Anton sat up on his bed, put his feet on the floor. “Listen, do you know anything about Apollinaire?”

“A follower of Mallarmé, I believe.”

“Not a follower. A colleague,” Anton corrected her.

Mallarmé was Mother’s sort of poet, very World of Art, decadent, symbolist. All those fauns and night-blooming flowers, absinthe. I cringed to hear her speak of him with Anton. However, the miracle was that they were speaking at all. Anton could just as well have taken that revolver and shot her in the forehead.

“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance,” she recited. At least Mallarmé was a modernist.

Anton nodded excitedly. “Have you read Apollinaire?”

“Not that I know of,” she said, brushing the knee of her coat.

Anton got up and went back to the table and began to read: “A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien / Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin…” His accent was atrocious. While Mother was a graduate of the Catherine Institute—and knew Balmont and Gippius and Pierre Louÿs personally—Anton was a poor teacher’s son from Orel. He was doing the best he could with a tattered copy of Larousse. I watched her anxiously for sneers, but aside from the slightest reshaping of the lips from time to time, she betrayed nothing. All those years of dinners and teas and dances and receptions, generations of good form, kept her from sabotaging herself on Grivtsova Alley. Her cool and interested demeanor during the recital of these cubistic poems with which Anton had been torturing us for months was a monument to her upbringing. She sat with closed eyes and listened, carefully, as if it were a séance and she was trying to elicit words from the Beyond. Could she actually understand the disjunctive, futuristic spirit of Apollinaire?

“I’d like to see your translation,” said Vera Borisovna after he finished. Then she gave him the slight smile she was famous for. “That is, if you care to show it to me.”

41 The Defense of Petrograd

OUTSIDE THE DISTRICT SOVIET, a crowd of grim citizens gathered in the icy Petrograd morning. This was it. The head of the domkom of our building, a hound-faced old man named Popov, had come around with the notifications: Mandatory fortification work for all noncombatants. I’d quickly introduced my mother and Avdokia, “evacuated from Pskov.” He shrugged, not caring where they were from or what they were doing there, and he left without encountering Anton, who lay hiding under his cot. Now I stood in the street before the familiar worn yellow facade as lean, stubble-faced Red Guards distributed shovels, picks, sledgehammers, and axes.

A registrar signed my labor book, and I took my shovel. “Go down to the Narva Gate,” the guard said. “They’ll show you where to set up shop.”

Shouldering my spade like a rifle, I joined a brigade of other charcoal-eyed citizens—clerks, students, ordinary workers from the artels and small factories of the Kazansky district—heading southwest through the frigid morning fog. Others fell into step with us and exchanged rumors, scraps of news. “It’s all about the railways now,” a small, craggy worker said. “My brother-in-law said it’s getting hot down around Rostov.” Rostov-on-the-Don, in the Cossack-dominated southwest of the country, where Volodya and the Volunteers were fighting.

“Think the Germans’ll use gas?” said a woman with deep lines under her eyes that ran diagonally across her cheeks like scars.

Everyone had the same fear of the terrible gas the kaiser’s troops had been using on the battlefield. I well remembered the ruined men in the airless wards of the military hospital, their burned eyes, their burned lungs. A thin-faced man, a first-aid worker with his Red Cross armband, walked alongside our crew carrying a bucket full of rags in case of a gas attack. We would soak the rags in baking soda and water and breathe through them. We’d been told it was as good as a gas mask, but I sincerely doubted it. I just hoped it would be some protection, better than nothing.

“Just remember, they’re hungrier than we are,” said a woman with a falsely cheerful air, as if she were persuading herself. “They’re all workers. They could come over to our side in a heartbeat.”

We marched along the Obvodny Canal, the outer ring of the city, as packs of workers streamed out from the electrical station, the Triangle Works, and the midsize shops—tanneries, textile and shoe factories, laundries. Some clapped us on the back encouragingly, lightening our mood, but dread returned, heavier than the shovels we carried—the old world was returning to claim its own, coming to crush our new lives under its murderous heel. There was no need to draft these girls, these hard, sober men. No need to bribe them or threaten them. We intended to defend our new nation. We had won it by revolution. It would be up to us to keep it.

