The baron returned. He pressed a thick wad of banknotes into my hand, like a paper brick. “Here’s the five.” I didn’t count it, only turned away and tucked the bills into my bodice, packing them around my ribs. When I turned back, he was studying me, unblinking, long fingers pressed to his lips. “I start to see what our friend saw in you, Makarova.” He made that terrifying moue again, contorting his bony face in a whore’s pout. “But don’t mistake my affability for idiocy. I might have something for you in a day or two. I’ll be in touch.”

45 The Errand

NO WAY TO HAVE something in these hungry days without the world knowing about it and hating you for it. When Avdokia let me in, I smelled incense—Master Vsevolod must have been there. Even though Mother no longer had tea and mille-feuilles to offer him, I was pleased to discover that it was actually a friendship. I had assumed the worst about him—unfairly, as it turned out.

Avdokia crowed as I dropped my heavy prizes on the table, the meat, the oil, the flour, which I’d carried home most of the way on my back, fully prepared to shoot anyone who got near me. She sifted the silky flour between thumb and forefinger. “Wheat flour! Theotokos be praised.”

Mother said nothing. She’d turned inward again since our ejection from Grivtsova Alley. The fight with Genya, the attack on the Virgin, the terrifying walk back to the flat through the storm had snuffed out her time with Anton like a lamp at bedtime. Avdokia volunteered to brave the kitchen to cook the meat. She would be better able to withstand the catty remarks of women trying to guess where that delicacy had come from than I would. Envy ran thick as cold oil in the collectivized flat. Mother buried herself in her Blavatsky, and I thought about Kolya and what he was doing with the frightening, intriguing man whose company I’d just left.

Later, as we ate our heavenly dinner, real wheat pancakes and fresh meat, my nanny and I plotted what to do with the money and the rest of the food. We decided we would first buy a small load of firewood. Avdokia knew a woman who knew a man in the Haymarket who had a source. “We’ll trade for a bit of the flour.” But how to get the wood back here? If only I had a little sled… just a board with wooden runners and a rope to pull it with.

Mother cried out when I broke apart a drawer of the chifforobe using my hands and feet. “That was a wedding gift from my grandmother,” she sighed.

I didn’t bother looking for tools. Even in the old days, we never had any. We’d used other people as our tools—plumbers and shoemakers and tinkers and tailors, the dvornik. And now we were paying for it. No awl, no hammer, no ax—we were little better than cavemen. These days tools were rarer than radium. Though nails were easy. Every bit of wood came with some—all you had to do was burn it. Everyone’s bourgeoika stove was full of them. Maybe I should look for a hatchet while we still had the money.

I emptied the bullets from Anton’s gun and used the butt to hammer the runners to the bottom of the drawer’s face using nails from the stove. Soon I’d fashioned a crude sled, no worse than many I’d seen in town. I punched two holes in the walnut slab and threaded a drapery cord through for a strap.

“Barbarians.” Mother turned away, unable to watch the destruction of the beautiful armoire.

“Rich barbarians,” I said. “And soon to be warm ones.”

In the morning, we measured flour into a sack that Avdokia had sewed from a pair of Mother’s underwear and hung from my belt inside my coat, pulling on it to make sure it wouldn’t break loose under a pickpocket’s hands. “Make sure the wood’s not wet,” Avdokia said. “And don’t settle for less than a pood. You should hardly be able to lift it.”

“Marina, don’t go.” Mother was anxious again. She’d started rubbing her knuckles, knitting her hands, as she’d been doing after Seryozha’s death. “Stay home today. There are dark entities around you.”

That was all I needed to hear before going out on this little mission. I exchanged glances with Avdokia. She walked me to the door, made the sign of the cross over me. “God have mercy… maybe I should come with you. I’d make a better bargain.”

“You stay with her.”

With the gun snug in my pocket, I descended the stairs to Furshtatskaya Street. I felt like a character from Dumas in seven-league boots. So glad to be out of the flat and Mother’s aura of doom. The air seemed suddenly warmer, the fog less icy. Perhaps it was just the good dinner last night and a breakfast of fresh eggs. I had oil, meat, and soap, flour to trade, money hidden behind the baseboards. No Genya, no Kolya, but I’d survived, and spring was coming soon. A sudden feeling of well-being seized me. I strode down the street like a bogatyr. Life would return. Maybe for me, too.


