Maybe they would change, when they had the time and security—this woman with the brown scarf, the girl with the stuffing coming out of her coat. Maybe when they could stop worrying about the Germans, when they had eaten their fill and really understood they were their own masters, they would have time for mercy as well as justice.

42 The Lost Eden

I RETURNED TO THE Poverty Artel after dark, to the incongruity of Mother and Anton sitting together at the table, their heads bowed as if over a missal. Mother coolly corrected his French, while Anton clutched his head and cursed. Over the old divan, a light burned in a red glass before the icon of the Virgin of Tikhvin. The place smelled of cabbage—a pot of soup kept warm for me on the little primus stove. I sank onto a chair, too tired even to take off my wet boots. Avdokia knelt to pull them off. A regular little missy again, Varvara had sneered. Yet the familiarity of Avdokia’s care was so comforting… exactly why I shouldn’t allow it. “No, please don’t. I’m eighteen. I think I can pull off my own boots. Everybody has to pull off their own boots now,” I said, louder, for Mother’s sake.

“Marinoushka,” Avdokia chided in her chu-chu-chu voice. “Give this old woman the pleasure of taking care of her baby.” She got my boot off.

I wrestled the muddy thing out of her hand. “What did we fight a revolution for? So you can wait on me on your knees?”

She sighed, sat back on her heels. “You were always such a stubborn child. What should I do—sit by the fire and grow roots like a turnip?”

“We all have to change,” I said. “This is exactly why people hate the bourgeoisie. An old woman on her knees, serving a perfectly healthy young person.”

“People hate the bourgeoisie, period,” my mother said from the table. “They’d rather see an old woman digging ditches. Or sweeping the streets.”

Avdokia sighed, watching me struggle to take my other wet boot off with clumsy, frozen hands. She set a pair of my mother’s embroidered lambskin slippers toes out in front of me, ready to be stepped into. The yeasty smell of this old woman, the velvety feel of her cheek, were as familiar as my own eyelids. She cupped my chin in her gnarled hand, rubbed her nose against mine. “The devil never tires of new ideas.”

She straightened and brought me a bowl of hot cabbage soup. The bowl felt wonderful in my cold hands. She claimed my boots and cleaned them with a page of Pravda. Such levels of irony there. Mother watched me eat as Anton grappled with Apollinaire. “I don’t like ‘with shame you overhear,’” he said, but she wasn’t listening. I saw curiosity, even respect, in her blue eyes. Who was this girl, her daughter? A married girl, a poet, capable of earning a living with her hands? I had lived her life for so long. Now she was having a taste of mine.

Avdokia set my boots by the door on a piece of newspaper and began to sweep the room. “Could you stop that?” Anton snapped. “Babushka. The place is fine.”

“Pigs shouldn’t live in a place this fine,” she muttered, moving dangerously close to Anton’s territory between table and cot, picking things off the floor, dusting them or stacking them, tucking his shoes under his bed.

“Leave those things alone!” He grabbed her armload of balled-up paper, pamphlets, dirty clothes. “Women. Can’t you ever sit still? Just leave things as they are? I’ll never find anything again.”

Mother burst out in silvery laughter, and I had to join in. Anton could never find anything anyway. He spent half his day raking through his haystacks of poems and papers for the lost scrap of an idea. Now he was outnumbered. He cursed us all roundly, then grabbed his coat, cap, and revolver and stalked out, pausing in the door like an actor leaving the stage. “I’m going to go shoot someone now. Perhaps myself. If only the Germans would come and put me out of my misery.”


Two days later, the Soviet voted to accept the German ultimatum. The deal the kaiser offered with his foot on our necks was far harsher than the one Lenin had wanted to sign in January—the one that ideologue Trotsky walked away from, proclaiming, “No war, no peace.”

With the Germans on our doorstep, we had to accept it all. So much for our old demand of “no annexations.” We would cede the Baltics and Poland to the Germans, the Transcaucasus to the Ottomans, and the Ukraine to a puppet government ruled by Berlin. Our borders shrank to the size of old Muscovy, like a heart inside the breast of a dying beast. As for “no indemnifications,” the socialist state owed six billion marks to the kaiser. Not to mention the irony of forced demobilization. We had wanted all along to take apart the machine of war and bring our men home, yet forcible disarmament by a foreign power felt quite different. And more demoralizing still, the workers’ state agreed to stop exporting revolution to the West. No propaganda, no assistance to foreign workers, a complete rout. Trotsky resigned rather than have to go to Brest to sign such an odious declaration.

