Janet Fitch - The Revolution of Marina M.

“Ooh, sensitive,” she snickered.

Mother, still as an ice-encrusted statue atop the Winter Palace, watched Genya, now pacing, anger darkening his pale face as all the chill in her personality returned, freezing the warmth and charm. He opened the stove door, letting smoke into the room, poking it with the stair rod we’d stolen from the front building. His brows pressed on his deep-set eyes, and his wide mouth pinched at the corners. He was about to explode.

“Anton,” I whispered, cutting my eyes toward Genya. Say something.

But Anton rolled a cigarette in a scrap of newspaper, breaking the tobacco off each end. Genya reached over and plucked it from his lips, stuck it between his own, lit a straw, and ignited the cigarette with its burning edge. The smell of smoke hung in the air like a warning. He slammed the stove door.

“Genya, can we talk? In the hall?” I asked him. If only I could get him away from his audience, take him in my arms, I knew I could explain. Surely he could understand the danger. His fury was being fed by the presence of spectators. This new swagger and sarcasm must be the spoils of war. Where was my tender Genya?

He crossed his arms, his jutting jaw telling me all as I moved close, speaking low in his ear. His green, fresh smell was the same as always. “So talk.”

“They’ll be gone tomorrow,” I began. “Please. It’s not a big deal.”

He didn’t meet my eyes. His face darkened even more. “I’ve been sleeping in ditches on the snow. I get back to my loving wife and it’s Vera Borisovna. Not to mention the old nanny. You say it’s not a big deal? Anton, what the hell were you thinking?”

Anton raised his hand. “Don’t involve me in your domestic fiascos,” he said, moving onto the cot, where he rolled himself another cigarette to replace the one in Genya’s hand. Mother gazed down at the book of Khlebnikov poems she’d been discussing with Anton, knowing she’d been thrown to the wolves.

I still stood in front of him. “Genya, look at me.”

But his attention was seized by something over my shoulder. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” In one step, he swooped over and scooped up the Virgin of Tikhvin in his huge hand. He gazed down at it with such loathing I thought he might spit on it. He hated religion more than anything. It meant authority, superstition, tradition, ignorance, reaction, and irrationality all rolled into one.

I reached for it, but his smile chilled me as he pulled it away. Eyes narrowed at me, his brow like a ridge, he dropped it to the floor. Its silver frame made a tinny clatter. Gigo and Zina were watching him, fascinated. Then he lifted his enormous boot and crushed the small painted panel. I heard Avdokia’s gasp. I felt as if he’d just crushed my own chest. He kicked the shattered thing against the wall, and the pieces came tumbling out of the frame. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “Bringing something like that in here. You think this is a joke?”

Avdokia rushed in to salvage it, heedless of danger, gathering up the smashed remains, weeping and hissing curses at him. “Enemy Satan! Depart from us a hundred, a thousand versts…” And he did look, if not satanic, then like some elemental chthonic power coming up from the dark halls of the earth. “May he know every grief and woe…”

“Don’t you curse me, old witch,” he said and took a step toward her.

I picked up the stair rod and slashed through the air with it as if it were a saber. How I wanted to hit him with it, to beat it over his back until it broke. “Don’t you go near her!” I shouted at him. “Who are you? Where’s Genya? What did you do with him?”

I helped my weeping nanny stand, the broken pieces of the icon in her apron’s skirt. Zina held her hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. I brandished the rod in her direction and she stopped. My mother stood, picked up her carpetbag, and began numbly collecting her things. “We’re leaving,” she said. Outside the windows, the wind howled, the snow in the courtyard whirled but Mother and Avdokia put on their coats. Avdokia snatched her sewing basket away from Gigo. “I would not wish to spend a night under the same roof as you, monsieur,” Mother said.

“You can’t leave,” I said. “Not in that storm. And it’s late—the trams have stopped running.”

“Did they think of that when they kicked you out?” Genya said to me, throwing himself into the chair. “Pitched you right to the curb in the middle of the night? Soldiers were shooting. Did they care? No. The question is, who are you, Marina? Revolutionary poet or…” He tipped his chin at my terrified mother.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Zina piped up. “Right from the beginning, she came waltzing in with that fancy coat she used to wear—”

“Want me to part your hair for you?” I asked her. My mother was stuffing her things into her carpetbag. Gigo was pulling things out as she put them in, clowning around.

