by Janet Fitch
“Who would believe them? No one.” He stroked my hair, letting his fingers linger in the strands. “Who was on the front lines in February 1917? In October? We were. Who won the civil war? We did. Who fought alongside Trotsky’s troops in the very worst days? We did. Nobody’s going to paint us as counterrevolutionaries.”
“And if they refuse your demands?”
He picked up the comb from my desk, flipped it in his hands. “The Bolsheviks are not the revolution. They’ve taken it somewhere and hidden it under a haystack. We’re sick of Bolsheviks. The worker is sick of them. How is this country going to repair itself when the people don’t trust their own government?”
I pressed my cheek to his, drinking in his scent, the salty decks of the rebellious ships. Freedom.
“It’s not just us.” He put his arm around me, spoke into my ear. “It’s everybody. The workers. The peasants. You know the peasants have to turn over more out of this year’s harvest than they planted? It can’t go on. It’s time for them to listen. We’re just making sure they can hear.”
He tried running my comb through my hair, but it snagged in the tangles. I took it away from him and combed his own crinkly blond hair, so cropped it was impossible to snag, and marveled at the daring of Pasha and his men, men and women like him. Not just to join their voices with the millions—that would be easy, it had a momentum of its own. But to be among the few, to let their voices sound out as a collection of individuals, with individual faces, minds, and hearts. He would be so easy to kill, my Argonaut, sitting here holding the black print of the future in his salt-toughened hands. Would they succeed? Could they really do it? I could just as easily see his vulnerable body hanging from the tram wires on the Troitsky Bridge, or crumpled before a firing squad. Or worse. I didn’t want to imagine what they would do to these men.
But who was to say history stopped with us? Who was to say this too would not pass away—the Bolshevik stranglehold on the soviet—as the Provisional Government had, and the tsar. “They’ll have to negotiate with you. How can they not?”
He thumbed my cheek. Rope, seaweed, ice. “They might, they might not. They want the respect of the people. But if they decide not to listen…You know how big a 350 millimeter gun is? The shells weigh a ton apiece. They reload three a minute. We can hit a target thirty kilometers away. Each ship has twelve, and that’s just the ships. Think the Bolsheviks are up for a fight like that? Over open ice, with no cover? Against us? Our Red brothers, whom we’ve defended in battle, who fought alongside us for three long years? They know what we’re made of. Do you think they’d willingly fight us—we, who died for them?” He pressed his forehead to mine, blue-green eyeball to brown. “This is it, Marina. I had to come tell you. I know my poems stink, but this is my poem.”
We clung to each other, foreheads together, as the gravity of the moment sank in. Kronstadt, the flower of the Red Navy, had challenged the Bolsheviks to a high-stakes game. Its price was blood and its prize was Russia. Something banged in the next room, Shafranskaya moving around. She probably heard every word we said. Pasha was in danger here. People had seen him downstairs, they knew he was in my room. Were there informers at the House of Arts? I let my inner eye run over the faces in the canteen, in the halls. None stood out. Anton was jealous, sulky and resentful, but not treacherous. Anyone else? Did I have enemies? I didn’t take as much care as I might…If anyone found these posters at the House, we all could be accused of treason.
Pasha’s hand moved under my coat, inside my dress, sought my breast. He kissed my neck, my mouth. His blue-green gaze grayed in seriousness. “I wish we had more time.”
We kissed, like sea creatures, not needing to breathe, twining our tentacles around one another. Not even time to make love. “I have to go.” He gently extricated himself from my arms, collecting himself before battle. Now I felt the other side of him. That unknown language of him—the man of blood, the fighter. Fist of the revolution.
“Can I help you post the bills?” I was no soldier, only a poet, and I had no 350 millimeter poems. It would mean death to be caught with such papers. I touched his face like a blind girl, memorizing the hard bones. He kissed the palm of my hand. There were worse fates than to die with such a man. Now I understood how a wife could follow a husband to prison or exile. “I could hold them for you. I could keep a lookout.”
He patted my face, roughly, between both his palms, as if catching and releasing me, as a child pats his mother’s cheeks. “I’m not the only one in town. You just keep the lantern lit. Write a poem about me, your heroic Kronstadt sailor. I’ll be back before morning. You can read it to me.”
