by Janet Fitch
I leaned over to drink from a jug. That creaky cat’s cry. Oh no—her face all crumpled and red! Shhhh. Such a little bundle wrapped up like that, her head popping out. Now she was awake and furious, shrieking. What was I to do with her? I patted her back but it didn’t help. What did she want? Diapers? Feeding? I started to cry too. I tried to put her on my big hard breast but she kept turning her head and screaming like I was trying to kill her. Please stop, Iskra. Oh please, baby, your stupid mama doesn’t know what to do. She already didn’t like me, this poor thing wrapped up like a little loaf. We both lay there weeping.
Finally, the midwife came in, smelling of hay, sweaty from labor. “Look who’s awake,” she beamed, washing her face and hands at the basin, drying them on a white towel. Her old face’s network of lines grew bolder with her smile.
“What’s wrong with her? She won’t stop.”
“She’s just hungry, milaya.”
She held the baby snug in the crook of her arm as I used the chamber pot, unsteady. I washed my hands and arms and face while she clucked at my daughter, quieting her. It should have been Avdokia. How I missed her! I imagined my own mother at my birth—had she felt this helplessness? But no, she had been through it before with Volodya. To think that I was even more ignorant than Vera Borisovna…But she’d had the luxury of the Furshtatskaya Street flat, not a peasant’s izba, doctors and nannies and relatives all around. Yet this izba was a good sight more comfortable than that breathless black nightmare of a bathhouse…
How alone and very far from home we were.
The midwife guided me back to the bench, my cunt on fire, plumped the pillow behind me, and helped the baby onto my enormous hot breast. Swollen, immense—my God, where had that come from? How could she get her mouth onto that? The midwife showed me how to coax her mouth open with a little milk on her lips, to hold the breast flat with a finger so I wouldn’t smother her. We sat watching her feed—an everyday miracle, nothing more mundane or astonishing. The air through the window cooling our damp faces.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
“She came a fortnight ago Sunday. You were still screaming and raving the Sunday after that. What a week that was, the Lord be praised, we had to wrap you in sheets and douse you with water.” She touched her face. There was a bruise. Had I struck her? “Tomorrow comes Sunday again.”
Two weeks! And I didn’t even know where here was. Alone with my newborn, not a ruble in my pocket, not a soul who knew my name.
The big woman stroked my hair with her work-calloused hand, smelling of hay and sunshine. And where was the train?
“Any word from my husband?” Two weeks…he could be anywhere.
She nodded, rose, wiping her hands on her apron. “A soldier came. He brought you a letter. You’ve been so sick, we didn’t want to bother you.” Reached up into the red corner, and there, propped against the icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos, a wrinkled green envelope. She held it out to me, but I was afraid of dislodging Iskra. I had no idea whether she was even getting any milk, but she had stopped crying, so she must be getting something. “Open it for me,” I told her.
She tore it open with a big blunt forefinger and extracted the letter, handed it to me.
It was a poem. In Genya’s unmistakable hand. He lettered like a madman, cubo-futuristically.
Funeral for Myself on the Tracks at Kambarka
The bells, did you hear them?
I’m a clown
I’m a carnival devil
bells on my papier-mâché hat.
Who would have dreamed
I would
drop
my own heart
from the gallows
pull the rope myself.
THE
CR
A
C
KK
reverberates
from Petrograd to
Vladivostok.
But I did it.
Is it weakness or strength
to
hang
your own heart?
It’s the hell of it.
Tenderness gets in my eyes.
Now I put on my costume
GREAT RUS
The part I play
I wrote the lines myself
It’s a disaster
and yet,
out of disaster,
the world.
We’re all giving birth.
No, not all of us, Genya. Not all.
Yes, I’m a cold-blooded swine.
Hate me,
curse me.
I’m shit.
Man is a puppet.
Woman is a mystery.
I don’t know anything about life.
I cut
my own throat
here tonight
That’s what you’re seeing,
The last of my rich
r
e
d b l o o d.