Now that I was eating regularly, I felt better than I had in a long time and the city seemed more beautiful to me. Occasionally sunshine broke out and glinted on the icicles, which loosened from the rooftops and dropped like spear points from the sky to burst on the pavement. You could be killed if you weren’t careful. Yes, spring arrived with the retorts like gunfire from the Neva as the ice began to break. I was writing again, three, four poems a day, the straitjacket of my soul broken loose.

Strolling along Sergievskaya, not far from the Krestovskys’, I was startled by an enormous form at the periphery of my vision. A huge horse—black, and shaggy. My first thought—Kolya! But no. In the high driver’s seat was the wizened little man who’d kept the door at Arkady’s barracks. Yet the horse was the same as those in the courtyard that day on the English Embankment, a giant black feather-footed beast, powerful, beautiful, and well-fed when all Petrograd horses were either bags of living bones or already wrapped in paper, being sold in dark stairwells. Who but criminals could feed horses like these now?

“He wants to see you,” the little man said. He didn’t open his mouth much when he talked, like people from the far north.

“What for?”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

There are points in one’s life where it’s possible to turn back, and we know them when they come, even when we don’t choose to take that option. Man is a curious and stubborn creature, and I was possessed of both qualities in full. So instead of running for my life, I took a seat behind the little man, who whipped up the giant horse. It surged off—my God! It had the energy to trot when most of the humans around us barely had the strength to stand. We raced to the river, crossing at the Liteiny Bridge, clods of softening snow thumping against the front of the sled, the freshening wind splashing my face. Gaunt pedestrians watched us hungrily, wishing they could ride, wishing they were as fat as the horse, wishing they could carve the horse up with their little knives right there and then. We moved across like royalty. It had been so long since I’d ridden anything other than an overcrowded tram.

On the Vyborg side, we passed the great factories, empty now after the evacuations. Broken windows, sagging gates. Ericsson, Nobel, Arsenal—stinking belching brawny plants now silent as dead mammoths. The workers’ tenements looked colder and shabbier than ever, the streets full of debris. Workers with no work had gone back to their villages. If one needed more proof that Petrograd was dying, the fact was laid bare up here. How would the Bolsheviks ever breathe life back into this devastation?

We sped on through the industrial belt and emerged in the countryside. The sky had brightened, the sun threatening to break through. I had never been so far out on the Vyborg side, had only seen it from train windows, and never in winter. The horse thundered through little-used lanes between open fields, and I remembered another sleigh ride, lilac light on the snow… it seemed like a dream now. Or maybe this was the dream. The sweet cast of the warming air on the weary, sodden drifts.

We pulled up before a greenhouse, the glass obscured by steam, green things growing inside. The little man got down from his high seat. Funny to see such a shrimp driving a sleigh—Petersburg coachmen were always large and well padded. I stroked the giant horse’s beautiful haunch, warm and shaggy, savoring the sweaty, earthy smell, and followed the little bowlegged tough to the greenhouse. Its entry still boasted fancy woodwork from the age of Alexander III. We passed inside the double doors, outer and inner, entering the warmth of the hothouse and its staggering fragrance, lilacs and lilies. They still existed, the greenhouses of Petrograd. Down one long aisle, Arkady von Princip leaned over a flat of hyacinths, closing his eyes over the deep blue of the blooms and inhaling, just like a man preparing to sip a glass of cognac.

He didn’t look up. “What do you know about hyacinths, Makarova?”

“Only the myth.”

“Tell it to me,” he said, moving on to other flats.

I searched my memory. “Hyacinth, a handsome boy who became an object of rivalry between two gods: Apollo, god of the sun, and Zephyr, the west wind. So the gods decided that they would throw the discus to determine who should win the boy. Hyacinth thought to impress Apollo by catching it, and Zephyr, in his jealousy, blew the discus so hard it killed the boy. In mourning, Apollo turned him into a flower.”

“Apollo couldn’t bear for the boy’s soul to end in sad Hades,” Arkady said, breaking off a hyacinth and sniffing it. “So he turned him into a flower that rises from a bulb buried most of the year, to live again in the spring, full of this unearthly scent. Quite a tribute. Ovid says that Apollo’s tears are written upon the petals. Ai. See?” Ai, alas.