The bracing walk did me good. Everyone was bundled up, our breath freezing in midair. Galina Krestovskaya, so beautiful with her golden curls, met us at the door, kissed us in greeting. I always loved coming to this big overwarm apartment with its faux peasant furniture, the flowers and birds painted on the walls, the young poets gathered from all over the city to share their work and listen to the critique, especially from Anton. Seryozha would have loved this place. He would have approved of Galina—he was always attracted to beauty. She wore an embroidered Russian blouse that my brother might have designed himself.

Everybody was talking about a brand-new poem from Blok, “The Twelve,” a poem about the revolution. No one had seen it yet, but a friend of the Krestovskys had acquired a copy, and we eagerly anticipated hearing it. Galina, the star of the Kommedia theater, read aloud proudly and with great revolutionary enthusiasm, checking periodically to see what Anton thought of her performance. Her husband, Krestovsky, rattled his newspaper from time to time in his leather armchair in the alcove, occasionally surveying the gathering with a doleful, proprietary squint. It was he who footed the bill for our journal, for the snacks and the fuel to heat this room for our meeting, and for Anton’s editorial salary, which in turn paid for the Poverty Artel.

“The Twelve” took around fifteen minutes to read. Intricate and modern, it captured the music of the revolution, a Blok no one had ever heard before. In the poem, twelve Red Guards patrolled the streets of Petrograd in a snowstorm, streets familiar to us all, haunted and laced with deadly dramas. We recognized the rough men, the haggard bourgeoisie, the prostitutes, the hunger and cold. A prostitute, Katya, seduced by a tough, is shot by her Red Guard lover. The action was brutal and callous, yet Blok could not stop the music inside himself. What a singular moment, to hear the first recitations of a master’s work, to stand aside from the dullness of my grief—no, not stand aside from it, because grief was in the poem, along with coarseness and beauty. A contradictory piece, it was on the side of the revolution and yet accepted it for the wild, violent, uncontainable thing it was, a time when people were going to suffer.

The dangerous, ragged quality of the poem took impulse, rage, murder, and remorse and drove onward, onward into the snowstorm that blinded us all. It ended, most astonishingly, with Christ marching unseen at the head of the column of the twelve, struggling through the blizzard, into the unknown. And in front of the flag / invisible in the snow / walks one more man…

I would have liked to just sit and absorb what we had just heard, but the discussion began immediately. What was Christ doing at the end of the poem? Was Blok a modernist or still a symbolist? I accepted a pastry from a tray being passed by the Krestovskys’ maid and chewed it without savor. Though pastry was usually a treat, tonight it tasted like paper.

Genya, the priest’s son, of course was outraged. “Do we really need Christ to redeem the revolutionary struggle?” he thundered. “He says without crosses—what’s the line? Freedom, freedom… oh, oh, without a cross. But then here comes Jesus. If you need a justification from the Beyond, you’re not a revolutionary, no matter how many Red Guards you stick in a poem.”

At least Anton didn’t judge the ending. He was at his best at times like this, examining each of the twelve sections on a cool technical level. In the end, he decided it wasn’t a poem at all but a play. Still, he had no respect for the self-questioning of the poem. He was interested only in its bones, not in the mystery of its flight.

Once, a night like this would have brought me to near ecstasy, but I was fed up with our opinions, our judgments. Life was too deep and full of currents that could snatch you off your raft and drag you under for such theorizing. I thought of Blok’s Christ, leading the men through the snowstorm that was inside them as well as outside. Was He here, invisible, leading all this as well? Had He been there at the Kremlin the day Seryozha had breathed his last? Perhaps so. Invisible, weeping for us all.

After chewing up Blok’s magnificent poem we turned to our own. Genya stood to recite.

Abraham was shaving when he heard

a voice

          in his head.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

          “You know,” said the Lord.

                      “You and me, Abe, we know the score.

“I’ve got your number, brother

           “And I’m calling it in…”

So this was his answer to my brother’s death? The poem he’d been so excited to share with me? My father as Abraham, my brother as Isaac, the bourgeois father sacrificing his artist son to the corrupt God of the past, an ancient but bloodthirsty deity? How proud of it he was, how thunderous his delivery, the way he stuck out his chin, as if daring God to strike him down.

