Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

He was halfway to the table when he saw me. I watched him grapple with the fact of my return as a man grapples to catch a falling bowl. His eyes focused, his Adam’s apple rose and fell in his strong neck, then he lowered his head like a bull in the last minutes of the corrida—exhausted, its thick neck impaled with picks.

I had done this to a man I loved. He stood, swaying, staring at me with such sadness I thought I would break from the weight of it. How naked he was, his pain, his love, his fear. This beautiful man, whom I had betrayed. He deserved better. Better than me. I hadn’t known this about myself, just how selfish I was, how untrustworthy. Anything he could say about me would be true.

“Tell her to bugger off,” Anton directed. “You can’t let her come back.”

“Go take a walk,” Genya said, not turning his gaze from me.

“I’m busy,” said Anton, pretending to read a manuscript.

“Am I asking you?” Genya took a step toward his friend, more menacingly than I could have imagined.

Anton sighed and threw the pages down. “Look. I’ve put up with this melodrama long enough, and so have you, brother, if you’d get your head out of your pants long enough to see it.”

In one swift movement, Genya seized him in a headlock, marched him to the still-open door, and threw him into the hallway. Then he slammed the door and turned the lock. He turned back to me with those wounded green eyes.

The whole house could hear Anton pounding on the door. “Let me in! I’m freezing my nuts off!”

Genya grabbed Anton’s coat and gloves and hat and threw them out into the hall, then slammed and rebolted the door.

My relief at Anton’s absence was followed by the stark realization that Genya and I were alone together. Bearlike, he swayed, just staring at me. Would he fall? Would he rush at me, strike me with those huge hands he was unconsciously flexing and opening? He was not a violent man, but I had driven him to the wall. I deserved it. I wrapped my coat closer hoping he wouldn’t smell Kolya on me. I couldn’t stand seeing in his face the harm I had done him. I wanted to reach out, to comfort him, even now. Though he stank of vodka, he didn’t seem drunk so much as heavy with suffering.

“Where did you go?” he asked. Mina told him everything.

I tried to think of something I could tell him, but all I could see was Kolya’s greedy face and naked body in the bed on the English Embankment. “Genya, I’m not who you think I am. I’m…” and my throat closed up on me. I always saw myself as a good person who occasionally did bad things, but I saw now, that was a misconception. “I’m not careful. I make a mess of everything. You should throw me out. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Where did you go?” he roared. Bull nostrils flaring. “Who were you with? Tell me!”

I looked down at my hands. They didn’t even look like mine. “I have a lover. I haven’t seen him since I met you.” I felt like my face was on fire. I wished I could just tear it off. “He came back. I was so wild after I left Sergievskaya, so low. And I heard he’d come back. He knew Seryozha. I wanted to see him. Not to make love to him, just to see him. Just to feel known, do you understand?”

“No, I don’t,” he choked with a sob. “You don’t think I know you?”

I shook my head. “Forgive me. I’ve lost everything. My whole life. I thought it would make me feel better to see this man from the old days.”

“And did it?”

Did it? “For a while.” But now I’d ruined my life for it, for three days. Go back to your poet. Would a man who loves you send you back to your lover?

“You should have stayed with him.”

“He left.” The air felt like glass. Broken, sharp, unbearably bright. “He’s a criminal. A speculator.”

“And you went to him.”

“Yes.” I couldn’t stand to look at him. It was like looking into the sun.

“Don’t you care about me at all? What am I to you? Just this big buffoon you can lead around by the nose?” He had started to cry. “Was it that poem I wrote? I thought you’d like it.”

Oh, if only lightning would strike me right now, so that I would not have to live through this moment.

He shuffled to the window, rolling his forehead on the cold glass. “Did you ever love me?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

“Yes,” I said, letting the quilt fall from my shoulders, glad there was something I could answer with absolute confidence.

“Do you love me now?”

“Yes.” From the pain I was feeling, I knew I did love him, not incandescently, not feverishly, craving his skin, unable to think about anything else. Why must there be only one kind of love? There had to be better words, ten or fifteen, a hundred. Love was such a mixture of things, each love with its own flavor and spice. I wanted to both reassure him and warn him. For him I had love, tenderness, pity. Attraction and admiration, friendship and trust. As opposed to what I felt for Kolya—animal passion, ecstasy, history—and a spoonful of black hatred as well.

