She sank onto one of the upholstered benches, let her coiffed head fall against the painted wall, closed her eyes, and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t tell him where you were, did I?” She put her hand on my sleeve. “We’re not who we used to be, fine, but can’t we be friends anyway?”

Outside, a bout of gunfire. What could be happening—a confrontation between robbers and Chekists? Life was so precarious now. Mina had betrayed me twice, withholding the news of Seryozha’s death and of my lover’s arrival.

Her gray eyes pleaded. “I didn’t go out of my way to hurt you, Marina. Or maybe I did, I don’t know…”

Yet who did I have who knew me as Mina did? Genya and I were still together, despite my betrayal. Should I hold my friend to a higher standard than I had been held to? In any case, I needed a friend now, clay feet or not. As Genya said in his poem, nobody lived in the air.


Anton spotted us as we came back out to the party together and sauntered up, trickling smoke from his long nose. “Gotten your stories straight?”

“You’re the poets,” Mina said. “I’m only a humble scientist. It’s not my job to make things up.” She took my arm and led me past him. It made me laugh. She really was growing up. But then I saw that she was leading me straight over to the group around Genya. God, did we have to do this, too? They kissed cheeks in greeting and he reached out for my hand.

More gunfire. “What the hell is going on out there?” I asked. “Another revolution?”

Petya, his pilled sweater covered in pastry crumbs, ignored the blasts. They were obviously talking about the war negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, already a month old. “Lenin’s right. We’re going to have to give in sooner or later. Your man Trotsky can’t stall forever.”

“Oh, this again,” Mina said.

The negotiations had bogged down into a stalemate. Trotsky, as commissar for foreign affairs, refused to agree to the German conditions. He insisted that Germany must not be allowed to annex Poland or Lithuania and that Russia would not pay it any reparations. Lenin wanted to accept German terms and get it over with.

“Lenin’s a defeatist,” Genya said in his big bass voice. “Trotsky’s playing them like a fisherman. Wearing them out.” He kissed me on the top of my head, wrapped his arm around me.

Mina sought my eyes. See? You have Genya.

“You watch, a few more weeks, the kaiser’s going the same way as Nicky—right to the autocrats’ zoo. We’ll go visit and feed them peanuts through the bars.”

It was what everyone was hoping for—a revolution in Germany. They were so close. Five hundred thousand metalworkers went on strike in Berlin at the end of January. A million German workers were demanding peace without annexations abroad and democracy at home. Surely it was only a matter of time before the kaiser toppled.

“We’ve shown the world just what this war is about,” Zina said. “Reparations and annexations, for the Triple Entente as much as the Central Powers.” Upon the ascension of the Bolsheviks, Trotsky had outraged our allies by publishing the tsar’s secret treaties with France and England, revealing their plans to divide up the spoils of Europe when we won the war. “The German workers won’t take much more of it. They’re the ones paying with their blood and their labor.”

Petya took Lenin’s view. “You can’t underestimate the Germans. They’re not going to give in, workers or not. We’re a wreck and everybody knows it. They can roll right in anytime they want to.”

I noticed Dunya with Sasha over on the far side of the room, holding hands, laughing. She was wearing that soft, rust-colored woolen dress decorated with Seryozha’s sunflowers. She saw me watching her, and her smile saddened. She touched the patch. I wondered if her parents knew she was here.

“You’d better pray we don’t give in,” Krestovsky called out from his leather chair, his fringed lamp. “If you thought the tsar was bad, just try the kaiser. Trotsky should never have published those treaties. We might have gotten the English back as allies, finished the war, come out ahead. Now look what a mess we’re in.”

“Those treaties proved that both sides are the same,” Genya shouted over the heads of the others.

Across the drawing room, very straight and tall, wearing a black leather jacket with snow still clinging to her shoulders, stood a familiar form looking about—Varvara. After the way she had dismissed me that day on Vasilievsky Island, I had assumed I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I couldn’t imagine what Varvara would want, that she would willingly enter such a lavish establishment as the Krestovskys’. And where did she get that jacket? She looked just like a Cheka officer.

She saw me with Genya and Mina, grinned and hurried over to us, then took my hands in her cold, bony ones and kissed my cheeks. She glowed at Genya, grabbing him by the upper arms. Beamed at Mina. “You’re all here. My God, I’ve been looking for you all over town.” Her hair was wet. She was breathing hard. “I had to tell you. At four o’clock… there was a call to Smolny. From Brest.” The poets drew closer—Krestovskaya, Anton, Sasha, and his friends. “The war is officially over!” She embraced me vigorously and kissed me three times.

