Sitting in the tobacco fug, discussing each poem in turn, I watched lovely Galina Krestovskaya drink in our words like claret, sometimes gasping or applauding a good line, at other times nodding as Anton analyzed us. We were her little geniuses, her personal nest of golden cockerels.

Krestovsky, in his usual leather-backed chair, a balding man in a coat and tie, big-nosed and bespectacled, read a Nat Pinkerton novel, a cigarette burning in his fingers. He was resigned to our presence as he had been to his wife’s redecorating the flat in the fashionable primitive style of the Diaghilev set designers.

My poem centered on women pumping water in the courtyard of a Grivtsova Alley apartment building. Exhausted, complaining, they shared gossip as they stood in the frozen puddles, then carried their water upstairs, two, three stories, slipping on the icy steps. It was called “The New Ice Age,” told in tightly patterned stanzas as intricate as a watch.

Oksana began the critique. She enjoyed the repetitions and tight metrical schemes, the rhymes. Zina burst in, her button eyes afire. “But it’s counterrevolutionary. You’re saying the Bolsheviks are incapable of keeping water going in the buildings, when you know it’s the landlords who won’t make repairs.”

“Are we critiquing content?” Petya asked Anton.

“Of course the landlords won’t make repairs,” Krestovsky called out from his lair. “Nobody’s paying rent. So who’s going to fix your water? Jesus Christ?”

Galina cast her luminous eyes to the figured ceiling, embarrassed at her husband’s unfashionable views.

“Well that’s the bourgeoisie for you. Money for wars but not for water.” Genya sat on the windowsill, his dirty boots defiantly resting on the satin of the seat below. He’d become more Bolshevik in the last weeks, more intentionally rude, as if he had to prove to himself he wasn’t going to be pushed around by bourgeois morality, least of all his own.

“I’m depicting actual life,” I argued. “As we’re living it. Should I pretend it’s already paradise?”

Zina flushed even darker. “But you’re saying life is worse under the Bolsheviks.” She looked pleadingly to Genya to back her up. Before, Genya would have been the first to chastise me, but now he let me be.

“I’m not ‘saying’ anything,” I said, defending myself. “Are you suddenly a symbolist?” Hers was the kind of criticism that often split our group into factions, whether content should be criticized or not.

“Those women should be glad to be pumping water in a Soviet Petrograd,” said sixteen-year-old Arseny to my left. “It’s their water now.”

Krestovsky burst out laughing from his chair in the alcove, and I had to slap my hand over my mouth not to join him. Did Arseny’s mother fetch his water?

“But they’re not glad,” I said simply. “I want those women to be able to look into the mirror of this poem and recognize themselves.” I rubbed at a blister on my right hand, where I’d burned myself boiling water on the primus stove. “Not some sentimentalized notion of ‘the people.’”

“You could write about the landlords not fixing the water,” Zina said. “They’d still see themselves, but it would also make a statement.” Her eyes flicked to Genya, but he just leaned back against the window frame and gazed over his shoulder at Sergievskaya Street.

Oksana came to my rescue, her gray eyes huge and dark-circled under her fringe of frizzy blond hair. “Not every poem has to be instructive to be revolutionary. To depict the life of common people in the contemporary context is itself revolutionary. This is poetry, not advertising.”

Zina stamped her small black boot on the Krestovskys’ parquet. “There are no sidelines. Poetry is part of the fight.”

“You’re all missing the point. The babas and their water aren’t the issue.” From the piano bench, Anton broke in, wearing that supercilious expression. “It’s the form that’s the problem. You’re trying to make a Red Guardsman waltz in hobnailed boots. Da dum da dum da dum da dum. The revolution is in the lines, or it isn’t a revolution. The poem is timid. It’s strangling in its corset.”

I resented what he was saying, but he was right. I was seeking solace in iambs and anapests, clever rhymes. I had become reactionary, not in my politics, but in my poetics. The trouble was that I could not write energetic modern lines, because I had no energy. These controlled intricacies reflected exactly my spirit’s limitations.

After the discussion, Sasha and other artists began to drift in—actors, students, dancers—knowing there would be snacks and perhaps liquor. Our hostess, graceful, blond, and green-eyed in a gypsy scarf, flitted from group to group, her bracelets jingling, happy to be at the center of such an advanced artistic coterie, while Krestovsky played chess with Anton.