“Do you love this other man?”

I nodded, barely moving my head, just tucking my chin. I would not lie to him now.

He roared and turned over the table, lamp and papers crashing to the floor. He wanted to hit me, I knew it, but he couldn’t do it, so he threw chairs and broke things instead. “No. You can’t. It’s not possible!” He picked up a chair and brought it down onto the table. It flew apart, leaving him with just the chair leg, with which he battered the overturned table until he fell to his knees, sobbing.

Was I just as Anton had described, some sort of succubus draining the life from this strong, beautiful man? “I went home to my mother’s, but she won’t forgive me. I had no choice. I’m sorry.”

“You could find a brothel,” he snapped. “I’m sure they’d be happy to have you.”

Would that be my next stop?

“Am I not enough for you?” he said softly. “You think I’m a bad lover?”

Of all things. Pity brought me to him, put my hand on his shoulder. He knocked it away. I leaned my face against his shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t hit me. Under my cheek, a great sob. He grabbed me and held me, kissing me, pushing me down on the floor, hands in my coat, needing to make love urgently, his desperate fingers. This body, this borderline, this rocky shore. He needed to erase Kolya from this body that had been his. He tore at my dress, planting his mouth on mine as if he needed the very air from my lungs. Ripped at my bloomers. Was this love? Was it hate? Was he weeping or was it I? We made violent love on the dirty wooden floor among the debris of chairs and sunflower-seed shells, clutching, weeping, until we were drained. “Don’t leave me, Marina,” he whispered.

I lay on the floor, half under him, shells embedded in my back, his smell of green and wood, my hair a tangle, his like ruffled shocks of wheat. What was the body, this bloody field of stones? So many battles fought here, so many good men lost.

ONCE AGAIN WE WALKED together, breathing our breaths into the frozen days, my head in its thick scarf coming up to his rough wool shoulder. In an unexpected way, we had become more of a couple than we had ever been—considerate, protective. We spoke in low, intimate tones. But we had lost the joy, the spontaneity. What was between us felt fragile, clear, and breakable as a ship in blown glass. We had entered the formality that leads husbands and wives to call each other by name and patronymic. Yet I learned that a strange kind of trust arises after betrayal that no one ever talks about, that comes with the knowledge that one’s lover is willing to be hurt—to absorb pain, to carry it—for the sake of love. And that one was capable of hurting someone—deeply. And that it was not the end. You can live that way, you can go on.

In Galina Krestovskaya’s apartment, we pale young poets of Petrograd warmed our cracked, chilblained hands by the stove and prepared to invoke the Muse—while ignoring the lingering smells of a decent meal recently consumed. Where Seryozha’s death had placed cotton in my ears and a fog before my eyes, my disgrace had stripped my senses bare, and again I heard, I saw.

Anton began. His poem investigated the possibility of the ya, the I, the ego. It was woven with clever half rhymes and strings of sound, unintelligible at first hearing. And yet its meaning bobbed along like a buoy in rough weather, sometimes above the line of waves, sometimes below. He’d said no more to me after his outburst, but his disdain for me and concern for Genya were always simmering under the surface.

Genya’s new poems thundered more emphatically than ever, in inverse proportion to our careful silences with each other. The poem he recited urged the people to be men and not children, not to examine their leaders for feet of clay, for all feet were of clay. The revolution could not live in the sky, the poem said, only in the mess of blood and fire and earth. He challenged the reader to embrace the heat and the darkness and the smoke and let it transform him, let it temper him hard. It was his wish for himself.

For my part, I found a place to stand in the details of daily life. I returned to the precision of rhyme and meter. I found it soothing to sit on the divan, day after day, working out rhyme schemes, counting loping iambs and foot-dragging dactyls. I had never been so technically accurate. The two university students, Oksana and Petya, liked the repetition, the clarity, but Anton of course hated them. “All its energy is in chains,” he complained. “Where’s the sound?” But Seryozha’s death was silent as an owl flying through snow. Kolya’s departure was the nicker of horses, a swish of runners. And Genya and I—the sound of breath being held, the tinkling of icicles.