by Janet Fitch
I tried to think of a country where people were free of the family. Of Father who leads and Mother who bows. Imagine that kind of freedom for women. Poor beaten Faina could leave her husband and make a life for herself.
“It used to be that you didn’t worry about my children, and I didn’t worry about yours,” she explained. “But in our socialist society, any child in need is everyone’s responsibility. Every mother’s welfare. No mother, married or single, will be left on her own to care for her children.”
The women shifted nervously, not completely ready to accept that they need not devote their lives to wiping children’s noses and washing their clothes, that it wasn’t the highest function of womanhood. A woman in a patched jacket stood. “I work over at the lumberyard, and I pay a third of my wages to a woman who watches my kids. When are we getting one of those kindergartens here, like you said last time?”
The commissar’s wife flushed, that someone noticed there was a difference between the dreams of the spacemen and the facts of life in the streets and squares of Tikhvin. “We’re not magicians, Comrade. I don’t have to tell you we’re in the middle of a civil war. We already give the children hot meals in school. Step by step. Any other questions?” She opened her book, clearly impatient to move on.
Another hand came up. “They say they’re going to take the children away from the mothers. Is that true? Who can better care for a child than its own mother?”
Sergeevna’s flat cheek flexed. “We’re not taking children from their mothers, Comrade. We’re offering the woman an opportunity to engage in the economic and political life of the socialist society. We don’t need a hundred women each cooking dinner and ministering to individual children. It’s economically regressive, when six women could free the rest for meaningful work.”
These women didn’t understand that the soviet was offering working-class women the labor arrangements that aristocrats had known for centuries. When was the last time an upper-class Russian woman raised her own children? Vera Borisovna certainly hadn’t. I would be the first woman in my family to attempt it—my useless, incompetent self. I remembered the mess I’d made at Faina’s, just trying to diaper her baby. We’d all been raised by governesses, tutors, and nannies, but it was a shocking, foreign idea among these peasants and workers, these provincial petite bourgeoisie. To release women from their position as family serfs, there had to be some way to care for the children. Nothing was going to change without it. I had been so ready to dislike this woman, but now I felt sorry for her. I couldn’t help but see what a hard job she had ahead of her, trying to get the benighted womenfolk of Tikhvin to understand that there was more to life than motherhood and wifedom and pregnancy every spring.
“Think of being able to go to work without worrying about your kids,” I blurted out. “Without paying half your earnings to some crazy old person who waters the milk. That’s what she’s talking about.”
The speaker almost toppled with gratitude that someone understood what she was trying to say. “Thank you, that’s exactly right.”
“But what if they beat my kid?” asked the woman perched on the windowsill. “He’s a brat but I wouldn’t want no stranger beating him.”
“Nobody’s going to beat your child, Comrade. Abusing children is reactionary. We must never beat our children. Any other questions?” She looked around desperately, hoping someone would ask a question about the woman’s place in future society.
“But what if they did?” insisted the woman. Now I recognized her, she was one of those busybodies in the queues who had wanted to know all about Korsakova’s daughter.
I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “Well, what if you beat your own child? Is that any better?” There must have been something I didn’t know about this woman, for the hall erupted in laughter.
“Well, it’s my kid, ain’t it?” she said defensively. More laughter followed.
“That’s the point, Comrade,” Sergeevna jumped in enthusiastically. “It’s not your child—that’s done. My child, your child, that’s the capitalist way—I take care of my children, make sure they have everything I can possibly give them, but to hell with your child, even if it’s starving, freezing, crying on the side of the road. My child, my property. What if my husband thinks of me that way? I can beat her, she’s my property, just like my horse.”
“I’d like to see him try,” whispered my seatmate. “I bet she rules that roost. I bet he has to sing for his supper.”