The light guttered in the lamp, I had the wick turned down as far as I could to save the kerosene, and waited for him to appear out of the black night, my mouth dry with the fear that he wouldn’t. I’d remember his courage, whether he was killed tonight or not. I wished I’d asked him about the joke he told himself about life and kept behind his eyes, the laughter that never went out. I prayed it wouldn’t be tortured from him. I would imagine it living within him until the very end.
I sipped pine-needle tea—it was bitter, but we’d heard that drinking it kept scurvy at bay. Since then we’d all switched to pine needles. The corridor smelled like the forest at Maryino. I imagined Pasha with his resolutions and a glue pot nestled under his shirt to keep it warm, out in the dark and the swirling snow. Finding a wall, somewhere the resolution would be seen but not torn down too quickly—a courtyard, a corner in a workingman’s district, the opening of a passageway. Brushing snow off the stone. As he held the poster up by a forearm, the brush went into the pot and slap slap, up onto the wall. Watching for patrols, and on to the next spot. How diligent would patrols be on a night like this? Normally I’d say not very, but it was martial law—they must know the rebels were in town, or why impose a curfew?
I hadn’t even thought about that. The patrols, the sentries on the bridges, weren’t only to keep the workers in but also the sailors out. If they spotted him, they wouldn’t even wait to see what he was doing. They’d shoot him before he had a chance to run, because he was out, and the night belonged to the Bolsheviks, and also the day. I saw his flawless body facedown in the snow, and the falling flakes erasing him. By morning he’d be buried, along with the secret joke. He said he’d go toward the Admiralty docks and Kolomna—the neighborhood of the sailors’ club, which had been recently closed. Now I knew why. The spot where we were going to launch our sailboat this spring, when all this was over. If he could only live through this night.
I listened as a dog listens, for the smallest sound. All sounds were suspect. Anything at all could mean danger, anything could lead to death. No gunshots, that was good, silence was sweet on a night like this, but snow muffled sounds. Would I hear a shot? No boot steps in the hall or on the stairs—that was important too. No visitors and no shots. Here was where Blok’s sounds had gone.
I thought of Pasha’s smile. How could he still smile like that? I wished I were a sculptor, to capture forever the ropy square shoulders, his chiseled leanness, that grace. How I wanted to see him on the deck of a boat, sailing between islands in an azure sea, leaning into the wind. I knew how he’d squint, take our bearings. He was so straightforward, never really raised his voice—that easy manner, like a man showing open hands to a dog: I’m not making problems. Yet he was a battle-hardened fighter, a killer, and now he and his brothers were out in the night, raising their old red banners against Bolshevik power.
I kept the flame as low as I could, so it would last the night. He must be able to find my window in the dark.
It was almost morning when I heard a stone tossed against my windowpane. I took off my boots and ran—flew—down to the Bolshaya Morskaya courtyard gate, that discreet entry Pashol was accustomed to leaving by so as not to disturb the house. He was hiding in an arch, ran for the door when I opened it. I shut it behind him and locked it. I pointed down to my feet, Take off your boots. He saw and took off his own—cold on the feet but
no one must know he was here. It would be dangerous not just for me but for the entire house. Even Gumilev would not have sheltered a Kronstadt sailor now.
In my room, in my tiny bed, we made love as silently as starfishes. You wouldn’t think two such weary, half-starved human beings could find such tenderness. That irrepressible smile, the private joke behind his eyes, the sound of the breakers I could hear in his chest when I pressed my ear to it as if to a shell. He slept deeply, instantly.
Too soon, Petrograd’s weak, despondent dawn smudged the window, and then the inevitable, dangerous day. We shared some tea and a bit of bread and a sausage he’d brought, and when it was safe for him to reappear on the streets, he went. Pashol.
53 A Visit from Moscow
As could have been predicted, the soviet lashed back with accusations and flat-out lies. The Kronstadters had beaten their commissar hostages. The Kronstadt sailors were counterrevolutionary traitors in the pay of foreign powers. They were following a White general. It was absurd, horrific. Could anybody believe this, having read the Kronstadt Declaration? Who could entertain the notion that such loyal sailors were following some White general? I wanted to share what I knew with someone, but didn’t dare speak of it, not even with Anton. My knowledge was too intimately tied to my sailor lover.
