Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

Terrified, she mimed buttoning her lips, glancing at her mother sewing at the table, her father, her sisters. Although we were pretty safe with Shusha banging away at Rachmaninoff, she yelled, “Let me show you a new dress Mama made me,” then gestured with her head down the hall.

I followed her to her room, past pictures of grandparents, great-grandparents, men with sidelocks and beards, women with suspicious faces, stern with disapproval at their dependable workhorse turned siren. I could hear Uncle Aaron singing behind the bathroom door. In Mina’s bedroom, where I’d slept with her and her sisters during the first revolution, she pulled the door shut. The room smelled of some light perfume. She never wore perfume. There was the bottle, by her bed. Something he’d brought her, no doubt.

I didn’t want her to lie to me now. She had to understand the situation. “Mina, listen to me. Seryozha’s dead.”

On her face—shock. But something else… her gaze dropped to her feet, then met mine again. Her tear-filled eyes drifted off to the right. She knew! He had told her. Her lids dropped again. She couldn’t bear the anguish on my face. She shielded her guilt with a cupped hand.

I grabbed her, shook her. “How long have you known?”

“I was going to tell you, I swear, it’s just that we haven’t seen you…” Sniveling, she tried to wrench herself from my grip.

“I’ve been right here. Ten blocks away.” Mina, my best, my oldest friend in the world, had kept Seryozha’s death from me. No wonder she couldn’t meet my eyes. I shoved her away.

Her face was a kaleidoscope, emotion replacing emotion—shame, fury, pity—like impatient people all trying to get through a door at the same time. “I would have told you when I saw you again. I thought I’d see you. But the longer I waited, the harder it got.” Her little earrings flickered in the electric light.

“And you got to see Kolya.” I saw it so clearly. She would have done anything to have him. Even this.

Her chin stuck out a little farther. “Yes. Yes, all right?” She rubbed her arms where I’d hurt her. “Do you have to have everything? Everything, everything! What about me? Good old Mina. Here, hold my coat, Mina…” Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “But maybe I’m not so good. Maybe I deserve a life, too.” The smile hovered, crumpled. She held her hand to her forehead and began sobbing in earnest, the ragged sobs of a child.

“Mina, I need to see Kolya.” I tried to keep my voice low and soft. “Let me come with you tonight.”

“No!” Startled, she wheeled away from me. “What will you tell Genya? Remember him? Your boyfriend?”

I thought of Genya, so sincere, so caring. But it was Kolya I needed. Only he would know how I felt. Only he could know what it was to lose Seryozha, only he could console me. To think that a few minutes ago, I was heading home to sit alone and watch snow fall. I’d been thrown a lifeline and I wasn’t going to let it go. Not for her or Genya or God Almighty. “Tell me where you meet him.”

Her crying had left blotchy patches on her lovely skin. Her hair was coming down. She sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, took off her earrings, and threw them at the pillow. One bounced onto the floor, skittered under Dunya’s bed. “I’m sorry about Seryozha. Oh God, what a mess…” She keeled over sideways on the bed and wedged her hands between her knees, her tears dripping on the chenille bedspread.

“Where is he? I need to see him.”

“In a mansion. On the English Embankment.”

Poor Mina. My tearstained, disloyal old friend. I had never guessed her envy was so great that she would go as far as to withhold news of my brother’s death so that she could keep her rendezvous with Kolya. “How do you go?” I pressed her. “Will he come here?”

She shook her head. “He sends a cab. You go. It’s you he wants anyway.”

Was it wrong that this lifted my spirits? I needed him. There would be no explanations, no awkward embraces, no ridiculous metaphors or poetic histrionics. It was a time for raw feeling, something there was no room for in the crowded Poverty Artel. Mina might love him, but I would burn down everything to be with him again.

THE COACHMAN WORE A frozen lily like a starfish in his buttonhole. Frost whitened the poor horse, its ribs a clattering xylophone. Crouching in his great cloak against the whirling snow, the coachman clapped the reins and we moved into the storm as into a poem, a legend. Frost soon coated my shawl in a glassy shroud, making it crack. My eyes narrowed to slits as we slid through the deserted streets down Horse Guards Boulevard and up past St. Isaac’s, across the vast white whirling plain of Senate Square.

