by Janet Fitch
“I still have milk,” I whispered. “I could feed your son.”
She lifted him onto my lap. I opened my coat, my dress, held my breast out to him. At first he shrank from it, but she pinched it expertly, and the milk came squirting out onto his lips. He tasted and drank greedily. He had teeth. I never saw Iskra’s first tooth cut that smooth gum. Her child was hurting me—my nipple still sore from the Archangel—but I didn’t pull away. A small blessing—Iskra never did have to drink from the breast he had touched.
“Was it your first baby?” the gray woman asked.
I nodded.
She sat next to me, stroked her child’s curls. “This is my third. God took the others.”
God took them. How simply she said it. As if God had reached into a fruit bowl and selected a juicy apple. If I believed in God so completely, there would be nothing to do but submit. A mysterious God who gives and takes for his own reasons, far too deep for mortals to understand. But I didn’t live in that universe. I lived in a universe of chaos and sudden catastrophe.
“You’ll have to stop the milk,” she said.
Standing on the bench, she took a bundle of dried herbs from a beam she was too short to reach, though I would have been able to unhook the bundle without even straining. She gave it to me, a powdery silver-leafed plant. “It’s sage,” she said. “Chew on it or make a tea, until the milk stops. If you get lumps, rub them with your fingertips. Like this.” She illustrated with her fingertips, little circles. “You’re young. There will be others.”
“No. No more.”
The gravedigger was cleaning his nails with his new penknife. “You have a husband?”
I nodded. My two husbands. Neither of whom had seen their daughter, the perfection of her, the force of her personality. Nor would they ever.
“You’ll have more children, then. A houseful of them.”
No. No house. No houseful. No children. I shook my head, dripping tears into the child’s hair, like raindrops.
“You have so much love in you still,” the wife said, her hand on my shoulder. “Look, you love my son. God has filled your heart with love. How could you go on without someone to give it to?”
I had no idea.
After a while, she took him off me. He stood, gazing at us both. He was so short, standing there, like a tiny man in his cut-down clothes. Iskra never got a chance to stand. Not even crawl.
The wife made sage tea for me. After I was done, she embraced me, kissed me three times. “Go home.” She patted my hand, which still bore my daughter’s blood. “Live, and God bless you. Make a confession. Tell Theotokos of your sorrows. Only the Virgin can console you.”
I passed a church by the Obvodny Canal, a narrow little church with a single eave over the door, and obediently, hopelessly, I entered. Inside, a couple of old women lit candles. The icon of the Virgin gazed out of her frame with her son on her lap, so helpless. His death foretold before his birth. As Iskra’s had been. I kissed the icon, made the sign of the cross, lit a stub of candle. A priest watched me, but I had confessed enough. Now you know, said the Virgin. I was not consoled.
26 The Petrograd Card
It seems we are tied to life by bureaucracy. My papers were too precious to abandon. Even with feet like pilings in the shore, I was forced to return to Orphanage No. 6 and recover my bag, my labor book, my ration cards. So awful to understand that I would still have to eat, and sleep somewhere, and continue to draw breath. I kept my eyes averted as I walked past the place…and entered the amber foyer. I shut my ears to the children’s clamor. I saw nothing. Alla Denisovna rose from behind her overfull desk. “Marina—” But I walked right past her, down the hall, past the clattering typewriters, into Matron’s office. No one stopped me. I was terrifying—like a Gorgon, I would turn their flesh to stone.
Matron was writing something at her desk, a heavy woman with a heavy glance and a heavy job to do. “Close the door,” she said, not looking up. “They brought me your things.” My bag was there, Iskra’s basket. My hat and gloves.
She examined me with a cool brown gaze. “Do you want to tell me what went on here last night?”
It was only last night? I was as mute as Olimpia. My breath froze in my throat. If I spoke, a monster would come out, something murderous with a thousand razor-sharp teeth. My breath tasted of sage and earth.
“All right,” she said, folding her thick hands. “What do you want to do? Do you want to come back to work?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to see human beings ever again. I wanted to put screws into metal, sew shoes. I wanted a job in a telephone exchange.