Genya kept looking over at me to see what I thought of his gift. I rocked myself, praying it would soon be over. Seryozha wasn’t a poem. He wasn’t a symbol. He was just a boy full of dreams, bursting with talent and eccentricities and fears, who’d been sent away on a fool’s errand. Father was certainly no Abraham, anointed by God and called to the ultimate sacrifice. He was just a pigheaded man steeped in vanity. Neither one of them was an abstraction.

I saw what Genya was trying to do—shape Seryozha into a martyr, a legend, a narrative that could be delivered on a street corner so people could imagine a cosmic battle between good and evil. It would play perfectly at the Haymarket. His fervor took over as he recited, and he was completely lost in his own roaring.

I had to leave. As I was slipping out, I ran into Oksana Linichuk, a student at the university, shaking snow from her scarf. I must have looked as shocked as I felt. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Isn’t that Genya reading?”

I could not bring myself to answer. “I’m not feeling well. Maybe I’m coming down with something. If he asks, tell Genya I’ll see him at home.”

Out on Sergievskaya Street, I scurried from swirling streetlamp to streetlamp, aware of the danger, staying away from the dark doorways. I had entered the poem “The Twelve.” The hunched shadow of a pedestrian entered the egg-shaped glow of the streetlight ahead, cutting a cave in the whirling snow, growing to nightmare size then disappearing. My eyelashes were freezing, I had to blink them warm again. Although the Krestovsky apartment lay in the heart of the diplomatic district, there was no such thing as a safe neighborhood now. Thieves robbed you just for your clothes and left you to freeze in the snow. I kept moving.

The shops were all dark, though it wasn’t that late. I caught the streetcar toward home—everyone inside looked hunched and miserable. Down on Nevsky, the windows of Mina’s building glowed behind curtains. Up there, on the fifth floor, lived people who actually knew Seryozha. Would understand what I had lost. Oh, to be known! On impulse, I jumped off the tram and raced to that familiar entrance, slipping and teetering on the ice.

In the cracked gilt mirror of the elevator, I saw my face—broken, smashed. My unfocused gaze was like my mother’s as she lay in bed, trying to untangle the chains. I pushed back my scarf, combed my hair with my fingers, tried to pinch some color back into my pale cheeks.

Dunya answered my knock. I hardly recognized her—she’d cut her braids. “Marina! Are you alone?” She immediately peered into the hall behind me, hoping for a certain tall blond painter. How grown up she’d become. The hands of our clocks whirled like pinwheels these days. Soon she would be seventeen, eighteen, she would have lovers, children. Whereas my brother hadn’t lived long enough for a first kiss.

I followed her into the parlor. In heaven, it would be just like this: Sofia Yakovlevna sewing at the table, Solomon Moiseivich on the divan in Bukhara cap and dressing gown, Aunt Fanya laying out a hand of solitaire, Shusha banging out Rachmaninoff on their old upright. Sofia Yakovlevna paused over her work when she saw me and half rose. “Marina!” Her smile was bright, then overcast with concern. “You didn’t come alone, did you? On a night like this?”

I wanted to throw myself into their arms, but for my own selfish reasons I also wanted to savor the beautiful peace of their lives, the warmth they wove about them, before I brought my tragedy into their midst. “Mina’s in her room,” Dunya said. “I’ll go get her.” She disappeared down the hall.

“Where’s your young man?” Papa Katzev asked, his eyes kind. “Your peppery comrades?”

“Up on Sergievskaya, thrashing Blok.” I couldn’t just blurt out Seryozha’s dead.

“Give her a minute to catch her breath, Papa,” his wife said. She knew something was wrong.

Dunya reappeared with Mina in tow. Now it was my turn to be shocked. Who was this vision before me in a dress of soft blue wool? Red lipstick emphasized her mouth, and someone had fashioned her stubbornly thick ash-blond hair into a pretty upsweep. The food shortages that had turned most of us scrawny had distilled her toward a new beauty. She wore dangling earrings and looked… horrified.

“Have I come at a bad time?”

“As a matter of fact, I was just going out. To a party.” Her lovely skin bore a bit of rouge. Where were her spectacles?

“You look… beautiful.”

She gave me a nervous, gelid grimace.

“Who is it? Someone I know?”

She paled, and her gray eyes slid from mine like butter on a hot pan. As clearly as if I were at one of my mother’s séances—I knew. Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help…. Who else could have worked such magic on dull, stodgy Mina Katzeva? She had probably been singing before the mirror, getting ready for her rendezvous with my lover. My lover. “You’re seeing Kolya?”