“In socialist society, we’ve gone beyond all that.” She pointed again to the poster, CHILDREN ARE EVERYONE’S RESPONSIBILITY. “Our children belong to all of us. We all have a stake in the future of the working class. Socialism’s job is to lessen your burden, so you can make your contribution, knowing your child is properly cared for, not running around loose on the street or in the hands of whatever provision you can make. You are valuable to us, and so is your child.”
My seatmate whispered, “I wouldn’t give her a chicken to raise.”
“I don’t know. I could use the help,” I said.
She patted my arm. “Wait until you have the baby. Then you’ll see. Mothers aren’t going to give up their children without a fight.”
I couldn’t bear the stubborn stupidity of the woman. “But wouldn’t it be nice to know you could live your life without worrying, Oh, if I leave my man, what will I do with my children? You wouldn’t be such a slave.” Like a tethered cow.
“And maybe pigs will fly,” the woman told me. “And shit bacon.” Laughter all around us.
Sergeevna raised a hand to quell our un-Soviet mirth, and went on to read from another pamphlet, about a woman’s duty to have children to strengthen the working class. Clearly written by a man, for what woman ever decided to have children out of responsibility to the collective?
In response, I felt the baby flutter within me like a flag, deep inside my body. Just a flutter, like a butterfly or a rustle in the trees. The revolutionary words had stirred it. “It’s moving,” I whispered. The woman smiled. The baby was telling me that it was ready for this new world. Girl or boy, it would grow up into a very different world than any of us could imagine. A brave girl, maybe, a real firebrand.
At last it was over and we rose to return to our homes. Sergeevna stopped me at the door, shook my hand. “Thank you for coming. I so appreciate having someone who understands what we’re trying to do here.”
I shook her hand and pretended I’d rarely spent a more fascinating interlude after a twelve-hour workday. “Women in the future will have more to live for.”
She released my hand. She leaned toward me. “Perhaps you’ll help us, a poet like yourself. We could use some slogans. ‘Women, Take Care of Everyone’s Children,’ something like that. See if you can think of some. See you Friday.”
The idea that there would be a Friday, and slogans, and Sergeevna on a returning basis, turned me to stone. The clamminess of her hand. The tremulous smile with which she regarded me. I hated people who had plans for me, even if it was with the best intentions. I could see her Bolshevik wheels turning. Maybe I could be roped into teaching literacy classes, or saddled with babysitting duties. My back ached, my legs, I wanted Liza to rub them, and I had to pee like a typhoon. “Thank you, Comrade. I’ll see what I can do.”
“And don’t forget your maternity ration,” she added.
Lord knew I wouldn’t forget that.
4 Stepan Radulovich
After many advances and retreats, spring’s troops at last broke winter’s lines. Ice cracked in violent retorts on the Tikhvinka. It put everyone on edge, it sounded so much like gunfire. Admiral Kolchak, the head of the White Army, had emerged from his Siberian stronghold and smashed through the Urals. Kolchak was on his way. The railwaymen knew everything, what a relief to have access to the news again!
Styopa Radulovich and I lay in his bed in his single room at the end of the second-floor corridor—the room I’d begun to visit at the very end of my endless day. I had sworn I�
��d stay away from him, but had finally succumbed to the pleasure of a man’s body up against mine, his rich, loamy smell, his kindness. His easy silences. He reminded me I was still young, still desirable. I was already pregnant, he couldn’t do me any harm on that account, and I was lonely. He was modest in his sexual needs. It was wonderful just to have someone to talk to. When he wondered at the scarring on my back, the Archangel’s souvenir, I told him it was something I didn’t want to discuss, and he let it go.
After making love, knowing I liked it, he propped his map of Russia up against the blanket and traced the progress of the White advance for me with his one hand, scattering cigarette ash over the soft paper and the blanket like a weather report of light snow. It was better than any newspaper—especially now that only Bolshevik papers remained, where even defeats were presented as victories, or drumbeats to inspire further effort. But Vikzhel had the telegraph, they knew which trains carried troops and how many, where they were now and which way they headed.