It felt good to be one with the revolution again. Despite the cold and the prospect of hard labor and the oncoming Germans, it was a relief to leave Mother and the whole mess of my sticky life behind. I thought about Genya as I marched along. We had a chance for a new, clean kind of life now. How loathsome all that drama had been, all that unnecessary pain. Kolya now seemed so murky and musky, foul as an unventilated room. I felt the press of the pin under my dress. I should just throw it into the road and be done with it. Yet I wasn’t that girl anymore, the little barynya of gestures and pronouncements. I would sell it and buy Genya a sheepskin. Then we could walk together and look clearly in the same direction. No more secrets, no more holding back. Genya was right. This was where my attention should have been all along—the bigger battle, the grander fight. Marching west along the canal in the gray mist with these workers felt almost holy. This must be what Varvara felt every time she said the word Revolution.

Strangely, it reminded me of the day I had my hair bobbed on Vasilievsky Island. How light my head had felt as my pounds of dark red locks fell to the tiled floor. And what emerged in the mirror was myself, but clean, modern, shorn of foolishness. I felt like that again, a new woman emerging from a chrysalis of tresses and tangles, no longer the dreamy girl of former life, the one full of secrets and divisions, but rather someone I had not yet met.

“Think they’ll get this far?” asked a girl in a rough wool scarf the color of sawdust, wiping her nose on the back of her mitten.

“Either they will or they won’t,” I said, pleased at how brave I sounded. “Think what happened to Napoleon.”

The girl’s mouth fell open. “You think we’re going to burn the city?”

It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might be a possibility—that we ourselves and not the Germans might leave the city in flames. Where would we go in deep winter? “No, but that’s why we have to stop them. We’ve got to.”

The city blocks grew spare, the houses poor and poorer, served by roads barely worth the name—unpaved, just tracks in the snow. Smoke showed from one house in ten. To think I’d been born in Petersburg, but had never been this far into the industrial outskirts of the city. Now we passed rickety houses with wooden fences all falling down, lonely and sad in the white mist, their snow-filled dooryard gardens within smokestack range of the giant factories. Red tips of willow bushes poked out from the drifts like the fingers of buried corpses. The city soviet was trying to get the workers to resettle in the big flats in the center of town, to literally bring them into the center, but the proletariat had been reluctant to move. Now I understood. If I was a worker, would I want to live in a big flat with ten strange families, miles and miles from work, just for the pleasure of the parquet and the tony address? That, too, was bourgeois thinking. It seemed the Bolsheviks weren’t as proletarian as they professed to be.

The road underfoot turned perilously icy. A stooped woman in a rusty brown shawl slipped and fell, and a girl in a quilted coat with the stuffing coming out at the seams stopped to pick her up. “You okay, Granny?”

“I’ll ‘Granny’ you,” said the woman, settling back on her feet, collecting her shovel, and rearranging her scarf. “Tell you one thing, I’ll be happy when spring comes.”

Hollow-eyed women with ragged children watched us march past. A few waved, but most just stared, mute as cattle. The branches of the willows trembled above the snow. A tall woman with steel-gray hair cut in a fringe across her face was complaining about the Bolsheviks. “They say vote for them, so you vote for ’em and what the hell do they do? Give themselves the cushy spots, best rations, all their damn committees, yak yak yak. Lording it over everyone like the new aristos. Then the first sign of trouble, they’re packing up and leaving us to go to the devil.”

“They’re not,” said the girl in the quilted coat, her breath a white cloud.

“The hell they’re not,” said a woman who looked too old to be carrying that pick she nevertheless carried with the ease of familiarity, shifting the tool to her other shoulder. “Takin’ the food with ’em, too.”

“We shoulda all gone SR,” said the woman with the bangs. “They wouldn’t pull this kinda stuff. Spiridonova for me. Those old SRs, they knew who to shoot, right, girls?”

I wondered if Varvara knew what the workers were saying about the Bolsheviks. Did they know that the bourgeoisie wasn’t their only problem? It scared me. If the workers weren’t behind the Bolsheviks, then what?

“They’re out, though,” said a girl from the Netrobsky shoe factory whose broken boots had been repaired with rags. “The SRs are done for.”