“Do you have anyone you can stay with, friends or family?” The empty apartment on Shpalernaya yawned like a tomb. I shook my head again, staring at my feet, the worn toes of my boots—a surprise to see them on my feet. I thought of Maxim’s oversized ones. Had anyone saved them? “You’ll come stay with me, then.” She lowered her eyes to her paperwork. It had been decided. “Just for a few days. Until all this settles out.”
People came and went, ignoring me as I lay on the bench in the corner of Matron’s office, my face to the wall. They talked about evacuating the orphanage. Worried about the food supply. I wrapped myself around my grief, pressing it to my aching womb. I thought I would raise my child like a little gift in a ginger-colored box, to present to her bright-eyed father. Not realizing how I would love her, how important she would become to me. Bigger than life. Each eyelash weighed more on the scale of my heart than this whole building. The arrogance, thinking I could just wheel into Petrograd as I had Izhevsk and Tikhvin. I didn’t know yet if she was left- or right-handed. Whether she liked to paint, or sing. She’d never have a first kiss, a first love. No doggies, no skating, no picture books in bed. No summer days swimming in a river under the trees.
It won’t live, Mother had said.
That curse. She was right, but certain news you should keep to yourself.
I lay on the bench, staring at the same crack in the green wall that looked like Italy. I picked at it. This room, green walls to six feet, then the white of old teeth. The smell of the children’s dinner cooking. My breasts ached. Time to feed the baby, they said. Time to feed a baby that didn’t exist. My breasts were so ignorant, so hopeful. I could go upstairs and feed the infants, but instead I chewed sage leaves. I was a mother no more. The taste of my milk would be as bitter as wormwood, all my grief distilled.
I ate dinner in the canteen with Matron, and nobody spoke to us. Then I followed her home through the dark sleety streets to a good-sized room on nearby Millionnaya Street. All her own, nicer than most. There were books in cabinets, a diploma from the Bestuzhev Institute for Women. Photographs of broad-jawed, broad-shouldered ancestors. Intelligenty. She didn’t try to talk to me. She didn’t tell me she was sorry. She just handed me tea and read the papers. I lay on the divan and followed the fancy molding around the ceiling, oak leaves and acorns—around and around.
What do you call a child without a mother? An orphan.
What do you call a mother without a child? A mother.
The next day, Matron let me stay in her flat alone. “You won’t do anything to yourself?” she asked. “I’m trusting you.” Her normally impassive face was even heavier. I lay on the divan and watched light move across the room, which faced south. A warm light, kindly as it touched the walls, fingered the books, whitened the glass of the photographs, traveling all day, and then disappearing into the blue of dusk. It was dark when Matron came home again and turned on the lamps. There was a hunk of bread for me, a piece of hard sausage, but I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t care if I never ate again.
The next day the same.
After that, I returned to the orphanage with her, ate in the canteen, my mouth making the right movements, but things catching in my throat. Matron deposited her bulk between me and the others, to give me some privacy. I could feel my coworkers wanting to deliver kind words, regrets, but there was no reason to talk, nothing they could
say would make any difference. The children were staring, I could feel their eyes burning into my skin. I didn’t want to love them anymore, my boys, my girls. People died too easily in this world. They had been there. When she was alive. When he jumped. Any of them could have stopped it.
At night, we walked the few blocks home in the freezing rain, careful not to twist an ankle where missing street pavers filled with water, passersby shuffling along listlessly. The White advance was coming. Any moment now. Yudenich was in Gatchina, he was in Tsarskoe Selo, a half day’s walk away. And nobody was doing anything about it. We had given up. We were just waiting for someone to end it. Someone handed me a pamphlet and disappeared into the dark.
PEOPLE OF PETROGRAD, THE BOLSHEVIKS HAVE ABANDONED YOU!
EVEN NOW YOUR LEADERS ARE EVACUATING,
LEAVING YOU TO YOUR FATE—
I crumpled it, threw it into the street. The end was coming, and no one had the energy to lift a hand to save himself. Exhausted, apathetic, despairing. Waiting for death.
