“Let’s not talk about him.”

“But he’s decided to defend Russia instead. Citizen Quixote.” He pressed his hand to mine, palm to palm, and slowly our curled fingers interlocked like swans bowing their heads in the corps de ballet. “Poor devil.”

“Don’t you dare feel sorry for him.”

“I feel sorry for every living soul right now.”

We lay there for a while, mournfully, understanding our mutual weaknesses, not needing to speak. Seryozha was dead, the world was exploding, and what we had was our passion for each other, our mingled souls and histories. The fire cracked and popped.

Finally he brightened. “Wait!” He got up out of bed, padded out to the sitting room, his strong muscled buttocks and thighs bare in the firelight. “Remember this?” The gramophone by the settee, all set up for a night of love—with Mina. My anger flared like a sudden rash and died away just as quickly when the guitar, the voice of Carlos Gardel filled the lantern-flickering room. Mina didn’t tango. He held out his arms for me to come join him. The song spoke to what was true about us—passion and danger, longing, rebellion, tenderness. I didn’t have to know Spanish to understand what it was about.

Naked, we danced, slowly, separated only by the thickness of our bodies, our essential selves once again foiled from perfect fusion by bones and flesh, and yet still yearning.


Kolya opened the drapes. Outside, the dark winter dawn crawled toward us along the white brow of the Neva. He’d already dressed, was in his old army uniform—epaulets removed for safety’s sake, officers being uninvited guests at the party of the revolution—and set a tray on the bed. Real coffee and good black bread, herring and sour cream. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got business,” he said. Beezneez—he used the English word. “I’ll be back. Keep warm. Eat something.”

“What business?” I sat up in bed. Out on the Neva, one sledge toiled along, like an ant in a sugar bowl. “There’s no business in Petrograd.”

The corners of his eyes turned up like his nose. “That’s when there’s the most business.” He kissed my lips, bruised from the nighttime of unaccustomed passion. Smoothed my hair. “Silly.”

“Don’t go.” I clung to him.

He grabbed my haunch. For some reason my flesh always conformed to the shape of his hand. “You think I’m not coming back? With that waiting for me?”

I pulled him toward me. I was raw as a grated radish, but I still wanted more. My greed was unslakable. “Forget business.”

“I’m not a girl,” he said, kissing me again. “I can’t loll around in bed all day dreaming and writing love poems. I’ve got things to do. But I’ll be back. There’s a pail of water by the washstand. Stay warm and think about me.” He pushed me away gently, stood, buttoned his coat, sticking his fur hat on his head.

And he was gone.

I ate fatty herring, sour cream, and black bread. After the previous night, I felt drugged, so safe in this hidden place, the smell of my love all over me, the tattered splendor. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. Tired of queues and district soviets and frozen potatoes, tired of the communal squalor of the Poverty Artel, tired of the daily terrors and having to be a grown-up every day, tired of thinking and fighting and waiting my turn, while the real me was left unknown. I sat on the fragrant bed and watched the snow fall outside the windows. I should go and tell Genya what had happened. The knowledge tugged at me, but it seemed too far away. As any child can tell you, you must not leave an enchanted place or it will be lost to you forever. All that will remain will be a ribbon or a slipper, an enameled bracelet on your arm, the smell of honey and Floris Limes in your hair.

33 Speculation

I KNEW WHAT BEEZNEEZ Kolya was conducting out there. Every morning the citizens of Petrograd woke to see blood in the snow where some speculator had been shot by the Cheka overnight, caught hoarding or dealing in contraband. Dressed in black leather, with Mausers at their hips, bands of Chekists raided buildings all night long. Not the Poverty Artel—we were too poor for hoarding—but in the front building, when the electric lights came on after midnight, everyone knew a raid was about to occur. And I’d found a hidden space off the mansion’s laundry room piled high with barrels and boxes, rugs, art in frames. It was strictly illegal—all art belonged to the people now, their national heritage. Perhaps some of my parents’ things, too.

Before the last of the sun’s frosty light dropped into the gulf, footsteps sounded on the bare parquet. I hid behind the door, but it was Kolya, balancing two full bags, one on each arm. He unpacked them gleefully, like a child, showing me cheese, butter, potted meats, a dusty bottle of Napoleon cognac under a red wax seal.

“Manna, my dear. Hallelujah.” He made the sign of the cross, priestlike, over a can of deviled ham.

“The Cheka has permission to shoot speculators on sight,” I said.

