“Who?” asked the ferret-faced woman.

“The tsaritsa.”

I wondered how crazy my mother had really gone. I would have stayed to glean a little more information, but I didn’t want to attract further attention to my visit, especially as I planned to get Mother out of here without raising any suspicions that she was leaving.

“Make yourself at home,” the blonde said sarcastically as I walked past her. “Just walk on through.”

“I’d have rung the doorbell but the butler’s on vacation,” I said. “Anyway, you got the front door all boarded up.”

“Anybody coulda come in through there,” said the big blonde. “Robbers.” She poked at the boiling mass in her pot. “Ready for dinner?” She lifted a diaper on her wooden spoon.

“I don’t think it’s done enough,” I said over my shoulder, and moved out into the service corridor.

All the doors were closed on this side of the flat—where Vaula and Basya had lived as well as Father’s driver Ivo before the war; where we stored junk, unneeded furniture and prams, sleds and skis and old clothes. I wondered if people were living in those rooms now. Each was barely big enough for a bed and a nightstand, true, but that made them much easier to heat. I’d begun to see housing differently since living in the Poverty Artel. For a second I imagined inhabiting one of those tiny rooms myself. It wouldn’t be so bad.

I passed through the cloakroom into the main hall, catching a peek through the pocket doors into our salon. An old man wearing felt slippers and a heavy coat, scarf, and cap sat smoking, studying a chess board. I slipped along the passage to Mother’s room. The odds and ends of discarded things—sacks and tins, trash—lay along the walls. I could already hear the nursery piano—no more the big round notes of the Bösendorfer. I stared at her door with its lock crudely bolted into the splintered wood. The last thing I wanted to do was knock, after she’d been so emphatic that she never wanted to see me again. But it didn’t matter what she wanted. She didn’t understand the fate that was awaiting her. I knocked. The piano stopped, but I heard no footsteps. I knocked again, our personal knock, Fais dodo. She knew exactly who it was, but the piano began again. “Come on, open up, will ya?” Rudely, in case anyone was listening.

And sure enough, across the hall, the door of my old room opened a crack. An eye, watching. A single eye.

Finally the door opened. She was alone, and I saw how bad off she was. She no longer looked like an otherworldly creature, merely a terrified, starving, exhausted woman of forty-three. She let me in and locked the door behind me, shoving a chair up against it for good measure. I took down my scarf, fluffed my hair, my ears still ringing from cold. I longed for the days of my big white fur hat, though I would have been robbed of it within an hour. You could not keep a hat like that without fighting for it.

“You didn’t see Avdokia, did you?” Mother asked. “She was supposed to be home by now.” She sat down at the parquet table, very still, staring at her hands. Her stillness was mesmerizing. “I wish you hadn’t come,” she said finally.

“I wouldn’t have,” I said, perching on the edge of one of the many hoarded tables. “But I need you to pack up and come with me. Right now.”

“Why? Has there been another revolution?”

“You’re not safe here anymore.”

She laughed. It was half a sob. “You’re just figuring that out?”

“There’s going to be a sweep. I don’t want you to be here when they come.”

She gazed at her hands, so thin and blue, like X-rays of themselves, the backs dry and papery. Her wedding ring with its platinum filigree was so loose that it looked like it belonged to someone else. From the courtyard, the jingle of a sleigh’s harness reached the windows. Somewhere back in the apartment, we could hear men in rough conversation, shouting, then laughing.

“They’re talking about internment. Hostages.” She would not look up. I wasn’t sure she understood me. “Because of Father. Look, I want you to come stay with me—just a few nights, until we see what happens with the Germans. There are old labor camps in the north. Rumor has it they’re going to send the bourgeoisie there.”

She examined her hands as if they were a world, as if those knotted veins could lead her out of this trap. “You’re bourgeois, too, as I recall,” she said at last.

“Yes, but I’m not married to Dmitry Makarov.”

Outside the window, the bare branches of the courtyard trees stood starkly black and white. She gazed out at them, her hands folded before her. The light flooded her weary face, her transparent blue eyes. “So I’m supposed to leave my home, just like that. Flee for my life. Que viene el Coco.” Here comes the bogeyman. “How do you like your Bolsheviks now? It was that horrible girl, I suppose. I knew she was trouble that first day. I should never have let you become friends.”

“She was the one who told me to get you out of here,” I said.

