The poets on the bed and around the low-ceilinged room exchanged glances like children caught in a prank after the schoolmaster asks the guilty one to come forward.

“I’d rather shoot myself in the head,” Anton said, his elbow on Arseny’s shoulder. “The Bolsheviks couldn’t organize their way out of an intersection. If it gets down to a fight, I’ll take my chances with the anarchists or the SRs.”

Gigo, on the floor, brushed back his shining black hair from his eyes. “Death and I are bound to meet, its dark wing cooling my fevered brow,” he said, quoting his own poetry. “And who will weep for me?” Gigo’s last woman had ditched him for a Red Guard, whose rations were better than a Georgian translator’s. “I’ll go, and you women will curse the day you missed loving me.”

“I’m in,” Sasha said.

This was too awful, the poets and artists of Petrograd ready to trot themselves out into the fields to be killed. “You’re all crazy. We need you here. The district is organizing something,” I said.

“You go to the district,” Zina said. “I’m going to defend the revolution. Count me in, too.”

“Anton’s got a point,” Nikita Nikulin said. “Look how the Bolsheviks have bollixed it up so far. ‘No war, no peace?’ That was a good idea.”

“Well, they got it half right,” Oksana said, low in my ear.

“Listen.” Genya stood and opened his great arms in the small room as if he were spreading revolution single-handedly, as if it were grain he was casting to the whole world.

       When the enemy comes

Will you watch him

      crush the skull of your newborn

      against History’s cold wall?

                     Will you cower beneath blankets with

      your spines unstrung?

                     There’s not time for lint-pickers,

                                boot-lickers, liquor-misters.

                       Let’s go!

                       before History

                                flicks you away like clots of snot.

                       Step out, lace those boots,

                       Pull up your tattered underwear.

                               The train, Red Dawn,

                                      is waiting at the station.

Sasha removed a bottle that looked like some kind of artist’s cleaning fluid from his trunk, mixed it with water from a pan on the stove, and poured the concoction into another jar that he passed around. Each of us proposed our own toast.

“To history,” Gigo offered.

“To a little less history,” Oksana replied.

My brothers and sisters, the Transrationalists—would we ever be together like this again? Everything was ending, just as we came to know it and count on it. The alcohol proved oily and chemical. I could feel it chewing the lining of my stomach. I did my best to match their gaiety, but couldn’t stop thinking that Genya might be dead soon. Gigo, Sasha… I was drinking with ghosts.

“Marina, I thought you were the brave one,” Zina taunted me. “Are you really going to stay behind, like an old housewife?”

“I wouldn’t want to deprive you of your Joan of Arc moment,” I said. I couldn’t very well explain what was really going on—that Genya didn’t want me there to be his comrade, his brother-in-arms. He was desperate for a woman who would wait for him, worry about him, imagine his suffering, as he had waited for me during those nights and days I’d been away with Kolya. He needed his dignity back and this was to be my penance. And I would do it. Damn what Zina thought of me.

On a paint-smeared guitar Sasha often used in his cubistic still lifes, Petya played an old song about a peasant girl longing for her soldier boy. We sang along and we all felt something irreparable taking place, that it might be our last time together before history shook us, took us, killed us, changed us. Now I understood why Genya had wanted to come here after our talk on the bridge—not just to recruit comrades for the fight but to all be together like this, to complete the circle.

Now he whispered in my ear, “Let’s go.”


In the Artel, at last alone, we lit the stove and fed everything flammable we could into its hungry small body so that for once we could remove our clothes, producing our precious bodies—bitten, God knows, but beautiful. His heavy arms and legs, his neck like the branch of an oak, his eyes, wounded, searching, clouded green like swamp water. I could see the hurt child inside, looking out through the man’s eyes—Do you love me? Do you care if I die?

I couldn’t help thinking about the men in the hospital beds, their mangled and mutilated forms under the dirty sheets. If he were wounded, I would care for him. I would spend the rest of my life tending that body, wiping his chest, his legs. I let my fingers follow the lines of his bones, the wide collarbones, the knobby forehead, the strong, crooked nose, the lids of his yearning eyes. Was he thinking of the reality facing him tomorrow? Grenades, German guns, the points of bayonets, the hardness and indifference of war?