Tomorrow I’ll look like a man,
but won’t
bleed.
This is no place for humans.
Steel and iron alone—
machines
A train an army an idea a war
When we’re finished
we’ll find the humans.
Show them
to their new homes.
Here’s a joke:
Do you know why there are no more horses in
Petrograd?
Because horses have to be fed.
Where men can live on just the hope of it.
Doesn’t that just split your sides?
I should have left you with One-Arm,
that humorless chump
But I’m a demon of vanity.
I was sure if I said
it would be all right,
it would be.
I see you still
on the Chernyshevsky Bridge,
the moon on the ice,
frost on your lashes.
I lay back on the pillow, looking into the trees, baby at my breast, the midwife pouring milk into a bowl. Long-haired birches streamed. So my Stenka Razin had once again thrown his Persian bride to the deep. Proving his loyalty to his brothers at the expense of his love. He was the tenderest of souls and yet, if vanity was at stake, he would walk into hell itself with his chin held high. I could imagine them watching him—Yermilova, Antyushin—reporting back to Moscow on what he’d done, their poet, their great-voiced embodiment of the Soviet dream. How pleased they must be with their Stenka. The train, vanishing over the Urals, red flags ablaze.
At least he remembered the frost on my lashes!
Genya, Great Rus. Throwing himself under the train—but only in verse. No Anna Karenina. She was a woman, caught as a woman, bearing the full brunt of it, not some full-throated giant in the prime of his life, able to stir the masses like thunder. That overgrown baby! Kolya would never have left me like this, in labor alone in a hut in the forest. He would at least have pressed papers into my hands, money, something I could use, some way to get home. While Genya spent the night writing a poem.
I gazed down at Iskra, nursing, and thought back to how I’d left her father on the platform in Tikhvin. Her mama was a fool indeed.
I had to get up, start thinking clearly. I motioned for the midwife, whose name was Praskovia. She took Iskra, helping me stand, firm arm under mine, as hard as wood. I noticed I was wearing a pretty linen shift that wasn’t mine, a dazzling white. I stood at the open doorway, admiring the trees, the birches’ long boughs streaming, and watched the old lady briskly change Iskra on the bench. Cleaning her, wiping, the new diaper, folding her back into the swaddling cloth. I would never be able to do this. Never. “Can we leave her free for a while?” I asked. Even my voice was unsteady.
“Free?”
“Unwrapped?”
“Babies like to be swaddled. It keeps them calm.” She said it in a way that invited no discussion. I wished Avdokia was here, she was easier to cajole. But where once I woul
d have argued, now I simply watched her wrap Iskra smartly—like watching someone with clever hands make a bed.
I stepped outside—would she stop me? Was there yet some new prohibition I was violating? Some Bannik I was insulting? But the old woman seemed to have relinquished her prohibition on the out-of-doors, and I planted myself on a rough bench, facing the trees. She brought me the neatly wrapped package of my child. Did you really put her in the stove? I wanted to ask. Iskra gazed up at me, entranced, or perhaps it was just the sun-dappled light overhead. I felt suddenly like a fraud, bankrupt—what did I have to give this trusting creature but the lostness of myself? My sack was empty. Red dust.
The midwife sat down next to me, her big work-roughened hands splayed on her knees. We stayed like that a good long while, just listening to the songs from the fields and the wind in the trees. There was something she wanted to say, she was turning it around in her mind’s hands, trying to find the right place to begin. She plucked at her apron, and tucked the swaddling cloth around Iskra once again, when it was perfectly tight. “What do you think you’ll do now?” she asked finally.
Iskra was wondering the same thing, her clever moss-green eyes, so much like his merry blue ones. Was it that the old woman wanted me to leave? After all, I’d been lying here almost two weeks, raving, hitting her, sleeping in her hut, eating her food—yes, I must have been eating, I wasn’t particularly hungry. They had their crops to get in. Was she telling me it was time to move on? Fear and regret ran down my head and shoulders like cold water. I wasn’t ready to go, I could hardly stand. I had no plan. “Head home, I guess,” I said.
