Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“Not since Furshtatskaya Street.”

We entered the broad stairway and joined the steady movement of people rising and descending like some biblical curse, in our case heading hellward. As we went down, I asked the question I’d come here to resolve. “What do you hear about the internment of the bourgeoisie?” The farther down the tight spiral of stairway we moved, the more I smelled food. I could tell her silence was intentional as her black head bobbed in front of me. “Are they going to do it?”

She pulled me toward the wall. “If the bourgeoisie would stop trying to undermine the Soviet, readying bouquets for the arrival of the Germans, they wouldn’t have to worry so much. But with people like your papa stepping up operations…” She glanced at the people passing us to make sure nobody was listening. “Your old man’s been quite the busy boy.”

Well, he wasn’t preparing any bouquets. I could bet on that.

Others pressed into us to let yet another filing cabinet pass by. Varvara waited until they moved on before continuing. “Yes, he’s been collecting funds for the Volunteer Army. Working against us any way he can. Still in the pocket of the English. If they start rounding up hostages, you can bet Vera Borisovna will be first on the list.”

Hostages? “Would they really do that?”

“Of course.” She nodded at some men coming up out of the basement. “We think he’s still using your apartment, though it’s been searched again and again.”

How did she know so much about my parents? “Who? The Petrograd Committee?”

She shrugged in a way that didn’t deny my worst suspicions. “For now.”

Why would they care? But it wasn’t the time to worry about what Varvara was doing. I had to concentrate. “Help me get her out of Petrograd.”

She glared at me. People were shoving us, trying to get by. She pulled me into a corner at the next landing. “Listen,” she hissed. “One: like I told those buggers upstairs, I’m not a magician. And two: she’s our tie to your old man. No way we’re going to send her out of town.”

Then I knew. We. “You’re not with the committee at all. You’re working for the Cheka.”

She gave me a black-eyed under-the-brow gaze that told me I was the biggest fool who ever put on a coat. Searches in the middle of the night. Blood in the snow. Was this where her faith in the revolution had led her? But I had my mother to worry about.

“Don’t let them arrest her, Varvara.”

She began to descend again. More workers carrying boxes rose from the basement and everyone had to press themselves to the walls. Suddenly, a picture resolved in the developing tank. I’d been so intent on Mother’s circumstances that I hadn’t been paying attention. All this furniture, these files… the rumors were true: the Soviet was abandoning us. All their reassurances at the Alexandrinsky Theater had been a fraud. “You’re leaving, aren’t you? All those promises, they were just lies. Oh my God, it’s all lies! You’re moving to Moscow!”

Varvara shoved me into the wall, staring holes into me. “Don’t make a scene or it’ll be the worse for you,” she said under her breath. If she hadn’t been holding on to me so tightly, I might have fallen. The government was saving itself, leaving the rest of us alone and exposed to the German army. “All those speeches,” I whispered. “You accused the Provisional Government of exactly this and now you’re doing it—”

Varvara jerked me again. “Stop it. Do you think this is some kind of game? The game of Revolution?” Her fingers dug into my arm as she pressed her bony face right up to mine. “If the Germans take Petrograd—well, too bad for us. It’s a disaster for you and me and the rest. But if the Soviet is taken, we lose the revolution. This isn’t about Petrograd. We’re preparing for the years to come. In the end, what happens to you and me doesn’t matter one tiny bit. If they have to move to Moscow or Omsk or Novosibirsk to keep the revolution safe, then so be it. The important thing is that the Soviet survives.” Her eyes glittered, inhuman. “Don’t cry. Don’t even breathe.”

My lungs hurt. I clung to my flowers drizzling petals onto my boots. Listening to Varvara was like going up in a rocket ship. I felt dizzy, sick. It didn’t matter to her what happened to us—to me or Genya or Vera Borisovna, any of us. From space, even Russia would look small. You couldn’t distinguish one human from another from that height, hear their cries.

Finally, when she saw I wasn’t going to scream, she let me go, then took me by the nape of the neck and shook me, but more gently, tenderly this time. “The Petrograd Committee isn’t evacuating. Look, I’m sorry. But I can’t have you falling apart in front of…” She nodded toward the busy comrades, rising and descending. “What do you say? Let’s eat.” As if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t understood something fundamental about our new rulers—that lying would become a way of life now. I thought of Genya’s poem about the feet of clay. Don’t be such a child, I could imagine him saying. We all have to grow up now.