“They accepted Trotsky’s terms?” Oksana asked.

Krestovsky rose, threw his book onto his chair. “You’re sure?”

“I was out at Smolny. We got the news this afternoon. By tomorrow it’ll be in the papers. But I just had to let you know first.” She took my hands again. “You’ve given up everything for this. I wanted you to know.”

“Peace,” said Galina Krestovskaya. “I can’t even remember it.”

Mir. Even the word sounded strange to my ears. Four long years of war. I thought of those hospitals, the soldiers’ fetid dressings, the windows that wouldn’t open, the wounds that wouldn’t close. They would all go home and take up their plows. We might even have decent bread again. And Kolya would come home.

I shoved that thought away.

“What were the terms?” Krestovsky asked.

Varvara looked into the faces of the crowd that had assembled around her. Her voice changed when she spoke again. “Comrade Trotsky’s decided that nothing would put an end to the German demands. Who did they think they were negotiating with, another imperialist state? ‘No annexations,’ he said. ‘No indemnifications.’ The German people want to end it, too. It’s just the German General Staff—they can’t accept that their world is finished. So Comrade Trotsky ended it. This afternoon, he walked out of the negotiations. No war, no peace.”

“What the devil does that mean?” Anton said.

“It means we’re out of the war, but we agree to nothing,” she said. “If the Germans dare to attack us, a peaceful Soviet Russia, their workers will rise up and they’ll lose from the rear. They can’t risk it—don’t you see? Either way, they lose.”

“Genius,” Zina pronounced.

Krestovsky mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. “The Germans will never let it go at that.”

“You can stop worrying about the Germans,” Varvara said. I could smell her leather jacket as the room warmed it. “Nicky started it, but Leon Trotsky just put it to bed.”

Genya moved to the center of the room. I could feel his excitement. “Here’s to Comrade Trotsky! Urah!” This is how I liked to see him, that huge energy, freed of wounds, my sins forgotten. Perhaps more had ended than just the stalemate at Brest—perhaps ours had as well.

Gunfire splattered the night. So that’s what we were hearing—celebration! The war had ended! We began to sing “La Marseillaise”—not the worker’s version but the original. In a minute, Galina bustled in with her maid, the actress holding up two bottles of champagne, the maid bearing a tray with wine glasses. “After four long years, let’s have a proper toast.” She gave a bottle to her husband to open. He at first returned her enthusiasm with an expression of dismay when he saw the label, then resigned himself to her gesture of largesse. Opening the foil, becoming caught up in the fun as he popped the cork and filled the glasses. She began passing them around. “Does everyone have a glass?”

We all did.

Genya raised his. “To Comrade Trotsky. And the end of the war.”

“Your lips to God’s ear,” Krestovsky added under his breath.

We drained our cups—heads back, necks bared. Genya snatched me up, hoisting me to his shoulder and marching me around as he led us in singing “The Internationale.” I ducked the chandelier as we sang. Even Krestovsky sang: So comrades come rally / And the last fight let us face: / The Internationale unites the human race.

The festive mood strengthened with the second bottle of champagne. Krestovsky put a record on the gramophone and began a wobbly-kneed sailor’s dance to “The Boundless Expanse of the Sea.” Not bad considering his age and level of fitness. Genya and Sasha and Arseny joined him, arms linked across each other’s shoulders, their vigorous steps endangering the fine furniture. Varvara put her arm around my waist and hugged me again. “I just had to come tell you. I read about Seryozha…”

Oh, please, God, let her not say anything more.

“I know you’re still mad at me… please don’t hate me anymore. I can’t bear it. I’m sorry about that night, your papers. I was being a shit.”

“I got them anyway. Bourgeois.”

She brushed a lock of my hair back that had come forward during my triumphal march on Genya’s shoulder. “Let’s start over. Can’t we? No war, no peace?”

Could we ever start over? Did I want to? The sailor’s dance ended and Petya took to the piano, launching into an American ragtime piece I didn’t recognize. Genya was enthusiastic but not much of a foxtrotter, stepping on my toes. After a while Gigo cut in, and he was a beautiful dancer, a surprise. Anton and Varvara sat out the dancing, exchanging cynical quips no doubt, but Dunya and Sasha, Galina and Arseny took the floor. Oksana danced with Nikita Nikulin, a poet.