by Janet Fitch
He put his arm around my waist, leaned into me as if he could draw some of my warmth. “I told you so, didn’t I? I wasn’t making it up.”
I gave him a squeeze. This sweet, anxious, intelligent boy—how could I put a barrier between him and this horror? “We’ll be all right. Just stay away from those kids, okay? Don’t get mixed up in this.”
I could feel him out there. The wolf who was always hungry. I was afraid to even think of him. As I walked home with Iskra through the dark of early morning streets, I could feel him, circling out in the trees, slinking along doorways, watching. But how to stop thinking, how to keep him from my door? I could not stop seeing the way the dead boy had been leaned up against Catherine’s skirts, as if he’d sought refuge there, but too far below the notice of Mother Russia to be protected. I’d been so rattled when I returned that Nadezhda had offered me a sip of samogon from a perfume bottle in her purse. But I wouldn’t start drinking. I couldn’t afford that luxury. When I saw Arkady’s dead body, that’s when I would get good and drunk. I would sit on his grave and drink to his health. In the meantime, I would keep watch. I would rub evergreens along the windowsills.
In the queue the next morning, I took my place with the others, the sleeping Iskra warm and smelling faintly of gingerbread under my sheepskin. “Did you hear, they found a dead boy last night,” I said to the woman ahead of me. “Near the Catherine statue. An orphan boy.”
She shrugged. As if it had nothing to do with her. As if her own children weren’t one disaster away.
I wanted to upset her. I wanted to upset someone. “He had no hands,” I said. “They’d cut off his hands.”
She closed her face like a door. “Well, I didn’t do it.” And turned away.
Day had broken a dull, heavy gray by the time I arrived home. The worn cards lay on the table in the parlor, the air warm and smelling of old people. They would sleep for another few hours. I rescued my pail from our little room and drained the samovar, changed Iskra, lingering over her little legs. Her perfect hands made me weep. Her rubbery body, slight—the milky skin that summer would cover with freckles like my own. O blessed Mother, keep and protect her. Why did we have to live in such a world? I washed her laundry, nursed her, then fell into a black sleep curled around her in our narrow bed.
I was back at the Europa, larger, honeycombed with stairways and halls, passages I’d never seen, corridors and small doors within doors. I stumbled into a room that was Gruzinskaya’s parlor. I hadn’t realized the two were connected. But instead of the old nobles playing whist, a group of men had assembled to play American poker. And it was the conspirators from the dacha in the woods, the last time I’d seen the Archangel, the last time I’d seen Father, when he’d sent me to my death. Here was Karlinsky, and the spy Konstantin. Father wasn’t there, but his Englishman was…and Kolya! He’d been there all along. “One more hand,” he said. But he had no hands.
The sight of those stumps wouldn’t leave me. It took the pleasure out of playing “Magpie, magpie” with my baby, touching each of her tiny fingers, knowing how easily there could be none. Everywhere I saw dead blue eyes and hair of spiderweb, and his child army, an army of shadows. I choked on the suffocating helplessness of it all, the resurfacing of Arkady, coupled with the relentless approach of Yudenich and his Freikorps. I was mired, and could do nothing but sink deeper into the horror.
News of the murder spread through the dormitories of the orphanage like a bloodstain. The lie was given to the orphans’ swaggering and tough talk by their shouts in the night, tears and wet beds. I ended the Shinshen story—Vanka Manka found the egg of Shinshen’s soul inside the chest and cracked it open, exposing its rotten contents to the sun and killing the sorcerer once and for all. Quickly I moved to what I could remember of Treasure Island, Stevenson’s pirates and stowaways. These boys in their rough bunks, the dim light of the lanterns, became the crew of a great ship creaking its way through the night, each alone on his own voyage, together only for a time. Even Maxim would leave eventually. There was no way I could keep him with me, keep him safe. I just hoped it wouldn’t be soon.
Our limited time made the small triumphs more poignant. One evening in the canteen, after they’d devoured their meager dinner of fish soup and coarse bread, Maxim came to my chair and thrust a shabby notebook into my hands. “I wrote a poem. In school.” I could see him struggling not to smile. The other boys were watching our interaction, so I could not betray any favoritism or it would go the worse for him. But this was the first time I’d heard any of ours mention school with anything other than loathing. The older ones mostly skipped that dreaded institution in favor of the far more useful lessons of the street, while the younger ones feigned illness. Maxim opened the tattered book to a scrawl of pencil on the cheap newsprint page.
