by Janet Fitch
“So he’s nearby?” I asked. “He said he’d be back soon?”
“He’s a mysterious one, that husband of yours,” said old Naryshkin. “We think he might be in Pskov, in communication with the Northwestern Army.” Yudenich, that is. Estonia. It was all achingly familiar.
“But who knows…” Elizaveta Vladimirovna began, and stopped. They all looked guiltily at one another.
“Oh, it can’t be a secret, this is the man’s own wife,” he said.
“Anyway, it’s just a conjecture,” said Naryshkin.
“He’ll be along. He comes and goes,” said Pavel Alexandrovich. “He takes good care of us, that lad.” The old people nodded. “And as we’re speaking, I should say, I disagree heartily with our Rudolf Platonovich. If, as you say, son, he only wants to cultivate advantage, what would be the advantage in our acquaintance? Where’s the advantage of propping up a household of old museum pieces like ourselves? If he really wanted an advantage, he’d do better to turn us over to the Cheka.”
The white mouse crossed herself. “Don’t say that, Pavel Alexandrovich. Not even in fun. He never would do such a thing, never. That boy is a pillar of strength to us. What hasn’t he done for us? A godsend, I tell you, a saint!”
Count Rudolf and I shared a laugh at that one. There was no question that I knew Kolya intimately, whether or not we were legitimately wed.
“How long has it been since you last saw our Nikolai Stepanovich?” he asked me keenly.
I was too worn out to think up much of a story. “Just before the baby came. He had to return to Petrograd, some sort of emergency.”
They nodded. It seemed to mean something to them. Perhaps they believed him involved with Yudenich’s try at Petrograd, when the English sank those battleships. Oh, what a nest of counterrevolutionaries. I was exhausted. Would they ever stop talking and invite me to stay?
“I don’t like it. If I might speak frankly, the fellow’s a well-known smuggler, speculator, and counterfeiter,” said Platonovich, “not to mention opportunist, womanizer—pardon me, Madame—and scoundrel. He might have all of you hypnotized”—he pointed around the gloomy room—“but I must call a spade a spade.”
“He’s Stepan Shurov’s son,” said old Naryshkin, shuffling the cards. “A wild one, but ours.”
Nash, ours. Other languages had no cognate to the Russian nash. For us, ours were relatives, dear friends, one’s class, one’s race, one’s blood. The people we cared about, whose sins we always pardoned, and the hell with everyone else. And the Bolsheviks were as Russian as anyone—they had their own nash. With us or against us.
“No doubt. But still, I count my fingers every time I shake his hand,” said the count. “I’m talking about character, now, not politics.”
Although the man was probably right, no one likes to hear one’s lover disparaged by those who don’t love him—even if correctly assessed. He was our own nash, Iskra’s and mine. I set my teacup and saucer down on the gateleg table. “Whatever my husband’s activities and business affairs, you can rest assured he would not need your fingers.”
Old Naryshkin laughed. I imagined he had been quite something in his time. You could see traces of it still, in his sly laughter, his quick blue eyes.
I yawned as they chattered back and forth like so many parrots in a South American jungle, my head drooping, then jerking upright before I fell off the couch.
“Oh, but we’ve been keeping you awake. Forgive me, how neglectful of us!” At last, the white mouse recognized my situation. “And you’ve traveled so far. It’s just so rare that we have a chance to talk to a new person—one does have to be so careful nowadays, and we’ve lost so many…” The old people said nothing. Only the sound of the clock’s soft chime broke the silence. “Let’s not speak of that. Better days, da? Come, we have an empty room. Please do us the honor. It’s a pleasure to have you with us. No, don’t say no. I know you think we’re just so many old fools, but it would be lovely, really. Aglaya, Aglaya!”
The next thing I knew I was back in that same empty room next to the kitchen, Aglaya making up the bed, moving the familiar heaps of furniture. Here Kolya and I made love that last night in October. How we burned. Like two pieces of paper in a hot stove.