He pinched my cheeks as one would a fussy child. “Lucky for me, their eyesight isn’t too good.” He pulled at a lock of my hair, let it fall. “I wish you hadn’t cut it. I miss it long. Was it always this red?”

“Mother hated the red.” I watched him open the brandy, breaking the seal, tucking it under his arm, pulling the cork. “She thought it was vulgar. When I was little, she used to have Avdokia rinse it with rosemary and walnut shells to try to darken it.”

“Didn’t want to be upstaged,” he said. The cognac unstoppered, he went looking for the glasses. They were still by the bed where we’d left them the night before.

He sliced a fat piece of ham and held it out to me. I opened my mouth for him to feed it to me instead. I would have liked to be one of those dogs who can’t eat if not fed by the master’s hand. As I ate, I wondered what it would be like to live with him, to follow him out into his mysterious world. It would be like walking through the looking glass. What lay on the other side of his life? Abandoned houses, villages, woods, gypsy camps? Was it true that there were men who could not love the way a woman loved, completely, devotedly? Akhmatova wrote,

No, I will not drink wine with you—

You’re a naughty one.

I know your ways—you’d kiss

Any girl beneath any moon.

I dreamed about fish swimming in dark currents under the frozen Neva. I was visited by the ghosts of the dead mansion, dressed in the fashion of the 1830s, watching us, watching me. I dreamed of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine, and they became mixed together with Katya and the tough and the Red Guardsman from Blok’s poem, all at a masked ball in an open square like the Field of Mars, in the swirling snow.


The next night Kolya didn’t return though the hour grew late. I had no way to gauge the time once darkness came, but I imagined it was at least midnight and still no sign. I lit the lamps, waited. Paced. Imagined him dead. Shot, robbed, arrested. But no, surely he’d been delayed with one of his customers, some old gent who had opened a bottle of wine hidden for months in a dusty cellar, accompanied by treasured cigars. A school chum, someone from the university he stumbled across on Nevsky Prospect. In a city like this, it could be anything. Arrest, interrogation.

Or a woman. The thing I should not have imagined was impossible not to. The female body sang for him, and, as they say, a great violinist can play any violin. If I can’t have caviar… but he did have it. Absurd to think he could go from our bed, so thoroughly torn and abused that I had to completely remake it each morning, to someone else’s. We already made love four times a day. But what of his need for admiration, for desire? It drove him before it like the wind. Yes, he could be with some poor lovely Former he was “helping.” Just beezneez.

“Are you even a soldier anymore?” I’d asked the night before. His unit was down in the Ukraine—or were they? The Ukraine’s Rada, its parliament, had just signed a separate peace with the Germans while the Bolsheviks were still negotiating to end the war.

“It’s uncertain,” he said. “I’m still in touch with my superiors.” He arced his head from side to side, neither yes nor no. “Let’s say I’m a useful fellow.”

Yes, I imagined he was. Sitting in someone’s parlor—desperate Former People struggling to maintain their dignity—examining their objets d’art, a Fabergé egg, a jeweled dragonfly. They would speak of old times, friends in common, parties they’d attended—Oh, you were there?—pretending that nothing so low as commerce was taking place. While he eyed the dark-haired daughter, or the mistress of the house… the oval portrait on the yellow wall followed me with her eyes. You, too?

Well, they couldn’t eat their silver, their art. Wasn’t I grateful for the money he had left hidden behind the tiles in my father’s stove? What good were our Repin, our Bakst, Vrubel’s portrait of my mother in such times? You could not stoke the tin stoves with them. You could not get passage to Finland with their beauty.

I drank wine and out of sheer perversity imagined every violent fate that might have met him, then became terrified that it had really happened, that my ugly thoughts might actually become reality. Please bring him back, I prayed. But he’d always flown back before, eager for me, shortly after dark. Was he tiring of me, my neediness, my unquenchable passion? My body ached for him.

He returned in the early hours of the morning, stinking of vodka, reeling like a circus clown. Sank down upon the settee and attempted to take his boots off, failed. He held one foot up for me to help him pull it off, but I ignored it. He let it fall with a thud. “The city’s a ruin,” he said, removing a cigar from inside his jacket and cutting off the tip, lighting it. He puffed blue smoke into the air. “I fell over a dead horse tonight. Almost broke my damned neck. A dead goddamn horse, right in the middle of Bolshaya Morskaya.”