“We’re leaving anyway,” said one of the younger girls. “Mama’s got sisters in Kiev. They say there’s food down there.”

We kissed each other goodbye like school chums before summer break, and left the courtyard in dejected groups of two and three.

Back at Furshtatskaya Street, I tried every trick I could think of to get into the Red Guard’s room, but no such luck. His wife, so-called, was always in there, and she distrusted me from the start. There was no trace of Father’s supposed support. I kept waiting for him to make an appearance, steeling myself for the explosion that was sure to follow, but he never surfaced. Perhaps he’d gone deeper underground. Or maybe Mother had been lying all along.

After the knitting factory closed, I haunted the labor exchange, but they were only looking for the most vital, skilled professionals—obstetrical nurses and engineers. Mostly I wandered around avoiding the apartment, stopping in at Wolf’s and reading the poetry I couldn’t afford to buy anymore. I wanted to know what poets were saying about the revolution, whether Okno had appeared and if I’d been included. And, yes, I was hoping to run into Genya. Rehearsing what I would say to him. Yet I could not bring myself to go to the Poverty Artel to beg him to rethink his actions, beg him to let us start over.

I drifted over to Znamenskaya Square, scene of so many rousing and traumatic events of the previous year. The train station was a kicked-over anthill. Half of Petrograd seemed to be trying to get on trains for the south or Moscow or back to the villages. A porter I talked to had been there for the evacuation of the Soviet. They’d had trains waiting on sidings a half mile out—that’s why no one saw them. “I carried stuff out there all night,” he said. “Desks, chairs, pictures. Bathtubs. Wives. Mistresses.”

I stood under the clock, watching people rush by me like a run of salmon around a rock. I felt becalmed, invisible. A great migration out of the city was taking place and like a lone goose on a lake, I’d been left behind. The concourse, once a showpiece, had grown impossibly grimy, the floor black as if it had been painted, the stuccowork cast in high relief, each medallion picked out by a heavy coat of soot.

Suddenly, a woman with three small children tugged at my sleeve. “Devushka, can you help us?” The woman was young, pretty—well dressed, I noticed—but harried. Her hair was coming down. “I need to find my husband. Could you stay with the children and our bags?”

I was evidently still identifiable as bourgeois, a girl who would be trustworthy and sympathetic, a strong-looking girl who was nevertheless one of us. Nasha. I sat on their luggage, holding the baby—a novel experience as I’d never so much as touched one before. It was heavy and made mewling sounds, which fortunately never broke into out-and-out bawling. I jiggled it as the oldest child, a boy, told me all about trains, especially the one they were taking to Moscow, the Nikolaevsky Express. He didn’t know that it was the very train upon which Anna Karenina met Vronsky, the train under which she’d thrown herself. “You never heard of Tolstoy?”

He shook his solemn head. “Papa works for the Commissariat.” More desertion. I dandled the baby and couldn’t help wondering what Genya’s and my child would have looked like. I’d left all my things back at the Poverty Artel—my books, my brother’s silhouettes. I imagined going back to retrieve them, seeing if there could be some reconciliation between us. But we were both so terribly stubborn. The little girl, around four, in a puff-sleeved coat and a little tam, sat next to me with her soft-bodied doll and amused herself by kissing it and shaking it ferociously by turns. How like life.

At last, the woman returned with the husband and their tickets. The man asked if I would accompany them to the platform to keep an eye on the children and the porter. I received a twenty-ruble tip for my efforts, and it gave me the idea to see if there was more work in it. I set myself up as a porter, babysitter, runner after lost items or people, and cleared nearly fifty rubles that day. And spent it all on a packet of meat on the way home. Sure that there was a new career in this for me, I returned to the station for several days running, but never made as much money again. However, I was propositioned by three pimps and threatened by a porter who thought I was taking business away from him.

I had to find work. I was grateful that I still had a few more days on my monthly ration cards, but come March, those cod-liver pancakes would seem like a feast. There were only so many things Avdokia could sell in the shadows. I felt like a drunk pitched out into the street by the tavern keeper only to be run over by a cart. My brief marriage was over, the poets’ circle closed against me. My revolutionary life had ended. There was nothing left but two old women and a flat full of furniture that nobody wanted except to chop up for firewood.