We could hear a woman at the front of the flat scolding someone, perhaps in my father’s office, maybe the Red Guard’s wife, so-called. Mother’s blue eyes filled. “I think I’ve given up enough, don’t you?” That brittle tone dissolved. “This room is all I have left. I have no one anymore, not Mitya, not Seryozha… Volodya… you. My parents gave us this flat as a wedding present.”

“It’s just for a couple of days,” I said. “You can come back when it’s blown over. You don’t want to be a Cheka hostage.” I heard my father’s reasonable tones in my own voice as I spoke.

“If I leave, some illiterate coachman and his five children will move in and chop up the piano for firewood.” She stood and stroked the keys of the banged-up nursery piano with her fingertips, the chipped yellowed ivory. She loved three things—spirituality, culture, and beauty. But her value now was as a hostage against my father’s counterrevolutionary escapades. There was no time to waste.

“You won’t lose your flat. We won’t let them know you’re going. You’ll leave just like you were going out for the day—”

“Sneak out like a criminal,” she said flatly. “I know what you’re saying. I’m a criminal now. In my own country. In my own home.”

I stood and came to her, took her hands, so cold and bony that they were hardly made of flesh. How was she going to get through the rest of this winter? “We need to go now.”

She pulled away from me. “To stay with you and your hooligan?” She found a handkerchief in her sleeve and wiped her nose.

“His name is Genya.” I didn’t know if it would help or not, but I added, “My husband.”

“You married him?” Her expression went from peevish to horrified, as if she’d learned that I ate worms for tea. “Your husband?” And then she started to laugh, even as tears streamed. She stopped long enough to wipe them, then the laughter started again.

“He won’t be there. He’s gone to the front. He’s volunteered for the defense of Petrograd.”

She would not stop laughing.

“Think of the cesspits,” I said. “You liked that? A labor camp would be ten times worse. And a Cheka prison? I don’t even want to imagine it.”

Her desperate hilarity died away. The eyes opened slowly, still wild but more focused. She was facing it.

“We’ll leave separately. It’ll attract less attention. I’ll meet you down the block in fifteen minutes.”

“But what should I bring?” She backed away from me, clutching her skirt. “What about Avdokia?”

Yes, what about Avdokia? I wondered briefly if it would be safer for her to stay here and keep the room, but I knew I would not be able to handle my mother on my own. “I’ll go get her. Don’t bring anything. Nobody can guess you’re leaving. Just wear what you need. The warmer the better.”

Her glance fluttered helplessly about the cluttered room. “I’m not a sheep! I need things…”

“A small bag if you have to. As though you’re going on an errand. You’re just going out for an hour. Visiting a friend.” I went to the armoire, pulled out her sable hat and warmest coat, mink-lined. I sighed, stroking the fur. They were too beautiful. They would arouse attention on Grivtsova Alley. A black sealskin coat was better, though not so warm, and a hat of karakul lamb.

I stuffed a few things in a small carpetbag—underwear, a towel, her brush… just as though she were going out to sell some of her dish towels. “Do you know where Avdokia’s gone?”

My mother shook her head. “She just goes.”

My mother did not know where her bread came from. Even now. I scanned the map of the neighborhood in my mind, trying to imagine where an illegal market would be in this, the most bourgeois area in the city. There had to be one somewhere, because the Former People who couldn’t get work couldn’t get ration cards. They all depended on the black market. I guessed that the “market” was in Preobrazhenskaya Square. Large enough, not on the water, with several side streets down which people could scramble in case of trouble. “Look, put on a few pairs of underwear under your skirt. Put these dresses on.” I tossed her two, both wool, the heaviest ones. “Take a few things in your pockets and the rest in the carpetbag. I’ll wait for you at the Church of the Transfiguration. Fifteen minutes. I mean it.”

“I hate this life,” she said. “Why can’t they just kill us and get it over with?”


I headed over to Preobrazhenskaya Square. Yes, I was right. The starving figures of our neighbors stood like shadows against the walls holding out wrapped bundles of their prized possessions while buyers, mostly peasants, bartered with frozen potatoes and other questionable foodstuffs—eggs, most likely rotten, bottles of oil that could be anything. And there was Avdokia, right under the great chains of the church enclosure, in heated negotiation with another peasant woman close to her own size and vintage. They made the deal, then Avdokia deposited a wrapped item the size of a plate into the other woman’s arms, hefted a bag of potatoes off a sledge.