Within the beehive of the House of Arts, the buzz was about Dom Iskusstv, not the declaration. They talked about who would be in it, who would be excluded. They worried about attacks on us by the Left at IZO, the House of Arts’ frequent rival. They talked about rations—the bread situation was dire. But most of them hadn’t seen the declaration, and those who had, considered it a symptom of the generalized chaos, just another part of the great storm. Whereas it was all I could think about. What was going on out there, across the ice in the fortress of sea and salt and might?
There was one person I could ask—the man who had placed me at the sailors’ club to begin with. Gumilev had been born on Kronstadt, his father was a naval doctor there. He still had ties to the island. Surely he had some information. I climbed the stairs to where he lived in the Eliseevs’ famous private bathroom and knocked on the door—making sure no one was watching. He answered, wearing a jacket and scarf, felt slippers and a fur hat. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Nikolai Stepanovich. Can I speak to you privately?”
He smiled his little smile. “Of course.”
I’d never been inside the Eliseevs’ personal bathroom, only the big one in the basement where I got a shower every month. This was glorious, tiled with glazed Tiffany fish, three windows and a bathtub, a tiled vanity with a big round mirror. Gumilev’s bed was just a cot, but it was made up with military precision, taut enough to bounce a gold ruble. He’d been writing at a desk that faced Nevsky. The snow drifted past from one window to the next. He took my hand.
“Sit down.” He indicated the cot. “What can I do for you, Marina Dmitrievna?”
God, did he think I was accepting his pass? I perched uncomfortably on the edge, wondered where his wife was. She’d been sent out of the city, somewhere with their child, leaving him to play Don Juan, the scourge of the studio girls. “I wanted to ask if you knew what’s happening out at Kronstadt.”
His friendliness soured like milk. It curdled on his face, you could smell it. “I have no idea,” he said stiffly. “What made you think that I would?”
Now I was confused. “It was you who sent me to the sailors’ club. You have classes out there on the island. You grew up there! Surely you still have contacts—”
His froggy green eyes grew as hard as glass. “I have no contact with them. No one does. They’ve been outlawed, or haven’t you heard.”
“But surely someone must know…” I could feel myself starting to cry, giving in to the strain.
His manner became more and more clipped. “Gorky probably knows something. But I wouldn’t bother him now. There’s nothing to do but wait, and I highly advise you do just that. Go back to work, and for God’s sake keep your concerns to yourself, which is what I’m doing.” Indicating his desk, he was working on a new poem. “And will continue to do. Thank you for coming by. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He led me to the door, opened it for me. “Goodbye, Marina Dmitrievna.” A slight bow.
And so I was dismissed from the presence of Count Gumilev. As if he’d never heard of Kronstadt.
Well, I was certainly not going to sit in the House of Arts and wait for the list of the executed, as Nikolai Gumilev suggested. I buttoned up and walked through the bitter wind to Znamenskaya Square and the Vikzhel club. They would know everything. But when I got to their club, I saw that the door was thickly padlocked. I shook the icy chain. No Skorokhod, and now no Vikzhel. I imagined the same fate had befallen the sailors’ club. No classes, no rations. Life was going to get very tough indeed. But I was not in the danger my union men and women were, not to mention Pasha and the sailors. I only prayed that the Bolsheviks would see sense and give in, that the third revolution would come soon. Four days had brought down the tsar. And October went even faster than that.
I made my way home in the worsening storm. I could barely see through the snow, it was falling so fast. I stumbled upon a group of workers marching ahead of a cadre of soldiers with fixed bayonets. How weak the protesters looked, their heads bowed against the blowing snow, the fight gone out of them. They appeared, then were erased by the swirling snow. Like the Twelve. How would this all turn out? I thought of Mina, just overhead, in her father’s studio, the bay windows on the fifth floor from which we had watched the last revolution take place. If only I had that small camera again, I would take a picture of those strikers. I wished Mina and I were still friends. Those had been good times. We’d had no idea how it would end. We’d believed in the promise of the revolution, believed our time was coming.