I wondered if this pamphlet was from my father’s group, planning for the arrival of the Whites. In a different time stream, he would have seen Iskra, his brilliant granddaughter, Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Gennadievna Shurova Kuriakina. Would he have dangled his gold Breguet for her baby hands to reach for, let her hear the hour’s chime? His wedding present from the woman who was once my mother. Where were they now? Alive or dead? The watch I imagined lay now in the pocket of some English diplomat. The little chime, exchanged for the White cause.
In her sweater, which she wore like a cape, knees covered with a knitted shawl, Matron read the newspapers. The progress of Yudenich, the retreat of the Red forces. Poor Petrograd, this cursed city. Cursed from its birth, born alive over the bones of forty thousand. Now about to be crushed. As my child was crushed. The party had jumped off a building with the city in its arms.
Would I prefer that it had never been built? Would I prefer that Iskra had never been born, so I wouldn’t love her? So I wouldn’t have to mourn her?
One morning something had changed. People walked urgently—they’d stopped dragging their feet. They carried shovels and picks. During breakfast at the canteen, forcing kasha down my throat, which fought the groats—my morning contest—a short, grim-faced woman, one of the typists of the day shift, marched up to Matron. “We’ve called a meeting,” she said. “The orphanage committee’s waiting for you.”
We followed her to the office, Matron walking briskly but unhurriedly, rolling stiffly like an old sailor. And I trailed behind, no one. A shadow, a smudge on the wall.
In the large room, the workers’ representatives had gathered. Kitchen staff, laundry, maintenance, administrative, matrons. My coworkers, that collection of shirkers, bureaucrats, absentees, and petty thieves all talking at once. Nobody noticed me on the bench in the corner. Comrade Tanya rapped on Matron’s desk with her knuckles. “I’ve just been at the district soviet,” she called out as the others quieted. Her normally made-up face was pale and shone with an unfamiliar fervor. “I want to report to you—Comrade Trotsky has returned to Petrograd. He’s going to lead the defense of the city.”
Trotsky was here. Comrade Trotsky, who’d turned the tide of the war. I turned over to listen.
“As the elected representative for Orphanage No. 6, I’ve been asked to read Comrade Trotsky’s words.” Tanya opened a folded pamphlet, cleared her throat, and began to read in her halting voice: “Petrograd, wounded but still strong, is in danger. Comrades, we took too much from you. Now we are trying, with feverish in-ten-sity, to give back…” Her singsong voice, the stumbling mispronunciations, nothing like his force, his energy. But it didn’t matter. I knew what he sounded like, had heard him speak at the Cirque Moderne. And now he had returned, to save us.
“If Petrograd were to be taken…Soviet power would still stand. But in the last few days, when the fall of Petrograd began to seem a real possibility…an electric shock ran through the country…and all said, ‘No!’”
He’d come to shake us from our torpor.
Tanya described the Red successes in the east, chasing Kolchak, the battles for Tambov and Kozlov. “There may be retreats and advances in this struggle, but there is one retreat, Comrades, which we will never permit ourselves, and that is a retreat eastwards from Petrograd.”
I surprised myself by sitting up.
“We are at present going through a critical period on the Petrograd front. The new re-in-force-ments have not yet been con-cen-tra-ted and de-ployed…Every day and hour now has co-los-sal im-por-tance for you. On other fronts we could withdraw weak-ened di-vi-sions fifteen or twenty versts to the rear and re-form them…but here, on the Petrograd front, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of withdrawing.”
Fifteen or twenty versts—they’d have to withdraw to Finland.
“We realize, of course, that they will not take Petrograd. A city of a million people cannot be carried off in the clutches of a gang of a few thousand men. But they can inflict damage, cause cruel loss of blood.”
I remembered Izhevsk. The gibbets standing in the square, ropes still attached, where the Whites had killed a thousand people just three weeks prior to our arrival. I could still see that bloody wall outside the munitions plant. How sick I’d been…my enormous belly. The beginning of my labor. Iskra and I, we had never been apart from this war, not really.
“We will not hide from the broad masses of the people the dangers, the blunders and me-na-ces, that lie in wait for us. Our Petrograd card, which is in-fin-ite-ly dear and important to us, is in danger of being covered. We must defend ourselves not only along the nearby line of Detskoe Selo but here, in the very heart of Petrograd.”