“Just don’t die,” I whispered, tracing his lips.

He pressed his own hand over my mouth. I tried the edge of my teeth against the knuckles. He pulled me into him. “I’m not the kind that dies,” he said into my hair. “Bullets can’t penetrate my genius.”

We held each other before the stove, my cheek nested against his chest, his noble, vulnerable heart beating in my ear, the meeting place of will and destiny. We walked together to the divan, where I sat and he pretended to fall on me, then caught himself at the last minute, our old game. That night we made love freely, not silencing ourselves, not sparing each another, groaning, shouting out. He came inside me rather than pulling out. There was no going back for us, for any of us.

Later, we lay resting, sweating, his semen seeping out onto the blanket under me, his hand caressing my neck, which always felt too thin in his hands, like the stem of a flower about to be snapped, worry closing in again. I could see its shadows creeping along his jaw and into his eyes, along his nose, which some boy back in Puchezh had smashed in a fight over a chestnut when he was ten. I felt it rise in myself as well.

“Marry me,” he said.

Had I heard him right? “You’re kidding.” Genya had always loathed that bourgeois institution. He called it as outworn as whalebone.

But I could tell by his expression that mine had been the wrong answer.

“We’re already married, remember? That night on the Petrovskaya Embankment?” I showed him the ring finger on my wedding hand. “You gave me Saturn.”

He pushed his hair from his eyes. “Seriously. Will you?” He wanted something he could hang on to in the snow outside Narva or Glyadino. How could I say no to him now? Was it right? Was it wrong? There was nobody to ask.


In the morning, I packed Genya’s few things—pencils, a notebook, a pair of Anton’s socks. He had blessedly stayed over at Sasha’s. I could always make Anton another pair of socks. I gave him all our food. I cut him a lock of my hair and tied it with thread, put it in the Mayakovsky, A Cloud in Trousers. We sat holding hands on the divan a good long while, breathing together. Our lives would never be the same after this hour. We would leave through that door and everything would change. Even I, a girl of eighteen, looked around that room, memorizing it, knowing I would forever remember it as our youth’s paradise—this spindly table where we wrote our poems, the torn newspapers on the wall, the little sulky stove, this moldy divan where we slept, and how we held each other very tightly to keep from falling out.

As we sat, knee to knee, on quilts smelling of sex, I thought of all the men in history who had gone off to fight for homelands and cities, for fields and villages, and all the women who had seen them off, just like this. I had the strange feeling of not being myself but rather some woman who had existed for centuries and whom it was now my turn to embody. I dared not cry. I dared not say a word that might burden him in any way. I just prayed, sealing my will around his body. Please, Holy Mother, let him return exactly as he leaves.

Time to go. We stumbled down the icy stairs and out across the dark courtyard along a narrow trampled path through great hummocks of uncleared snow, and out toward the district soviet.

This early in the morning, its windows were the only lit ones on the street. Inside, it was already busy, the halls smelling of wet wood, with people lining up, wanting to know where to go, what to do. And here were our friends waiting—pale, bleary, and disheveled from the party the night before, Sasha and Petya and Gigo. Zina with her cigarette dangling like a street tough. Nikita, Oksana—with flowers! Red geraniums. Where in the world had she gotten them?

“Have a nice sleep?” Scowling Anton looked like he’d slept upright. “Glad someone did.”

“We need you all next door at the registry,” Genya said. “We’re getting married.”

Zina dropped her lit cigarette. Anton turned away, bent double in a coughing fit.

Our Red wedding took less than two minutes. It was nothing like the wedding I’d imagined as a girl, in the little wooden church in Novinka, full of fragrant roses. My dress would be old ivory, my kokoshnik a crown of pearls. Bees would buzz around a long table set up for the feast in Maryino’s yard, under the larch tree. A sapphire on my ring. A honeymoon in the South Pacific.