“And where is that, devushka?” Her face, not unkind.
“Petrograd,” I said.
She sighed, gazing up into the trees. “And how will you go so far, with that tiny morsel?”
It was a good question. How would I navigate the crowded, wretched stations, the waiting, the hellish rush for the trains? I remembered well the day Kolya and I watched that tide of humanity fight its way onto the carriages at Nikolaevsky station. Could I do that alone, with a newborn in my arms, no help, no friends, no food—no money? I kissed Iskra’s tiny face, her body all bundled up like a cigar, head popped out the top like the bulb of a lollipop.
“There’s a woman,” the midwife spoke slowly, I could see the cautious lines of her mouth. “Here in the village. I told her about you, about the child.”
A strange buzzing in my ears. The wind rustled the birches, the pines nodded sadly.
“A good woman,” she said, gently touching my arm. “Her husband’s too old for the draft. The baby would be safe with them, dear. It’s not Petrograd, but she’d have a good life.” She sighed, the weathered crevasses in her skin as deep as canyons. She’d seen her share of the trouble that human beings could find themselves in.
Leave Iskra—was that what she was saying? Walk away from my redheaded baby? She smiled, but her eyes were sadder than ashes. She wasn’t asking me to abandon my baby, she was simply pointing out my position, trying to save me and the child both, just as she had in the bathhouse. Trying to say that Iskra would have a chance here. A chance to grow up. A chance to be taken care of by someone who knew something about babies, the type of woman who would never find herself in my situation. This wasn’t meanness, I told myself, just pure earthy practicality.
I saw myself as I must seem to her, a headstrong girl, unfortunate, luckless. No money, no people. Planning to drag a newborn child across a vast continent in wartime, taking filthy, crowded, disease-ridden trains to a future that was at best uncertain—and that would most surely involve cold and deprivation in a dangerous city, at a dangerous time. I forced myself to imagine earning my fare and my food begging in railway stations. Perhaps displaying my baby’s hideous diaper rash for a few kopeks. Or begging in villages from those who had little themselves. Praskovia’s sorrowful expression told me: When she dies this time, you will have to bury her yourself, with your own hands, in a field.
But when I looked down at Iskra, mesmerized by the shifting coins of light, I couldn’t imagine leaving her. The midwife thought it for the best, Iskra raised by a good Christian woman like herself or one of her daughters—round-faced, upright, clean women. She must think, What could be better than growing up sturdy and healthy in green fields, swimming in the river, cutting rye into shocks to dry in the sun, singing in harmony with women she’d grown up with, spinning the flax? The regular calendar of Saints’ Days and feasts. Surely that was better than the hardship of life in the city with its inedible food and unheated rooms and poor clothes, typhus and cholera.
But I had visited izbas full of sick children, huts where women sat meekly at the foot of the table while their ignorant husbands intoned their vile, reactionary views. Demanding service and threatening beatings.
Could I imagine my daughter thinking that horned Jews killed the cattle, frightened of devils in the butter churn, monsters in the forest? Kolya’s child and mine, growing up without Pushkin or Lermontov, The Wind in the Willows, Les Malheurs de Sophie, unaware there was a Europe, or that the moon only reflected the light of the sun, that the earth rotated around the sun and not vice versa. She would grow old and die barely conscious of the outside world—like the countless millions who had died before us. A short, brutish life in a small, dreary place, waiting for Easter and signing her name with an X. Don’t have children.
Yet I had to look hard at the reality I’d be subjecting her to. She could very well starve, as could I. She might die of a fever she’d pick up in traveling, or in Petrograd itself. I might die, leave her orphaned. She might not live long enough to read her first book. The midwife was offering me the possibility of a stable life for her. This tiny thing, red-faced and sweating, so bound in those swaddling clothes.