19 Night Shift
Thus, despite Sobietsky’s suspicion that I was what I actually was—an interloper, improvident, a libertine—I became part of the commune of intransigent reactionaries, the most likely spot in which to wait for Kolya’s return. Most importantly, I was awarded the job at Orphanage No. 6 over Pancake Makeup’s friend’s claims. In the daytime, I slept, queued, and cared for Iskra in the small room next to Aglaya’s. I did my best to skirt the parlor, mainly to avoid confrontations with the young ladies of the household, Darya and Anastasia Sobietskaya. Darya, a few years older, was tolerable, a tall, long-nosed girl, patient like her mother, inclined to melancholy—a real Chekhovian dreamer. She would surely have been married off by now had the Russian nobility not been residing in Paris this season. Instead, she gave piano lessons, and French, though it wasn’t in her nature to teach. She didn’t have the gift. She was nervous and overly solicitous, didn’t know how to correct someone who was paying her. “Très bien,” I overheard her telling a commissar’s well-fed girlfriend, who came for French twice a week. “Although, really, it’s trop without the p, not troppe.” She was the one I’d pegged for a potential babysitter.
The other one, Stassya, a student at the university—smaller and more feminine than Darya, clever and waspish like her father—took an instant dislike to me. I wondered if Kolya had made love to her, a smoldering, smoky-eyed blonde about my age, if she was the one the princess had in mind for his future wife. Perhaps she had thought so too. Or perhaps she hoped life would always be aesthetically lovely, without noise and the pressing needs of others. “I can’t breathe in here,” she told her parents, loudly enough to be overheard. “Why don’t you just bring in the yardman and his twelve screaming brats and have done with it.”
Of course, Iskra cried when she needed a change, or was hungry, but generally she was a good baby. I knew how lucky I was. I hung the diapers in my own room to avoid the smell that Stassya insisted was stinking up the house. I tried to make peace with her early in my stay, complimenting her on a hat that was clearly Parisian—though a little shabby, it still bore the mark of couture—as she arranged it in the hallway mirror.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said, tucking stray strands of her long hair into her simple coiffure. “Never speak to me. I don’t know you, I don’t want to know you.”
Still, I nursed the possibility that I might be able to leave Iskra with these people from time to time. I asked Alla Denisovna if she could requisition a baby bottle for me, and the next night, I found it waiting for me under the counter. At home, I boiled it for ten minutes, then heated some of my precious Drops of Milk ration, and took Iskra back into our room to practice with it. I thought it would be easy—of course my brilliant daughter would know what to do. It never occurred to me that she would rebel. It was as if she knew I was trying to cheat her out of her birthright, her beloved breast, as if she knew that I was planning to leave her—and she gazed at me with such despair. But it was dangerous to have her only able to feed from my body. We have to be prepared, Iskra—for everything. Her eyes welled. “Iskra, please, just a little. Try it, ma petite. For Mama?” I teased her mouth with the rubber teat, traced the little bow, squirted milk onto her lips, but she shoved it away and began to wail. I steeled my heart against her sorrow. “Don’t be a silly girl. It’s yummy!” I pretended to drink. “Mmmm,” but she was howling loud enough to be heard in San Francisco, or at least by the oldsters in the parlor, and certainly by the Sobietskys, who already hated us. I was weeping and then my milk let down. In the end, it was not Iskra who surrendered. And in truth, nursing her was bliss, the quiet, her dreamy eyes gazing up into mine, while she still hiccupped from her last fit, her tiny hand reaching up to touch my face. We just could not
be separated, and that was that.
And even if I’d been successful, it wouldn’t have mattered. One afternoon I floated the suggestion to Darya of looking after Iskra for an hour. The elder sister turned as pale as her music sheets. “I wouldn’t know what to do with an infant. Please don’t ask.” I knew enough not to ask Stassya, who would rather have dropped her out the window, and I was too obligated to the old princess to ask her or the other card players. The countess Sobietskaya was far too busy helping the count with his memoir. I tried Aglaya but she shrank back as if the baby might explode. “Don’t I have enough to do with all of them and their fussing? What if she choked?”
Until Kolya showed up, it looked like it would be me and Iskra in our country of two in the servant’s room with the diapers hanging.