Vadik was a village runt
His nose ran cold and his eyes ran hot
He lived in the corner of a railway den
He rode under boxcars and sang an orphan song.
One day he met a sailor Red
He left the rails for a Kronstadt bunk
He once was an orphan, now he belongs
To the Kronstadt fleet and the Kronstadt song.
“Teacher said it wasn’t bad.” He shrugged, examining the torn top of his huge old boot, twelve sizes too big for him, he must have stolen them off a drunk. Such hope, such pride in his big, sensitive eyes. Wanting my praise and terrified of it, like a mother protecting her baby from the Evil Eye. Like Sosha, not wanting to lose his little horse. “I can sing it too. Want to hear?” He sang the poem in a minor key, a sweet, true voice.
And I could feel the tentacles of his love reaching through the shattered plates of my armor, searching out my heart.
Yudenich took Iamburg, less than eighty miles away. You could practically hear their boots on the road. The Petrograd Party seized the moment to announce a “Party Week”—special offer to the citizens of Petrograd to join the Bolshevik Party in this time of greatest danger. Comrade Tanya showed us the announcement in Pravda. “No questions asked!” she said. She was working on me and Comrade Nadezhda. “You wouldn’t need anyone to recommend you or even to study. It’s perfect for you burzhui, a time to prove your solidarity. There’ll never be a moment like this again. You’ll be sitting pretty, better rations, get the housing you want…”
Anyone joining now would certainly be proven in solidarity, that was a fact. But the offer also underscored the party’s desperation.
Walking home after my shift in the morning darkness, my bread under my arm, I kept my eyes down, my head and my baby wrapped in the disguise of a heavy scarf, and considered the offer to join the party. It would certainly make life easier for Iskra if I became eligible for other work…But these musings didn’t last long. I was too busy watching besprizorniki slinking along the house entryways, disappearing into dark arches like feral cats. Shinshen’s army of shadows. It was only when I was finally inside the building on Shpalernaya, climbing its toothless stairs, that I felt released from the weight of that ghostly presence, free to consider a warm wash and bed. I hitched Iskra over my shoulder and fished out my key, turned it in the lock.
But something was wrong. The key, rather than opening the door, dropped the lock into place.
It was unlike them—they always fully secured the door, even when the entire Assembly of Nobility was present.
I dropped the key into my pocket, switched Iskra to the other side—away from the pistol—and turned the knob. The door swung open freely. Something was terribly wrong. The firewood was piled high in the doorway as always. The flat was silent, as it always was in the early morning. The samovar stood by on the sideboard—cold to my touch. Discarded hands of whist lay on the green baize. The hair quivered on my neck.
I moved down the main hall, the pistol in my hand concealed in my coat. All the doors stood open. They were gone—the white mouse, old Naryshkin, the Golovins, the Sobietskys, the young ladies. I wandered through the rooms, tryi
ng to piece a picture together. The Sobietskys’ bedroom had been evacuated in a hurry, books scattered, the wardrobe open, the big manuscript, Count Sobietsky’s all-encompassing memoir, gone. Their messy dressing table, powder strewn. Signs of a struggle, or haste? Old Naryshkin’s room, as small as my own, neat and dignified, like a retired sea captain’s. The Golovins’, fussy with bibelots, a squeaky brass bed. I’d never entered any of these rooms. Here was the young ladies’ boudoir, the flocked wallpaper, the odd wooden beds of differing heights, their mismatched quilts piled high. The icon presided in the red corner, a Vladimirskaya. Forgotten in a hasty departure? Or was it arrest? By Stassya’s bed stood a framed pencil drawing of her in profile, no doubt done by some young admirer.
The likely possibility—the Cheka decided at last to end the rule of the nobility on Shpalernaya Street. Perhaps they’d vowed to do a little housecleaning before Yudenich arrived. Matvei on the Red October said that whenever an occupying army was forced to retreat, that’s when you’d see massacres. That’s when pogroms would come, or in our case, Red Terror. Did that mean the Bolsheviks were sure Yudenich was going to win? Were they getting ready to blow up the power plant and sink the ships at Kronstadt? I picked up Stassya Sobietskaya’s navy-blue hat with the soft plume and put it on my own head. Very nice, my red hair and the blue…Would she have left it behind? If it was a Cheka raid, they’d be back to clean out the inventory. I had no use for such a hat, and put it back.