I sat at my desk, writing a poem about Pasha and the Kronstadt sailors. Pravda said the government had dropped leaflets on Kronstadt. That they’d arrested the families of the mutineers, were holding them as hostages. They warned that the sailors must either end the rebellion, hand over the ringleaders, and return the commissar and the chairman of their soviet, or the hostages would pay with their lives. The demand came from Trotsky himself: unconditional surrender. These the sailors who had supported him most courageously in 1917, who had cheered him at the Cirque Moderne, had marched to his defense against the Provisional Government, who had closed the Constituent Assembly, and had fought under him to turn the tide of the war. And now this. Unconditional surrender.
The Defense Committee for the Northern Region one-upped Trotsky with its own ultimatum—of course Zinoviev had to have the last word—reminding the Red Fleet of what had happened to Wrangel’s White forces in the Crimea. The Whites that hadn’t already succumbed to Bolshevik arms and Cheka retribution had died by the thousands from hunger and disease. “The same fate awaits the Kronstadt mutineers unless you surrender within twenty-four hours. If you do, you’ll be pardoned. If you resist, you’ll be shot like partridges.”
Shot like partridges. Zinoviev, who fell to pieces any time danger approached. Who did he think he was talking to? Even Trotsky was not so dismissive of the bravest, truest of the Red fighters.
I could only imagine the response on Kronstadt.
I waited for a massive reply from the people, an outpouring of outrage. Demonstrations on Nevsky, clamor, clashes. But there was nothing. The Kronstadt men were risking everything for us—their honor, their arms, their ships, their very lives! Where were the workers? Where were the people, the strikes in support?
I learned the answer the following day in the bread queue at the House of Scholars. Wagonloads of food had been delivered to the workers’ districts, with promises that Bolshevik privilege would be ended, the roadblocks eliminated. All items from Kronstadt’s list of demands were being addressed. The soviet was undercutting the sailors by acquiescing to their demands without acknowledging that that’s what they were doing. The question was, would the Petrograd workers be so easil
y bought off?
Ships creak in their coats of ice
The stony fortress groans
Winter seals the sea in its tomb
The sea-bell’s clapper
cleaves in its mouth
No way to toll its warning.
The sea heaves against its chains
The icebound ships lie dreaming
of swift currents and dawns,
quickening sails before a bright wind.
While the land bears its terrible weight
of roads and laws, plows and fields.
Cold casts the sea in its likeness.
Come, spring, and break winter’s spell!
Shatter it like mirrorglass
Restore the sea to its shifting
And the sailors to the shores.
Those with tidal hair
will be masters here
The rearing horse fights the rein
While the spring floods
carry the wakening ships.
Since Pasha’s brief reappearance, Anton had been nothing but considerate. He saw my fear and refrained from any commentary. He must have guessed what Pasha’s visit meant. “Don’t worry. They’ll agree in the end,” he consoled me. “Right now they’re beating their breasts and spouting ultimatums, but you watch, at the very brink, somebody will come to his senses and they’ll all back down—for the sake of the revolution, lya lya fa fa.”
He never directly referred to Pasha, always to the “situation.” Nevertheless I could tell he was secretly relieved that Pasha was out of the way. That my sailor might end up at the wrong end of a Bolshevik bayonet didn’t trouble him except for my sake. I couldn’t fault him for it. He was doing the best he could with his jealousy, and perhaps there was even a measure of grudging admiration.
I brought my poem to show him. As I turned into his corridor, I could hear laughter and chatter. Anton’s door halfway down the hall lay open. Light spilled out and people stood talking in the hall, Mandelstam chatting with one of Zamyatin’s circle, Alla Tvorcheskaya laughing. Was it a party? Alla stared at me in the strangest way. I reached the door. The room was thick with poets, hazy with smoke. How did so many people cram themselves in there? Someone was telling a story, and I recognized the voice. There, looming in the center of the crowd, a foot taller than anyone else, broad arms extended to emphasize a point—Genya Kuriakin. His tawny hair had grown out—and why not? After all, the war was over. He wore a tweedy suit with a vest. A real grown-up, an important man. He looked well, fleshed out in this time of starvation. Perhaps things really were better in Moscow—at least for some. Curtailing Bolshevik privilege? I thought not. He was talking about someone reading in a café, a fight that had broken out. I tried to back away, but he saw me. He stopped in midgesture.