I liberated an old basket from the flat’s junk room, set Iskra up in it on the Europa’s famous marble counter, where, safe behind the cage, I addressed myself to the tidal wave of case files. Night after night, I moved grains of sand from one pile to the other. I had stopped reading the details, for the most part, except for the worst, the most heartbreaking. These I felt a duty to read, as if it somehow kept those children company, to witness what had become of them. Gonchalovsky, Efraim. Age 11. Drank shoe polish. Bitov, Sergei. Age 8. Hung himself in the janitor’s closet among the brooms. The result of the endless bullying, beatings, or simply haunted memories of being lost in a train station as parents pushed onto a train, or watching them die of typhus or cholera.
Bit by bit, the mountain melted as I filed the accursed children away into alphabetical ranks, taking their sorrows into my own heart. The cleaner the counter, the darker and more stained my soul. The latrine of revolution, Orphanage No. 6.
One night I arrived for work to discover another girl sitting behind the amber counter, reading Pravda on my newly cleaned desk. From the satisfied look on her flaccid face, I surmised that Pancake Makeup’s friend had finally found her way to my job. She pointed to the assignment board. There was my name, Kuriakina, written in a firm blocky hand, moved from Administrative to Infant Department. Well, I told myself as I climbed to the second-floor rear, carrying Iskra in her basket, how bad could it be? Babies I understood. They wouldn’t beat each other up, or bring men back to service under the noses of the others. They wouldn’t drink shoe polish or hang themselves in the janitor’s closet.
I found the room, spacious and reasonably clean, lit by kerosene lamps. The din was tremendous. Twenty babies, crying at once. They didn’t notice what a fine view they had onto Arts Square, where a crowd collected outside the Mikhailovsky Theater in anticipation of a concert. This had been one of the best suites, plaster grapes and angels on its coped ceiling, the fancy inlaid parquet. None but the best for our orphans. Strangely, none of the babies exhibited much gratitude for such luxury accommodations. Iskra joined the chorus of wails. A stolid-faced, broad-nosed woman with a creased brow in a nurse’s uniform was changing a baby. “I’m Nonna,” she said over her shoulder. “They said they were sending someone. About time. Is that your kid?”
I put Iskra over my shoulder, patted her, trying to quiet her, but she was already joining the collective, a good Soviet citizen. “I had to bring her, there’s nowhere to leave her.”
“There’s an empty crib if you want it,” she said, nodding toward the wall, a mesh cage on legs.
I didn’t want to put Iskra in a crib recently vacated by a baby who may have died of smallpox or cholera or God knew what. “That’s okay, I brought a basket.” I put the willow basket, which had once held Emilia Ivanovna’s balls of yarn, onto the floor near the stove—it was wonderfully warm—and tucked Iskra inside it. I hated to let her just cry. She wasn’t used to being treated so foully, but I had our bread to earn. I hung up my coat and put on an apron that hung from a hook, the white nurses’ kerchief.
The room smelled of milk, baby shit, and carbolic. “How can you stand it?” I shouted over the noise, then thought of Stassya Sobietskaya.
“Stand what?” Nonna replied, efficiently changing the diaper of one of her screaming charges.
In the Infant Department, we were on a three-hour rotation. Change, feed, sleep. She approached them with all the tenderness of a worker on an assembly line. I began at the far end. The first one had awful diaper rash. “What do I do about these sores?”
She shrugged. “Clean him up, best you can. We used to have fish oil but somebody stole it.” To cook with, no doubt. “Keep going, we gotta feed ’em too. Then it starts again.”
It was a night of poor, sad diapers, nothing like Iskra’s solid, compact masses. These were watery, greenish, diarrheic—that reminded me all too vividly of my cholera patients at Pulkovo Observatory. I kept washing my hands in the hot water we left on the stove, washed them until they were raw, trying to sanitize between each infant’s diaper change, as Nonna clucked and shook her head. I was only midway through my babies when my milk let down. Now I had to stop and nurse Iskra—terrified I would infect her with whatever was plaguing the orphan babies. I thought I was going to lose my mind with that screaming. I gave Iskra a quick feed—her eyes widened in outrage when I pulled her off me. The look in her eyes was precisely the sorrow of a lover who suddenly finds her man becoming cold and efficient with her. She screamed when I put her back in her basket. “Forgive me,” I kept saying. I shut my ears and returned to the diapers.