Still, after four barbaric years of war—exhausted, beaten, truncated, and bankrupt—Russia was finally at peace.

Soon Genya would be home. I imagined him as I sat on my bench at the knitting factory, the pins falling in a clatter and the wool sliding through my fingers. I pictured him home alive, intact, his confidence restored. How I would rush into his arms and kiss him, never let him go. It was high time for Mother to leave the Poverty Artel now that the danger had passed. But it was Anton begging her to stay on another day, and another.

I would return to the flat after work to find her discussing the manuscript with him, cigarette in her hand—she’d started to smoke!—as Avdokia fried potatoes over the primus stove. Eight days earlier none of us would have believed any of it. She’d come to accept me as the woman I was. And I had begun to experience her anew as well, as an independent intellectual. Freed from her overcrowded room on Furshtatskaya Street, she’d been reborn. Her ability to tolerate Anton continued to astonish me. She treated him like a bad-tempered little dog whose outbursts were of no consequence.

That night I worked on three new poems—one about maroon women, one about socks, and a third about the boxed statues in the Summer Garden emerging in spring, not knowing all that had taken place while they’d slept. As I wrote, Anton explained to Mother why the futurist Khlebnikov was the only poet in Russia worth reading now, better than even Mayakovsky. He was just launching into a recitation of “Bo-Beh-O-Bi Sang the Lips” when we heard scrabbling in the lock. Oh, Lord. I threw my pen down and ran to the door. There stood my dear husband, filling the doorway, dirty, exhausted, and grinning, his thick overcoat snow-dusted and smelling of wood smoke. I couldn’t stop kissing him, touching him, his whiskery cheeks, drinking in his smell of hay. In one piece. Thank God he was here.

Zina and Gigo crowded in behind him. “Don’t mind us,” she said, pushing past me.

Anton stood and embraced him, pounded him on the back. “About time, young son. I was about to rent out your corner.”

He kissed me, hugged me in the crook of his arm, laughing, so happy, before noticing Mother at the table, and Avdokia with her mending on the divan. He took in the neatly folded bedding, the washed floor, the emptied ashtray, and stiffened in my arms. He’d never met my mother, nor had she laid eyes on him except from a second-floor window. I should not have let this happen. Not like this, not now. I took a deep breath, but the air in the room seemed to vanish. “Genya, this is my mother, Vera Borisovna. Mother, my husband. Gennady Yurievich Kuriakin.”

She gave a nod—courteous, formal. But the light had gone out in his face, as if he’d stepped into a shadow. He pushed his cap to the back of his head, stalked to the table, and slumped into my vacated chair. Slow rage built in his face. He reached out and drank from the cup of roasted-oat tea sitting before her, finishing it off in a single draught. She pulled away, valiantly trying not to show her disgust.

“She’s been helping Anton. With the Apollinaire,” I added quickly. “She came during the offensive. Just for a few days. Varvara said they might take her hostage.”

Gigo flopped onto the divan next to Avdokia and began to inspect her, clowning, fooling with her mending, touching her scarf, examining her like a chimpanzee would, as if he’d never seen an old woman before.

Genya took off his snow-brushed cap and tossed it onto the table, ran his fingers through his hair. It was cut short now, like a soldier’s. “Enjoying our hospitality, Vera Borisovna?”

Her eyes flashed in panic. “We have been comfortable, thank you.”

“How nice,” he said. He wasn’t a sarcastic man, it didn’t suit him.

I wished Anton would speak up. “Anton invited her to stay on.” But our Mephistopheles just leaned back in his chair watching the scene unfold, head to one side, thin fingers on the tabletop. He would never side with anyone against Genya. Genya glowered at him, then back at my mother. Zina picked up Mother’s karakul hat from a hook by the door, put it on her dirty hair, and posed. “What do you think?” I hadn’t missed her little sharp-chinned face, her spiteful black eyes with their dark circles. As I was sure she hadn’t missed mine. It had given her a chance to work her influence over Genya, in case he might be persuaded to change his mind about me. She glittered with malice as she modeled, holding her hands at fashionable right angles. “Will it do?”

I snatched it off her head, hung it back on the hook. “Don’t do that.”