Perhaps the families had fled. Maybe Kolya had come back and told them, Pack up, it’s your last chance, don’t take anything. Perhaps they were joining Yudenich, taking flight behind White lines, heading for Estonia, the best chance for escape. No matter how cold the Sobietskys had been to me, I hoped they weren’t sitting right now in a Cheka cell, waiting for their fate to descend. Gruzinskaya had taken me in, after all, which was more than Mina Katzeva had done. And old Naryshkin, ever polite, a truly noble man. I wouldn’t want to see him in that bloody cellar, or struck by the butt of a Red rifle.
If it had not been for Orphanage No. 6, I would have been here when the Cheka arrived. I might have been swept in with the pack, though I was registered independently with the domkom. I held my fingers hard on my temples, trying to suppress the panic.
I had no reason to stay in my cubbyhole while we waited for Yudenich. I chose to occupy the princess’s room with its needlepoint hangings and enormous Nicholas I wardrobe. When the house was collectivized—as it certainly would be—one could live quite comfortably inside her yawning armoire. I changed Iskra and washed her diaper in cold water, too tired to boil any. I stoked Elizaveta Vladimirovna’s bourgeoika and lay down with Iskra in the middle of the aristocratic bed that smelled of powdered wigs and quadrilles and medicinal drops. I wondered how many generations back you could go before you found a woman who had nursed a child here. We curled up in the dusty bedding like rats in a drawer under the gigantic eiderdown, and fell down the rabbit hole of a dreamless sleep.
22 A Night Journey
Now the orphanage was my sanctuary from the dark chaos of the city, while I feared returning to the empty flat, dreaded the echoing walk home in the stone prison of the streets. The flat seemed to accuse me when I entered. How did you avoid their fate? Guilty, I returned to my servant’s room. Just as well in case we had a return visit from the Cheka—this was the room to which I was registered with the domkom. And who was I? A stray cat, kitten at my side, shrinking at each noise, flinching at shadows.
The revolution was on the run. There was the sense of life on the edge of oblivion. I paced the boys’ dormitory between the double file of bunks, walking Iskra, jiggling her too energetically, and she bawled, upset by my stiffening hands. There was no soothing her. But I was grateful even for my thieving coworkers, for the boys and their excitement at the coming attack. I appreciated their information, what they could glean from the streets. True or not, they knew more than any adult around here, more than the newspapers, that was for sure.
Maxim’s bed was empty. I didn’t like it when he went out after supper. Nadezhda teased me about my little boyfriend, but he worried me. He should have been back by now, most likely with some bit of grotesque news. I wished he would stay inside, wrap himself in the thin blanket of my comfort, but he needed to hear the worst, set it at my feet like a spaniel I couldn’t keep home. The Archangel was selling marafet, a word I didn’t know.
Nikita had sniffed the back of his hand. “Kalinka,” he said. Snowball flower.
“They sell it to the soldiers,” Maxim explained, “so they don’t feel afraid.”
“The Cheka’s all on it,” Nikita added. He didn’t like being topped by the younger boy. “Makes it easy for them, when they pull your teeth out. They don’t care about anything. Where have you been, Grandma? Tahiti?” Teasing me with my Treasure Island.
How casually they took it, that the people who had power over our lives were insensate to suffering.
“I’ve taken it. A lot of us do,” said a new boy, Kostya, from a top bunk. He’d been wary of the orphanage’s matrons in our aprons and white kerchiefs but now saw others competing to impress me. “On the street, you get cold, and hungry. But you get some marafet, you don’t care.”
I wondered how many of my boys had used it. I’d read about the child addicts in those horrible files behind the amber desk. There were thousands of them. They had their own detsky dom. Marafet was cocaine. Stolen from the army, from the field hospitals of the war.
“The Archangel sells it—he sells girls too,” said Nikita. “Not for the night but outright, like a rug.”
“Let’s not talk about this before bed,” I kept telling them. “Try to get some sleep now.”
