagoveshchenskaya

                        Borovitskaya…

Blackhearted Rus

             You barrow,

              You sow.

                         Devouring your piglets one by one.

How would I live in a world without Seryozha? A world surrounded by strangers, a world that could kill a little boy in his nightshirt? The sky grew dark. I prayed he hadn’t been lying about being happy at the military academy. The snow swirled, a silent answer. You are all erased. You live to be erased. No one will be remembered by anyone. They hadn’t bothered to tell me—I wasn’t that hard to find!—but let me go on thinking he was alive. I’d laughed and run around town, spouting verses on bridges and singing on street corners, when he lay—where? I hadn’t even asked. All I could picture was a sad mound of snow by the Kremlin wall, one of its twenty towers looming above.

The tiny music box played over and over in my mind as I remembered Seryozha manipulating his Pierrot and Columbine paper puppets, making them jump with a tug of the string. Come with me; we’ll live on the moon. His little voice, playing both parts. Yes, I’ve always wanted to live on the moon.

Me, too, Seryozhenka. I’d like to live on the moon, somewhere cold and shining, with no humans at all—just us.

I could hear them, the racket in the hall, and in they came, talking all at once, shaking snow from hats and coats. Someone lit the lamp, dispelling the calming shadows, the gentle dark. Shouting, laughing. Something had outraged Genya, something about Red Guards. Now they saw me.

“Why were you sitting in the dark?” he asked me. He pretended to fall on me, a joke, caught himself at the last minute, one hand braced against the wall over my head. He leaned down to kiss me. I turned my face away. “Are you on strike like the Red Guards?” He tried the other side. “Fishing for more rations? Higher wages?” He righted himself. “What’s with you? How’d the job search go?”

I stared out to the windows facing ours in the courtyard. People making dinner for their children with what little they had. Families. How fragile it all was.

“What’s with her?” Zina asked.

Not looking at him, I handed Genya the letter, the paper that felt so much like skin. I could not say it. Seryozha’s dead. A girl on the far side of the courtyard lounged in a window, looking back at me. Maybe it was me in a different life. I held my hand over my mouth to stop sobs if they started.

“It’s her brother,” Genya told the others.

“What happened?” Zina asked again.

“Killed. At the Kremlin. Back in November. Remember him, at the Cirque Moderne?”

“The blond one with the curls?” Zina asked.

“The father sent him to junker school. Bastard. Bastard!” Junkers—it’s what they called the cadets.

Junker school. My father hadn’t presented it that way, but that was exactly what it was. Officers in training. I held out my hand for the letter without turning to look at him. He pressed it into my palm. I folded it and put it back in my pocket. It was all I had of him now, that and a landscape or two, some silhouettes. Genya took my hands in his, rested his face against them. “Marina. I’ll kill him. I’ll go up there and rip his head off. To send that kid down there for nothing? What can I do, Marina? Just say the word.”

“It happened three months ago.” I didn’t want his histrionics or his tears. I just wanted to be cold, to freeze solid here by the window. I wanted to disappear.

But now he was pacing, swatting at the air. “I wonder what your old man has to say about it now. ‘Your son died heroically.’ Boys against soldiers—what did they think would happen?”

“Sorry, Marina,” Sasha said, touching me on the shoulder. “He was a sweet guy, an artist. I remember him. He was good, too.”

“Like meat to dogs,” Genya said.

Stop, for the love of God.

Anton stretched out on his cot. Supine, he began to roll a cigarette on a book on his chest. “This is exactly why governments should be abolished.”

“Sorry, Marina,” Gigo said, awkward as a hayseed at a costume ball. He held out a half-eaten bar of chocolate to me, linty from his pocket, as if I were a child to be appeased with sweets.

Sasha blew the stove to life. The smell of sulfur, newsprint, varnish.

“I hope he’s satisfied,” Genya said, still pacing. He was too noisy. Could he not just sit down? “I’d like to ask him that to his face. ‘Are you satisfied now, Dmitry Ivanovich? Are you proud of your son at last?’”

I finally let out a shriek. “For God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry!” Genya flung himself to his knees at my feet, clutching at my skirt, his head in my lap. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m such an oaf. Just an organ-grinder’s monkey. Please tell me what to do. Please… anything, Marina. It’s just too hideous. I can’t stand it.” He wept into my lap.

I ran my hands through his hair just to quiet him. It was absurd—I wanted him to hold me, say nothing, and just be very still. Oh, none of these poets knew the first thing about life.

The conversation went on around me. I counted towers.

Spasskaya,

                              Blagoveshchenskaya

                                           Borovitskaya…

“Power will defend itself to the end,” Anton was saying from his cot, where he was examining the hole in his sock.

Beklemishevskaya

                     First Unnamed

                                     Second Unnamed

Secret Tower,

                     Tsar’s Tower

                                     Trinity…

That night, I dreamed of Moscow. Seryozha was a bell ringer, up in one of the towers of the Kremlin Wall, and they’d tied him into the belfry, hand, foot, and neck, stretched between them. I knew that when they rang the bells it would tear him to pieces.

Life went on. Arguments, fires made, meals eaten, visits to the toilet, hours in queues and trips to the district soviet. I managed to secure a labor book. Origin: bourgeois. I saw no point fighting it now. The air felt thick in my lungs, unbreathable, like the atmosphere on Venus. I went through my days, living as if within a matrioshka nesting doll. One Marina functioned, while deep inside, another Marina knelt in the snow by the Kremlin Wall, weeping atop a small grave. No one could join her there. They didn’t know that Seryozha didn’t like people touching him on the head. That his favorite color was cadmium yellow with a dash of red at its heart. That he was bitten by a spider at the age of five and became so sick and swollen that he almost died. He’d read that the Chinese kept crickets as pets and insisted on having one of his own. Avdokia got him a little basket with a lid, and Volodya hunted for three nights to catch one for him. My loneliness possessed a gravity I thought would crush me.

That Wednesday evening, we all trooped up to our poetry circle, held at the Krestovsky apartment on Sergievskaya Street, near the English embassy. Genya had something special to present. He was dying to show me, dropped numerous hints. He’d been working on it all week. Thank God it kept him busy. Mechanically, I combed my hair and got into my boots, my coat.