At one point, Petya began “Two Guitars,” and Galina, draping herself with the piano shawl, her blond hair falling loose over her shoulders, began a gypsy dance. Faster, faster she twirled, her little heels stamping, the fringe flying as we clapped for her. “You dance ten times better than that,” Varvara murmured under her breath.

“Hardly,” I said.

We applauded madly when she was done, and she bowed her graceful thanks.

Then Krestovsky, flush with champagne, broke out the vodka, and Petya began “Dark Eyes,” with all the flourishes. The sound of it hit me with nostalgic force.

“Marina, you dance.” Varvara shoved me forward.

“Marina!” my fellow poets chorused encouragingly. “Marina!”

Genya watched me, that dear face finally without the cloud that had darkened it these last days. Oh, but not this song. Ochi chornye / Ochi strastnye… Dark eyes, passionate eyes, / How I love you, how I fear you… / An unlucky hour, the hour I caught sight of you. “Go on,” he urged me.

I moved out onto the floor, leading with my shoulders, gypsy style, and danced it for Genya—our love, our grief, our beauty. Slowly at first, filling it with my passion as you fill a glove with your hand, then faster and faster, while down below in the street, people fired off guns for the wild music alone.

37 Germans

IGNORING VARVARA’S ADVICE TO stick to the banks and the telephone exchange, I landed a job at a small knitting factory a few minutes’ walk from Grivtsova Alley. It paid barely enough to buy a shoelace, but the important thing was to be working now, to have a labor card entitling me to precious ration tickets for bread and soap and even new galoshes when it came around to my turn, if that day ever arrived. He who does not work, does not eat, the tickets said.

The factory was owned by a tubby man named Bobrov, whom the girls called Count Bobo. His wife, Tatiana Rodionovna, made us a hot lunch every day. I liked to think of it as a factory, because factory work carried a proletarian dignity with it, but the place was really just a poorly lit, poorly heated workroom with tables and benches where eleven girls knitted socks on tiny machines. Their leader, fifteen-year-old Olga, showed me how to wind the yarn around metal pins, then trip them one by one. Click, click, click, all day long. After a week, I’d picked up the cough they all had from breathing the woolen threads. At eighteen, I was by far the oldest. It was like having eleven little sisters. They buzzed with stories, mostly about the German advance.

Contrary to Trotsky’s assumption that the Germans would give up on us, not daring to foment revolution at home, they came east at terrifying speed. In the girls’ tales, the Huns hacked off Red soldiers’ limbs and fed them to pigs before the very eyes of the mutilated men, and any workers they caught in the invaded towns were stripped and tied to fences, splashed with water, and left to freeze or gutted and left for the wolves. I didn’t dare ask them to shut up. A protest would just increase their gruesomeness. They loved it when they got to you and would attack like a school of small vicious fish.

Silently I spun the wool, winding it around the pins of the little machine, composing verses against the click and spin as the tube of socks or gloves emerged. Poems kept my mind off the blisters, the ache, and the cold. I thought of Avdokia’s gnarled fingers and for the first time really understood how it was to live off the work of one’s hands. It took hours to straighten my fingers at night. Genya rubbed them, warming them between his own, until the blood came back to them.

These days he and I had the divan to ourselves. Sasha and Gigo had moved into a place of their own, now that Sasha was working at the Zubov Art Institute. And Zina had begun sleeping elsewhere out of sheer disgust at Genya’s taking me back. I slept each night in the crook of Genya’s arm and dreamed of red wool snaking through my hands.

In a second courtyard

A dark workshop

Three sisters cast their shadows

The one who spins, the one who measures,

And—don’t ask.

The one who cuts the bloodred wool.

Our hands are raw

Our backs grow bent

Do we know whose fate we thread?

The pulse of blood runs thick and thin

As the heavy tread advances.

In the bread queue after work, I stood with the others, holding my thirty-day ration card, stamping my feet, and listening to the latest. All the standers agreed that the government had signed the peace too late. Against a broken Russian army, the Germans advanced like the tide. What reason did they have to stop when town after town rolled onto its back? They would teach Red Petrograd a lesson, a parable for their own workers to read.

“The Petrogradsky Echo says the embassies are pulling out,” said a girl wearing a homemade fur hat.