“She killed your brother. You forgive her for that?” Genya said. “Threw Seryozha to the dogs.”

Mother stood up straight, her face so pale I thought she would faint.

“And now you’re hiding her from proletarian justice, in my house!” He jumped up and crossed to the door in two long strides, opened it wide. Immediately the air from the icy hall emptied the warmth from the room. “Allow me!” He was playing it for theater, for Gigo and Zina. “Too cold for you, Vera Borisovna? I’m sorry. But really, it’s time to go.”

Was I going mad? She and Avdokia were all the family I had left—couldn’t he understand that? Couldn’t he find one shred of pity? I grabbed Mother’s hairbrush out of Gigo’s hand and put it into her bag. “I’m leaving, too. I can’t stay here with this impersonator. Let me know when Genya comes back.”

He laughed, so painfully. “Oh, so it’s my fault! How quickly we forget.”

Mother and Avdokia stood with their coats on, waiting for me to get out of the way so they could make a run for it.

He turned away from us all, sat in his chair again, his arms folded. “Go on then.” Daring me.

I grabbed my coat, my thick scarf, wriggled my feet into my boots, sobbing, hoping he would see what he was doing, beg me to stay as he had begged me to marry him only eight days ago. But as he sat at the table with his back to us, his shoulders like the fortification of a city, I knew he could not relent. “Anton?”

Anton lay on his cot, spinning the cylinder of his revolver, mortified at such naked displays of personal drama, looking like he was going to shoot someone—or himself. Gigo lay on the divan like an odalisque, while Zina had slipped into my vacated chair—ready to replace me. My home, my life. Why was this happening?

Yet I buttoned my coat, the wind roaring outside, and inside my head. “Neither of us wants this,” I said to him but he didn’t turn around. It had all gone too far. “Anton, give me your gun.” That made Genya glance over at me.

“What for?” Anton asked.

It would be a long trip across the city in the storm. Nobody was offering to walk us, and I wasn’t about to ask. “For me,” I said.

Mother waited by the door, tense as a cat, while Avdokia glared at Genya as if he were Beelzebub in a tattered coat.

Anton glanced questioningly at his brooding pal. “You really going to let her go? After all this crap I’ve been forced to listen to all this time?”

He actually understood how ridiculous Genya was being, but Genya wouldn’t even return his gaze, just stared moodily into the stove.

“Oh, hell.” Anton brought me the weapon. “If you need to fire it, you pull this back”—he showed me a catch at the butt end of the gun—“then fire. And if you do have to use it, keep firing, and don’t stop until it’s empty.” He reluctantly handed it over, the metal warm from his playing with it, and the weight of it, the ugly greasiness, surprised and revolted me.

Anton was actually being nicer than Genya—the world had gone crazy! I stuffed the gun into my coat pocket. Genya still hadn’t turned around. Mother looked frail and exhausted by my unseemly life in all its squalor. I wondered whether she would even stand the walk home. Home? Had I actually thought that? This was home, the Poverty Artel, the poets, Genya. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. The cards had turned again. Do you have to have everything? I heard Mina saying. But I was leaving my husband with only the rustle of the clothes on my back and the howl of the storm for a farewell. We walked down the slick stairs of the Grivtsova tenement, and out into the night.

HE WHO DOES NOT work, does not eat.

The knitting factory closed shortly after the Soviet accepted the German terms—an event nothing short of apocalyptic. I arrived in the morning as I always did to find the rest of the girls standing in the courtyard like so many stunned oxen, the metal door rolled down and locked tight.

“Do you think he’s been arrested?” a girl asked.

“That skunk, that fat burzhui,” said pug-nosed Olga, their ringleader, and gave the door an enormous kick. “He’s moved down to Moscow like the rest of the rats.” Though the danger of the German invasion was over, the Soviet had left anyway, sneaking out in the middle of the night like tenants behind on their rent.

The weight of what had happened hit me. “No war, no soldiers,” I explained to my little comrades. “No army, no contracts. No money, no socks.”

“Bastard,” said Olga. “There’s capitalism for you.”