I was speaking quietly with Oksana when two familiar faces entered the archway of the salon—Dunya Katzeva and her newly glamorous sister. What was Mina doing here? Dunya smiled at me, but she was searching for someone else, and her smile broadened when she saw him. I stepped behind Oksana and searched for Genya. Had he seen Mina come in? No, he was safely across the room, explaining something to Petya and little Arseny. I excused myself and threaded through the clusters of guests into the hall, but Anton’s quick eye had caught my exit. Mina’s arrival had not escaped him, either.

I ducked into a little sitting room, where Galina’s maid sat mending clothes. Surveying myself in the etched mirror, I pushed back my untidy hair, wished I had some lipstick. Compared to Mina, I looked like a washerwoman.

“Nothing to steal, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the maid said.

“I’m hiding from someone,” I said.

She assessed me like a woman appraising a sack of frozen potatoes that would cost a week’s wages, wondering how many were rotten. But finally she returned to her sewing.

We were in a pretty room—like the rest of the apartment, flavored with a folktale motif à la Nikolai Roerich. On the bookshelf stood photographs of Galina in various roles: a peasant girl in braids to her knees and an arched kokoshnik; a gypsy with golden curls; a moody portrait, her black velvet tam barely discernible from the dark background, the light questioning her heart-shaped face. Not as theatrical as the other photographs, showing her as lovely but allowing the flaws to remain, it had to be the work of Solomon Katzev.

What was Mina doing out there? Talking to Genya, stirring things up again? I paced back and forth, hoping she would leave, or—a soft knock on the door. The maid looked up, cursed under her breath. It opened slowly, and my old friend stood in the doorway. Like a hound, she’d chased me to ground. Would she tear me to pieces, or would I be able to get away?

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

“Isn’t it evident? I don’t want to talk to you.” I’d backed myself into a corner.

The maid smirked over her mending.

“Do you mind giving us a moment?” my friend, my enemy, asked her.

“The street’s right there,” said the maid, stubborn as a rock. I wondered if I’d found Anton a wife.

I tried to push past Mina, make a break for the hall, but she grabbed my arm, her gaze a purpled gray like a river in storm. “Marina—listen to me.”

I wrenched myself away. Out the window, wind swept the snow up into the blackness, where it peppered the glass like insects on a summer night. A whoop of laughter rang out from the party. Someone had started up the gramophone. A little bell rang. Sighing heavily, the maid folded her mending into the sewing basket and, with a stern cast of eye, left us.

Mina stood with her back against the door. I didn’t recognize her, only those small hands, the little ring on her pinkie that her father had given her on her thirteenth birthday. “Are you going to avoid me for the rest of your life?”

I didn’t want to talk about this, but she was giving me no choice. “You didn’t have to tell him. Did you enjoy that?”

“What was I supposed to do? He came over looking for you. You didn’t tell me what you wanted me to say.” Her lips trembling, she started to cry. As her nose reddened, she started looking like her old self. “I said you were beside yourself with Seryozha’s death, that you’d be back, to just be patient…”

She’d been sure I’d be back. Funny. She hadn’t dreamed that I’d been ready to follow Kolya to the ends of the earth, that I’d already imagined myself traveling with him to the south, living among bandits behind the Denikin lines.

“Was that all you said?”

Her cheeks flamed in her white skin—that beautiful skin—her eyes looked bruised. “I didn’t mean to tell him. I swear. He was just so torn up, and it was a terrible thing to do—you could have at least done your own lying.”

“So you told him about Kolya. You thought that would make him feel better?”

“I was angry. You just do whatever you want and get away with it. It’s always been that way.” She was shouting now. “Take what you want, leave everything else a smoking wreck. Why should I lie for you? Don’t do things you’re ashamed of doing if you don’t want to be found out.”

I drifted over to the tiled stove, smoothed the warm tiles under my fingers as if I were smoothing out a sheet. How clean it was here, the neat household of Galina and Krestovsky. How messy I was by comparison, how incapable of conducting my life. “Is that what you came to tell me? Or to find out what happened with Kolya? How it all turned out?”

She flushed crimson again, suddenly very interested in the state of her shoes.

“He’s gone back south, if you must know.” I could feel my own tears starting, welling up from where they’d been hidden since that day on the English Embankment. “Told me to go back to my poet.”