In the basement, we entered an enormous, windowless dining hall, steaming, smoke-filled, lined with long tables and benches, vibrating with talk that was subdued but keyed up, underscored with anxiety. “Any party member can come and eat at any time,” Varvara told me proudly. “Smolny works around the clock.” A red-faced woman dripping sweat ladled me some fish soup. From a giant tureen, a young girl poured us tea into which Varvara dropped tiny saccharine tablets. Then she led us to the corner of a long table full of intense young people poring over some posters.

Once we were seated, Varvara at the end, she bowed her head toward me, speaking low. “You have to stop thinking in individualistic terms. No one matters now, except what we’re doing for the revolution. It’s not me, it’s my ability to make decisions. It’s not Genya, it’s that he’s fighting the Germans, that he writes with a revolutionary consciousness. The question is, what are you doing? You’re an educated girl. You can write. You can speak to a crowd. What are you doing knitting socks? Join the party. You can’t straddle the fence forever,” she said. “You might even be of some help to your worthless mother.”

The party, the party. She sounded like Zina, with that same zeal. The poets were on their way to defend a government that was fleeing for its life on a carpet of lies. But I could also see it through Varvara’s eyes—they were saving the revolution. Oh, it was all so confusing. I couldn’t sort out the politics. All I knew was that my mother couldn’t be a hostage, couldn’t be caught in the cogs as history played itself out.

“What’s that going to do for my mother? I won’t throw her to the dogs.”

“You’ve been doing a pretty good job of it so far,” she said, sopping a piece of claylike bread in the soup.

I leaned over my bowl, very close. “You owe me, Varvara.” Yes, I still held it against her. I was no more over it than Genya was over what I’d done to him.

“I owe you nothing,” Varvara said.

“I see.” Fighting tears, I drank down the rest of my soup and stood, buttoning my coat, stuffing the bread into my pocket, picking up my threadbare flowers.

She grabbed my arm, pulled me back down to the bench. “Shut up and let me think.” The two long wrinkles between her dark brows deepened. It was what she was best at. Tactics, strategy. “You’re only looking at the next few days. Either the Germans arrive and she’ll have it made, or they’ll be turned back and we’ll move on to other problems. But she really needs to get off her ass. Nonworking bourgeois are going the way of the dinosaurs. Give her your sock-knitting job when you join the party.”

“You’ll never give up, will you?”

She grinned her crooked grin. “Surely there’s something she can do besides talk to spirits.”

“She sings. Plays the piano.”

“Maybe she could help organize a workers’ chorus.”

An idea about as likely as warm snow.

She snorted at her own optimism. “Well, for now just get her out of there. As long as she’s gone when the domkom comes calling, you’ll be all right.”

“It’s Basya. The domkom. Remember her?” I said.

“Sure. I told you, you needed to watch her, didn’t I?” Varvara stretched her long, lanky form. “Anyway, either this’ll all blow over in a week, or else we’ll be speaking German by Friday.”

How could she be so calm when the Bolsheviks would take the bulk of the retribution—Varvara and her comrades, all these people around us? I drank the too-sweet tea, wrapping my hands around the warm tin cup. “You’re not worried?”

“We’ll go underground, like before,” she said. “Lenin spent years underground. Nothing’s going to stop us, Marina. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” She shook me by the shoulder, affectionately. “Cheer up. Think of it this way—Avdokia can do your queuing, cook, run your bath. You’ll be a regular little missy again.” She spotted a thin man in a black leather coat. “Excuse me. I have to talk to someone.” We picked up our dishes and took them to the service station on the far wall. “See you soon, Marina.” She went to join the thin man, leaving me to my own chaotic thoughts. Vera Borisovna at the Poverty Artel? Thank God Genya wouldn’t be home to see this.

IN THE KITCHEN OF the flat on Furshtatskaya, two women boiled laundry on the stove. They stared at me suspiciously as a third admitted me through the back entrance, glanced at the tattered geraniums I still carried. I couldn’t get used to seeing strangers in our flat. Their flat. The hard-faced blonde in her forties, all lower face and flat eyes, recognized me, but her expression didn’t soften at all. “Looking for the nuthouse again?”