But tonight Maxim hadn’t returned. Nobody’d seen him. The baby finally fell asleep on my shoulder as I paced the quiet hall from stove to stove, listening to the boys gamble and talk. I could smell chinar. The last thing we needed was a fire in here. Then a girl I knew only by sight, a skinny one with a gap in her teeth, stuck her head around the doorway. She saw Nadezhda, then me. She waved me out into the hall, finger to her lips. I gently lowered Iskra into her basket and carried it over to Hopeless. “Back in a moment.” She nodded, not even looking up from the battered book she was reading.
In the dim corridor, the girl was dancing from foot to foot with terror, with panic. She clutched my hands. “It’s Maxim, he’s downstairs, you’ve got to come!” She flapped her hands with urgency, as if she were drying them.
“What is it? Is he all right?” But she was already running, and I flew after her, down the stairs to the gloomy lobby, the usual loitering boys, veered toward the porte cochere, and there he was, standing with a boy I didn’t know, not one of ours. Something was wrong with him. As I neared the entrance I saw he’d been beaten, a black eye, a split lip. He was terrified, his eyes white all the way around like a frightened horse’s. “What’s happened?” I said as I ran toward him.
Too late. They were all over me. Besprizorniki, six, eight of them. I screamed but nobody moved to help, not the dumbfounded Bolshevik behind the front desk, or the oldest boys observing quite coldly, watching these strange children pull me outside by my hair, my arms, dragging me out into the night. Maxim was the only one trying to stop them. He went wild, sobbing, screaming, jumping onto my assailants’ backs, trying to pry them away as I grabbed the doorjamb and clung to it. A big redheaded girl kicked my hands away. Then I was moving, out to Mikhailovskaya Street, where a running car waited. A Benz Söhne with a surrey top, another redheaded girl at the wheel.
Seeing that car, I fought like a cat, trying to reach the gun at my thigh, but there were too many of them. I was Gulliver in Lilliput. The first girl worked a rough burlap bag over my head and down around my arms, wrapping it with rope. If only I could get my arms free, I didn’t care if they were just little children, I’d kill them all. I kicked someone hard as they shoved me into the Benz. They snatched my boots off, tied my legs.
Now we were driving. The
girl at the wheel turned a hard left onto Nevsky, and stepped on the gas. The icy wind filled the open car—it sliced through me like a scimitar.
I pleaded through the rough burlap. “I have money. Marafet. I’ll pay you. Whatever you like.”
Their laughter. “You got marafet?” “She’s got nothin’ but shitpants.” “Oh, look, your boyfriend’s following us.” The runts jeered and taunted. “Awww, ’e just fell down.” “Oww. Oh, ’es cryin’. Boo hoo…” “Slow down, Klavdia, let’s see if he can catch us.” “Come on, kid, run!”
Poor Maxim! I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. That this was his fault? That he had betrayed me? Ten years old, no matter how tough, was no match for the Antichrist.
I fought to work my hands free of the burlap, get these kids off me. But the crazy motion of the car sent me rolling. The girl at the wheel could barely keep it on the road. We swerved and I hit my head on the car door. She struck something—a curb?—throwing me off the seat onto the floor, the children landing on top of me, screaming with laughter. I roared and cursed. The last time I’d been in this car, little Gurin had been at the wheel. How had I ended up back here, when I had sworn I would fly fast and far? The bag smelled horribly of apples. I’d never eat an apple again.
“Still awake, Comrade?” The sharp point of a knife jabbed me in the shoulder, another in the ass. They laughed as I shrieked curses. Picturing Iskra, sleeping so sweetly in Room III, no idea that Mama was racing away from her, into the night. I knew I had to stay hard for this. At least Iskra was safe, and the farther we went from the Europa, the safer she’d be.
We were flying in a straight line, southeast toward Znamenskaya Square. I pushed down my panic and imagined us as a moving dot on the map of the city. I listened, feeling as hard as I could. Over the roar of the wind and the excited chatter of these infants, the big engine of the Benz Söhne, I reached out to feel the city, hold its design on the page of my mind. I knew its shape like that of my own body, streets crossing canals, bridges. Concentrate. But my teeth were chattering hard enough to break, fear and cold redoubling each other’s effects, impossible to know which was which.