In the overstuffed boudoir, I ate a meager dinner with my mother and nanny—pancakes consisting of shredded frozen potatoes fried in a malodorous substance that was mostly cod-liver oil, all I could find on the black market. Mother was depressed, her friends the Gromitskys had had a visit from the Cheka the night before. “Everything confiscated. They only left them the clothes on their backs and the bed. Now, tell me, what does the worker need a Venetian mirror for? Dresses by Worth—can you imagine? Trotting around on some commissar’s mistress, no doubt.” I choked down the meal and thought of the future, my stomach bubbling like a cauldron. Mother pushed her plate away, unable to eat any more. She covered her mouth with the heel of her hand and looked away. All the brightness I’d seen in her at the Artel had faded. There was no reason for us to live like this when I had a diamond threaded into the seam of my slip. If this wasn’t the time to sell it, what would be? When we were peeling the paint off the walls with our fingernails and eating it? Although the idea of walking all the way up to the lawless outskirts of the city to sell such a valuable item was sobering. “Don’t cry,” I said, rinsing the oily taste of cod liver out of my teeth with tea. “I think I have a plan.”


I woke at first light to find Avdokia already up, water boiled, tea and kasha made, warm water in the washstand—as if she had read my mind. Now that I’d decided, I was impatient to get it over with. I washed my face and hands cursorily, ate standing up, bundled myself up in two wool dresses, and pulled Anton’s gun from the bureau drawer. My nanny’s birdlike little eyes caught the motion, though I kept my back to her. “Marinoushka, what are you up to?” she whispered, squinting at me, trying not to waken Mother, who’d stayed up late reading The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky.

I reached up under my clothes and unfastened the diamond stickpin from my slip. I turned it so it caught the lamplight. Canary sparks lit the room. The old woman regarded me with alarm. “Where did you get that?”

“Kolya. He told me about a market on Kamenny Island. Said if we ever needed money I should go up there.” I pinned the diamond back under my clothes, donned my coat, tucked my shawl in tight, and put the revolver in my pocket.

She crossed me and herself and pressed a piece of wood into my hand—the light wood, the torn edge. I guessed by feel what it was. “Be careful,” she said, but she didn’t say “Don’t go,” as she might have earlier. We had all changed, even the unchangeable Avdokia.

Preobrazhenskaya Square and its sad market emerged and dissolved in the milky fog. I followed the frozen Kanavka, the gold-touched rails of the Summer Garden. Inside those famous fences lay the paths where I’d walked with Genya so long ago. Now it lay in deep snow, the imperial statues shivering in their winter boxes, like vertical coffins. How we’d laughed as Diana had disapproved of our young love. The memory was a sharp pain in my side, as if I’d impaled myself on one of the railing’s spear points. The Kanavka reminded me of the Mallarmé poem about a swan trapped in the ice, that small white agony. Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui… Would that be me, left behind, alone and abandoned, trapped in these beautiful ruins?

Damp clung to my face, crystallizing into ice as I emerged onto the Neva, the southern end of the Troitsky Bridge with its style moderne tramline down the center. As I crossed, threadbare people eyed me and each other with distrust, each of us locked into our own loneliness. The bridge seemed interminably long, as if it were telescoping outward as I walked. For a moment, I panicked, wondering if I had fallen into some weird pocket of reality. My mother and her spiritualist cronies believed that there were parallel planes to this world—other lives, other levels. What if I had entered one? Or perhaps I was caught on a bridge forever suspended between the two banks. I might become a legendary ghost, seen from time to time through the fog of a tram window.

With relief I saw the outline of the Peter and Paul Fortress emerging, its golden needle shrouded in white. Dostoyevsky had been imprisoned there, and the anarchist philosopher Kropotkin, even Trotsky himself, silver-tongued and foolishly believing his own propaganda. Now it held tsarist officers and Kadet ministers and a raft of speculators, whose ranks I was about to join.

A little ways on, the great wooden wreck of the Cirque Moderne loomed. Were they so long ago, those electrifying days when SRs and Bolsheviks and Mensheviks all mounted the same stage, part of the same movement? Now all I could think was how long it would take to burn in a small bourgeoika tin stove. People were destroying the city for firewood—fences, banisters, whole houses. The Bolsheviks had banned any but official cutting parties going out to the forests above the city, making criminals of us all.