I couldn’t stand it anymore, and loosed her from the cloths, let her arms and her chest and legs feel the breeze, I kissed those arms, that narrow chest. Our blood, mine and Kolya’s—now there was a clever, volatile mix! She gazed up at me with those eyes, and I knew no round-faced Olya or Alya was going to be up to that. With a little luck, I would make some kind of life for her.
“I think we’ll take our chances,” I said. “But thank the woman for me.”
I felt Avdokia somewhere, sighing, exactly as this woman was sighing right now.
The midwife pushed down on her thighs and stood up, heavily. “Well, that’s that. May God have mercy on you both. At least she’s been baptized, that’s a comfort.”
“What?!” I didn’t want to shout, but it just came out. The baby startled and started to creak.
“Wrap her up, I told you. The arms—she’s used to being held tight inside you.” She took the swaddling cloth and laid it on the bench.
“You baptized her? While I was sick?”
“Well, we didn’t know if the baby was going to make it, milaya. So I baptized her myself. Then the priest came—don’t you remember?”
The incense, the priest—that was real.
“Put her head there,” she instructed, pointing to the head of the cloth. I did it. “Yes, we named her Antonina. I hope you like it. It’s a good name. You can call her Tonya, or Nina, or Inna.”
She’d baptized the baby herself while I’d been raving. Of all the things to worry about. I looked down into Iskra’s face, those eyes, Kolya’s mischief already showing there, and my own stubbornness. Already, a child with aliases. Antonina Gennadievna Kuriakina. I kissed her. Iskra. Tonya. Inna. Nina. “She needs to be bigger to travel,” I said. “But I won’t take your bread for free. I’ll work for my keep.”
She laughed out heartily, standing over me. “You’ve never held a scythe in your life. I bet you’ve never even used a broom, from the looks of you.”
Did I really look so useless? “I’ve dug ditches, I’ve built fortifications, I’ve cleared snow. Everyone works in the Soviet Republic.”
“You’re a good girl,” she said, patting my shoulder. “You rest, I’ll think about it.” She went
back out to the fields, chuckling, leaving me and Iskra outside the izba watching the clouds float across the patches of blue.
Wildflowers bloomed in the long grass. The wind in the birches, their haymaking song on the air. I’d been abandoned, and yet right at this moment, it was enough to be here. It was warm and peaceful under the blue bowl of heaven. I fed my daughter, steering the other massive breast into her small mouth the way the midwife had instructed. I would figure out how to get home when the time came. Meanwhile, Iskra nursed and gazed up at the sky, the clouds chasing one another, a blue it rarely got in Petrograd. A real Maryino sky.
She fell asleep in my arms, wet lipped, drooling. I tucked my breast back into the white slip and rocked her, humming along with the singing. Iskra, Tonya. Nina. Inna. So trusting. I was her mother now, I had to make the decisions. I would pay these women back, and once she got stronger, we would go back to Petrograd. She might not have ballet lessons or sweetmeats from Eliseev’s, we might live in a tiny room somewhere, but we would walk down the granite embankments of the Neva and read Pushkin and I would teach her the Argentine tango, let her climb the trees of the Tauride Gardens, look at pictures in the galleries of the Hermitage. And see if we could find a certain clever fox.
13 Chess
I worked in the fields, my birth-emptied body compacting into something I could count on again, while Iskra grew red-cheeked and flirty-eyed. I had never worked so hard in my life. Being Korsakova’s servant was nothing compared to this, not even digging trenches during the German assault. Swinging a scythe, cutting rye with a sickle, binding grain into sheaves with reed grass and standing them up in the fields to dry. I fell asleep as soon as we stopped for a rest, in the shade of a tree or just under a wagon. The village was glad of my help. Their men had all been taken by the Whites when they’d come through in the spring. I learned what it was to work so hard you didn’t think at all. We sang those beautiful songs in order to work at the same pace, as one, and keep our minds off the labor. Nothing I’d ever done in my nineteen years on earth had prepared me for the difficulty of peasant life. I stopped to nurse Iskra under the trees and went right back to the scythe, leaving her under the wagon. We both grew tanned and freckled and strong.