“Take these down to the laundry.” Nonna nodded at the great pile of them in the wheeled cart. “And bring us up some more water.” She began filling bottles from a pot of milk on the stove—this precious milk, how far had it come? I only prayed she’d washed adequately.
After we had them all changed and fed, we sat on the windowsill for a smoke. I could hear people in front of the Mikhailovsky at the interval, talking in the frosty air. “How can you do this? How can you bear it?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “They’ve got food, they’ve got blankets. More than what some of them’s got out there, da? You’ll get used to it. It’s these next ones do it to me.” She nodded toward another door. “Go in there if you want to stab yourself in the heart.”
I didn’t want to stab myself in the heart, but I was unable not to see for myself. I rose and pushed open the door. In the dim light of the nurse’s kerosene lamp—toddlers, in little corrals of cribs that had been lashed together, one against the other, to keep them from rattling, I supposed. Most were asleep, but several stood and rhythmically rocked, staring at me with big glassy eyes, like so many piglets in pens, or lay listlessly, looking through the peeling bars. Two to a pen, they pulled each other’s hair and sucked their fists. Turning to each other for a scrap of comfort. These tiny children had no idea how horrifying they were. Accusing me in their innocence—Why have you put us here? Do something. We need you.
Their abandonment made them absolutely terrifying. I could so easily see myself looking out through their staring eyes. If our infants survived our care, mine and Nonna’s, they would only end up here, staring and banging the crib. And the silence was worse than the screaming. At least our babies knew enough to howl. These children had already given up. I couldn’t stay in here another moment. Please, God, don’t assign me to toddlers. As it was, I would dream about them, vast rooms of abandoned, tiny, sentient creatures in metal pens, like a stockyard.
Late in the night, a timid woman entered the Infant Department, a bundle in her arms. We were in the middle of the second cycle, up to our elbows in baby shit, but I washed my hands and came to her. The bundle was crying, but weakly. The woman was a worker, not young, wearing a tattered skirt, a wet, felted scarf. Her long, thin face was nearly blue, her hands long and bony. “I can’t feed him,” she said softly, holding the baby in its poor blanket. She didn’t weep, she didn’t have enough liquid left in her. A dried-out shell of a woman, speaking in a monotone. “He’s a good baby, but I’m fed out.” She was missing several teeth, her lips serrated with lines. I had never seen real despair before, despair like that. “I got t
wo older kids,” she said quietly. “I need to think of them.”
“Don’t you get the milk ration?” I asked.
“I have to think of the others,” she said in that same monotone, as if it were her last instruction in the world, as she held out the shredded gray blanket that contained the baby. “I give Auntie the milk. She takes a third of my pay. I have to work. But it’s not enough.” I took the infant from her. It was about three weeks old. It clearly wasn’t going to make it, blue faced and thin. She just couldn’t bear to see it die. I put it in an empty crib and took the woman in my arms. She didn’t embrace me back, didn’t weep, just rested her head on my shoulder, weary, weary of living, weary of trying to keep things alive.
After a week in the Infant Department, not one but two dead babies later, including the one the woman brought in—they just didn’t wake up for their shift, swaddled small and inert, like small sacks of oats—I came to work to find my name moved, transferred again—this time, Kuriakina, Girls 6–9.
I wept with relief.
In a small room on the third floor, with six bunk beds, two of which were unoccupied, ten little girls gathered in ragged shifts and shaved heads. For the first time, I wondered why there were so few girls, when the halls were full of boys. Was it that they were better beggars, and didn’t feel the need to seek the shelter of the orphanage? Or was it that their parents struggled harder not to abandon them, feeling that they wouldn’t be able to scratch a living on the street, while their sons could be turned out-of-doors with better chances of survival? Maybe they ran off less. Or worse. Someone else might be finding them before we did.
“I’m Comrade Marina,” I said, pulling a stool up to their little stove. They pressed in around me, trying to peer into the sling where my daughter was playing with her fingers. “This is Iskra.”