On the English Embankment, the cold grew even worse. The wind sweeping across the frozen river drove sharp needlelike grains of snow into my eyes, my lashes crusted with frost. How different from that first joyous sleigh ride with Kolya. On one side, the great houses of the English Embankment braced like aristocrats before a firing squad, while on the other, wind and darkness, the howling expanse of the frozen Neva. The sleigh came to rest right in the middle of the road—there was so little traffic these days that it made no difference where we stopped. The coachman, hunched in his seat, made no attempt to help me scramble out. As soon as I had my feet on the ground, the bearskin piled back in the sled, he whipped up the horse, leaving me alone in this white blowing world.

I stood alone before a two-story mansion that had lorded it over the snow-crusted Neva for a hundred years, a looming blur of darkness one shade lighter than the sky. I stumbled my way through the drifts to the enormous door. Padlocked. I pulled on the chain, but it was fastened tight. No light appeared in any of the windows. I pounded with the side of my fist, barely making a sound. The cold sucked the last strength from my body, the benefits of the fish-soup dinner and the pastry I’d eaten at the Krestovskys’ gone by now. “Kolya!” I shouted up at the windows, my voice lost in the roar of the storm. “Kolya, let me in!”

Down the embankment, a door opened, a flickering light. A figure waved. I didn’t have to see the face. I ran to him. I flew.

He caught me by the waist. “Hey, hey, easy there!” He held the lamp high so it wouldn’t be knocked out of his hands and laughed as I stepped through the door. He bolted it behind me. We were in the frozen pantry of a great house. I pushed the shawl from my hair as he walked ahead holding his lamp. “Kolya.”

He turned back. The look on his face when he realized it wasn’t Mina, the smile of mild anticipation vanishing, then he knew me. He bundled me into his arms, repeating my name like a prayer. So solid, so real, his smell of cigar and Floris Limes and that powerful indescribable honey. I began to cry. He kissed my hands, smoothed my hair, held me tightly enough to make me believe this was real.

“Let’s go upstairs. I’ve got a fire.” We fell into step as we always did, as we traced our frozen path through the dead kitchens and ghostly pantries, the service rooms of the mansion, and climbed the stairs into the frosty grandeur of its foyer. I was too overcome to speak. He kissed my hair, rested his temple against mine. I had forgotten the waves of pleasure in that simple touch. My grief had found its home. This was why I had come—the world be damned. I didn’t care if it disappeared forever.

The flickering light created and erased reception rooms as we moved through the public areas of the abandoned villa—flashes of red silk wall covering stained and denuded of paintings. White pillars, a broken sofa, abused-looking chairs. He opened a small door I might not have noticed, flush as it was with the wall. Before us, the lantern revealed a small, high-ceilinged room papered in yellow and warmed by an open fire. Paintings and beveled mirrors still hung on chains from its picture rails, portraits in oval insets peered out like passengers from the portholes of a passing liner. The firelight licked at his face, the high cheekbones, the smiling eyes, but they weren’t smiling now. He knew. He understood. Objects gleamed on a small gilded table—wine, biscuits on a painted plate. For Mina Katzeva. I couldn’t bring myself to feel jealous. What I needed from Kolya went deeper than sex, deeper than passion.

He poured some wine into a glass of cut crystal and handed it to me.

I drank. Port, sweet, clinging to the glass. I hadn’t had alcohol since the Winter Palace was taken. It went to my head, along with the heat of the open fire and Kolya’s scent.

We settled on the settee, his arm around me. “I thought I’d never see you again. Poor Sir Garry.” That was Seryozha’s name in our circus, Sir Garry Pekingese. Sir Garry was a dog who would jump through a hoop covered with paper.

“Nobody told me. I went by the flat on Furshtatskaya to get my papers and Ginevra told me.”

“Mina didn’t tell you?” I shook my head slowly, threaded my fingers through his. He tipped his head back. “Christ.”

“You could have told me yourself.”

“I didn’t want to disrupt your new life.” Tears welled in his blue eyes. “I’m not the scum you believe me to be. She said you were in love with a poet, that you were beautiful together, to leave you alone. Do you love him?”

Did I love Genya? Of course I did. But here I was. When all was said and done, I’d run to this man without a backward glance. I would have to think about that—later.

“What a mess.” His arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist, we leaned into one another like people sheltering in a blizzard. But the hard black just under my ribs that I’d been carrying since that day eased over an inch or two. Seryozha, my beautiful brother. Sir Garry Pekingese. He remembered us. That was why I had come. We sat like that for a long time as the fire hissed and snapped. He poured me another glass of wine.