Petrograd like an ace in the green baize center of the gaming table. How I’d struggled to bring her here, so she could grow up a Petersburger. Was I a fool? Should I have jumped into a hole and pulled a lid over us? Would she have been safe then? I was too exhausted to think of it. We lived inside a war. There were no safe corners, not in Kambarka or at Smolny itself.
“Comrades, those who are perhaps pre-par-ing to de-scend on Petrograd in a night raid, so as to cut the throats of sleeping workers, their wives and children, must know that…Petrograd is already working fev-er-ish-ly…to make of its districts a series of im-preg-na-ble forts…”
Now I understood this morning’s shovels. There might be graves, but first there would be trenches.
“This is a huge la-by-rinth of a city, which covers a hundred square versts, a city with a million in-ha-bi-tants, in whose hands there are mighty means of defense…”
The cotton that had stuffed my ears since Iskra’s death had loosened, and I saw his strategy. He was going to use what he had—streets, canals, buildings, and people. Petrograd itself.
“Comrades, in these days, these hours, you must mobilize for internal defense. Everyone who is not capable of, or cannot be taken away for, par-ti-ci-pa-tion in ex-ter-nal defense…working women—wives and mothers able to wield rifles, revolvers, and hand grenades no less well than men—will defend in the streets, squares, and buildings of Petrograd, the future of the working class of Russia and of the world.”
Glances caromed off the faces of the staff—the red-faced laundress, the sour typist. Nadezhda, in her white apron and kerchief. Matron herself, as square and firm as a fieldstone. And me, my useless, childless, hollowed-out self.
“Last night we proved that when the alarm has been sounded, the proletariat of Petrograd is able to respond…and if circumstances require this, it will remain at the ready tonight and tomorrow night, in double and even treble strength…”
Could I put my grief aside for two days, to protect my native city, this precious scrap of stone and water? Would Iskra want me to lie on a bench and turn my face to the wall? Was that why I had called her Iskra? It would dishonor her to do nothing but weep and wait for the bayonets.
“In these gloomy, cold, hungry, anxious October days of bad autumn weather, Petrograd is showi
ng us once again a ma-jes-tic picture of élan, self-confidence, en-thu-si-asm and heroism. The city, which has suffered so much, which has so often been sub-jec-ted to dangers…is still what it was, the torchbearer of the revolution. And, backed by the combined forces of the whole country, we shall surrender this Petrograd to no one.”
I didn’t wait for the meeting to break up. I put on my coat and gloves and, before the committee had even discussed the defense, I was out the door. I knew where I was heading. Yudenich would not drive his tanks over my daughter’s grave.
27 Vintovka
A crowd of gray-faced workers gathered in the sleet outside the Moskovsky District Soviet. I joined a group of women who said they were from the shoe factory Skorokhod. A comrade directed us to a supply center on the Obvodny Canal, where they handed out shovels and burlap sandbags. Our crew leader, a woman with a short, sturdy nose and slightly crossed eyes under thick brows like a man, grabbed my arm. “Who are you? Are you Skorokhod? I never saw you before.”
I wrenched my arm away. Who was I? An unanswerable question. But I had no time for philosophy. “I’m a matron at Orphanage No. 6, up on Nevsky.”
“So what are you doing down here?” She squinted nastily. What, did she think I was a White spy, down here to steal sandbags for Yudenich? That I would leak the location of the shoe factory?
“This is where Yudenich is coming,” I said. “And this is where we should stop him. Not wait until he checks into the Astoria.”
A woman to my left laughed out loud. The crew boss shot her a frosty look, shoved my arm away as if it were a dead thing, and went off to stick her nose into somebody else’s business. “Don’t mind Elizaveta,” the woman said. Her blue eyes bulged slightly under her brown woolen scarf. “She’s always like that. Constipated. Though with that bread, who isn’t?” The snow was starting to stick to her scarf and shoulders. “I like that shapka.” She pointed to my fox-fur hat. “Did you kill it yourself?”