I ran my finger along the eastern front, where Admiral Kolchak and his Siberian Cossacks had broken through the Urals. They’d just taken Ufa, the stronghold of Komuch, the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly—my father’s people. But now it was just Kolchak, monarchy, and reaction. So much for liberalism. “Voted themselves out of office, and next day the Supreme Leader and his Cossacks marched in singing ‘God Save the Tsar,’” said Styopa. I traced the long jagged line to the west of the mountain range that separated Asia from Europe, the Kolchak front. Every day, the Whites moved twenty-five, thirty miles closer to the Volga. It wouldn’t be long until they took Samara and Kazan, on their way to Moscow.
I traced my finger down to the Denikin forces in the Don. Denikin’s troops, reaction and pogrom. And my brother Volodya, whatever he was doing now. “Will Kolchak and Denikin join up?”
“They’ll try,” he said.
I nested my head on his shoulder, the one without the arm. He was always careful to conceal the stump, wore a nightshirt, that sleeve neatly knotted. His smell was of machines, of oil and cinders. “We’re losing, aren’t we?”
Soviet Russia, what was left of it, a tenth of what had been. Red in the center, like a heart, in a sea of White.
“But they’ve got a weakness,” said Styopa, dropping ash on the map. “Sure, we’ve lost a lot of territory, but we’re fighting back-to-back. That’s the way you want to fight. Short supply lines. We can move men wherever we need them.” He sketched quick zigzags back and forth across the heart of Red Russia. “See? Kolchak’s got to send out all the way to Omsk for his laundry and shoe polish.” His finger traced a straight line six inches east of the Urals. “Easy to cut anywhere along the line.” The Trans-Siberian—always that train. My father saw its importance from the beginning. “The peasants are already rebelling behind the lines, in Irkutsk, and the Transbaikal.” He pointed to areas in the Far East, places so remote I couldn’t imagine them except in one of Ukashin’s tales about hidden monks and their ancient rites. “Those atamans out there are as crazy as bedbugs. Even the stupidest peasants are unrolling red banners. The Red Army doesn’t have to win, it just has to survive. The people will do the rest.”
He folded the map and put it on his little bedside table. Berkovin coughed in the next room, reminding us how thin the walls were. Styopa rested his coarse hand on the mound of my belly. I knew he liked the way it felt, hot, like rising bread. Sometimes it irritated me, to be enjoyed in such an animal way, sometimes it felt reassuring. We lay in the light of his kerosene lantern, watching his cigarette smoke rise in the spring-scented night. The house was so quiet I could hear the ticking of his watch. He burrowed his unshaven face into my neck. It must have felt good to him, but it left me with a rash. “Do you love me at all, lisichka?” My little fox, my redhead.
I sighed and sat up, straightening my nightdress—sewn by myself out of a torn sheet Korsakova had given me. I was reluctant to lie, though he clearly wanted me to say yes. I whispered. “I love being with you. Can that be enough?”
He smiled, a little sadly, pulled me in for another kiss.
“Tomorrow?”
“I’ll try.” Poor Styopa, I thought as I left his room, closing the door so very gently, not to alert Berkovin. If only I could have warned him not to fall in love with me. But who ever listened to such a warning?
The night was full of snoring, one man so buzzily sonorous—Gendelev? Zhubin?—I could have hopped the whole length of the hall singing “La Marseillaise” and not have been heard. Yet still I crept down the hall in my felt slippers, skirting the noisier boards, thinking that this was how the world worked. How interchangeable we were. Lost your man? Well, here’s another, nothing wrong with him, and his one arm would keep him out of the army. Bozhe moi.
I inched up the creaking staircase to the third floor, where Korsakova slept in the room opposite ours, listening as I held my breath and lifted our door by the knob before swinging it open—fast—and slipping inside. Closing it—but not all the way—and placing a slipper behind it to keep it from swinging open again.