“Which embassies?” I asked her.

“All of them,” said an intelligent-looking woman with a soft, lined face.

The SR paper, Delo Naroda—the People’s Cause—reported that the Bolsheviks were shipping the treasury to Moscow, preparing to abandon the capital. How upset Father had been when Kerensky had suggested it! Now it was Pravda and Izvestia denying the rumors.

No one knew anything for sure, but everyone had a bit of information to share. The woman standing behind me, broad-hipped and gold-toothed, holding a heavily swaddled infant, spat and said, “Ericsson’s being evacuated. They’re sending them out to the Urals.” The giant electronics plant. I well remembered marching with their workers in February. “My old man works there. But they won’t let him bring us. Ain’t that something?” She joggled the baby. Only the slits of its eyes showed. “Safe in the Urals while we’re here in Petrograd about get run over by Willie’s boys. What kind of a government is this, turning women and children into sitting ducks? He says the Ericssons are going to strike.”

“How close you think they’ll come?” asked the girl in the hat. “The Germans?”

“All my neighbors are leaving,” said an old woman with a fierce Turkish nose and a coat patched like a quilt. “And if I had a place to go, you bet I’d be on my way.”

“It’s one way to solve the housing crisis,” said the soft-faced intelligentka.

Everyone was talking about whether they should leave, whom they could stay with in the country, when the revolution in Europe would start, and whether it would be soon enough to save us.

A well-dressed man strode along the street past us—whistling.

“Look at that,” said a woman with an acorn-size mole on her cheek, wearing tattered gloves. “Disgusting.”

We glowered at him. The new cheerfulness of the bourgeoisie was a slap in the face of every working person. Far from fearing the German advance, they whistled in the streets as if it were a holiday, their shoes shined, hair combed, faces newly shaved. They were looking forward to liberation by the enemy and the end of the revolution. The irony: these were the people who had kept us in the war to begin with, and who had called the Bolsheviks traitors for wanting to negotiate peace.

The government had granted greater powers to the Cheka to suppress this new bourgeois threat. The woman with the mole on her cheek said they were going to start rounding up the bourgeoisie soon and sending them to camps in the north. “And good riddance, that’s what I say. They’re ready to stab us all in the back.”


The Germans were on the move. The district soviets held mandatory classes in sanitation and first aid, checking your name against your housing registration and your labor book. You could lose your labor book if you failed to show up. So after a day’s work, we all spent two hours in the evening learning how to staunch an arterial wound, and what to do in case of a gas attack.

Newspaper headlines screamed, THE SOCIALIST FATHERLAND IS IN DANGER! We went to hear the Bolsheviks address the crisis at the Alexandrinsky Theater, worked our way through the crowd pressing in and found a bit of standing room in the aisle under the loge. I climbed onto the base of a pilaster, balancing myself against Genya, so I could see the stage. Behind us, holes remained unpatched on the imperial box where the Romanov eagles had been torn off. In a single year, two governments had been washed away, and now the workers’ state itself was in jeopardy.

Someone from the city soviet, bearded and grim, spoke from the stage lit by cheap smoky oil lamps. You could see his breath in the cold theater despite the density of the crowd. “They’ve taken Dvinsk and Reval.” Reval, the capital of Estonia, a little more than two hundred miles away. “They’re executing everyone with rough hands, a union card,” he continued, his face like a funeral. “If we can’t stop them, they’re going to be at the Narva Gate”—the entrance to Petrograd—“in a week, tops. It’s up to us, Comrades.”

No false cheer. I balanced on my perch against Genya, my arms around his neck, which was swathed in the scarf that I’d knitted for him on the sly at my bench. I felt a sudden love for us all, all of these people wedged in and on the brink together—pale, dirty faces with red, sleepless eyes—the starved, gaunt citizenry of Petrograd. Anton bit his nails. A sailor ground his cigarette out on the floor.

I thought about the revolutionary uprisings we’d studied those last months at school—Spartacus, Pugachev, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune. The sad truth—they’d all failed in one way or another. Would October go down in history as another failed experiment, just before entries about how Russia became part of a glorious German empire? I imagined grim Prussian troops crossing the Russian countryside right this minute, their carts and great gray horses, their cannons. Their presence darkened the snow, turned the sky to lead.