I’d certainly become pragmatic. How do you like that, Varvara? Pregnant with one man’s child, married to another, and sleeping with a man who got me a job in a boarding house—five arms between them. I shed my shawl and slipped into bed, Liza’s braids ribboned on the pillow opposite. I tried not to think about how crude I’d become. I’d once wanted to live in a poem, but this was the real world, without grandeur or heroics. I needed a gentle man to hold me, a kind man with a ration card who didn’t mind massaging my aching legs with his one strong hand.
Moonlight fell across my bed over the tops of the curtains. Although I was exhausted, the moon tugged at my blood. I wondered where Father was, now that Ufa had been taken. Was he dancing with his bright-haired mistress to “God Save the Tsar”? Were they together again? Was she passing information on their every move back to Moscow?
I thought about Siberia, the vast sweep of it. Beyond Omsk, Kolchak’s capital, lay the terrible lands commanded by the Cossack atamans. Styopa said they flayed prisoners alive, men and women. Disemboweled them. Tortured them in ways that made them no longer recognizable as humans. And through their territories laced the spider thread of the Trans-Siberian, which Papa’s Englishmen had coveted like a string of diamonds. Maybe my father was on that train right now, heading for China. He and his horrible woman. Though someday, when my soul was placed on the great scales, I knew that I would be called to account for naming her. And she, for her own perfidies.
Walking together in the long spring twilight up by the ponds, Styopa and I attempted to talk, get to know one another. He talked about the loss of his arm, his former work as a mechanic, his current job in the station yard maintaining signals. He was resigned about the loss. “Just one of those things, lisichka.” He talked about his family, all railway workers—father, a section boss on the Vologda line; his brothers and how they went fishing; his dear mama; a fragile girl he’d loved who’d died of a bad heart. The light lingered like a lover, reminding me of Kolya. Little feet, where are you now? The railwayman and I sat in the twilight where we could look back at the Uspensky Monastery with its massed cupolas and five bell towers like teeth of a comb, looking so much like that enchanted city under the lake. I waited to hear the bells from the tower, but they never rang anymore. The bell ringers were gone, the monks scattered, arrested, or hunkered down in the cloisters. The trees now covered by the mist of pale green.
I told Styopa I was married to a poet, who had left me for Moscow, that I was drifting, that he didn’t know we were having a child. I said that my father was a typesetter, that my mother was very religious, that they quarreled. “There really are poets nowadays?” he asked.
“That’s what I’m doing with the Women’s Club. ‘For children’s sake, your help they need, / Soviet mothers, learn to read!’”
“Hey, that’s good,” he said, his weathered face smiling, potato-nosed. A kind and honest face. “You thin
k of poets as guys in tight pants talking about clouds.”
“All kinds of poets,” I said. “Some aren’t even guys.”
Draftees thickened the streets like flour in gravy. They marched in groups, their heads newly shaved, they looked like so many taste buds reaching out to lick the air. It tasted raw and smoky, the tang of mud, the bitterness of spring. Peasant boys mostly, in rough clothes and bast shoes, herded in from the countryside like sheep rounded up from scattered meadows. I thought of village vengeance, how the peasants offered up the families they liked the least, pointed them out as hoarders and kulaks—At least they left the family. Except Motka, they took him for the army. No wonder the Red troops melted away at the first sight of Kolchak.
I dropped off the slogans at the Women’s Club. Not exactly Blok, but it kept Sergeevna satisfied. I had to be careful with her—the appearance of reinforcements, anyone with a pulse, would be seen as water in the desert. As it was, she hinted that she would sponsor me for party membership, if I’d study and prepare. “Such a waste, a girl like you scrubbing pots.” But the idea of becoming a party member, signing my life over to the Cause, turned my blood to water. I agreed with much the Bolsheviks were trying to do, but I did not believe anymore. I had used up my stores of belief, my cupboards were bare. I could hope that the Bolsheviks would achieve what they set out to do, but my heart and soul remained my own. If only I could squeak through the cracks of all ideologies and loyalties and demands and dictates in this life, with a little beauty intact, a little poetry, it would be enough.
