Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

Book 2: Revolution of Marina M.

by Janet Fitch

Genres: Coming of Age; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

The story of The Revolution of Marina M. continues in best-selling author Janet Fitch's sweeping epic about a young woman's coming into her own against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution.

After the events of The Revolution of Marina M., the young Marina Makarova finds herself on her own amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War — pregnant and adrift in the Russian countryside, forced onto her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child. She finds new strength and self-reliance to fortify her in her sojourn, and to prepare her for the hardships and dilemmas still to come.

When she finally returns to Petrograd, the city almost unrecognizable after two years of revolution, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, she finds the streets teeming with homeless children, victims of war. Now fully a woman, she takes on the challenge of caring for these civil war orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction.

But despite the ordeal of war and revolution, betrayal and privation and unimaginable loss, Marina at last emerges as the poet she was always meant to be.

Chimes of a Lost Cathedral finishes the epic story of Marina's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century — as a woman and an artist, entering her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.

Release date: August 25, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 752

Sample

I WAS RISEN, risen from the dead. I had escaped the house of snow and lies, I had been spared.

An icy fog obscured the road the day I left Novinka on the back of the old man’s sledge piled with logs, heading for the market town Tikhvin. The countryside revealed itself in the foggy gaps, opening and closing like curtains. The load shifted dangerously underneath me, wooden runners jolting in the ruts. The old man smoked his pipe while I made plans that blew away like snowflakes, into the drifts and gone.

Five days we rode, stopping in villages, sleeping in straw, the child alive and moving within me. It was stubborn, like its mama. My celestial egg. Gathering strength for the jailbreak.

And out rushed oceans

Himalayas

Krakatoas,

warring nations…

 

Rocketing red and fiery across the dazzled brow

of Nothingness

 

Till Nothing itself became a memory.

At last, we descended into Tikhvin, a crossroads for centuries, with its river and its railroad, the point of arrival and departure where I’d last left my one and faithless love. His tears had run, but I had not been moved. That vain girl, walking around with her eyes shut tight, thinking that life should be straight and good, that she could pick and choose, like plucking stones out of a handful of rice. But now I was five months along with his child unborn, and had learned that imperfection was part of the weave of the world. I would return to him if I could, and pick up the stitch I had dropped.

Tikhvin was a substantial town of some twenty thousand souls—a number I once thought negligible. Now it was dizzying. So many streets, people, houses, fences, and carts…The giant Uspensky Monastery loomed with its five-towered carillon, its ancient fortress walls, which had once protected the entire population from Swedish invaders. Now Russian soldiers held the town in their grip, hanging about on street corners in their greatcoats, with their rifles and grisly bayonets. A gang of recruits marched toward a barracks, accompanied by shouts and curses. This was the current reality, the sound of the year 1919, the crash and clang of war. Time was bringing me into its brazen dance, leading me by the hand.

After days of nothing more urgent than snowbound forest and the bony rump of the horse, Tikhvin’s sprawl and energy unnerved me, and the child recoiled inside me. Like a country simpleton, I marveled at every small sight—the town seemed a metropolis, a terrifying wonder. Every sound amplified, every movement a jolt. I flinched at a carter banging crates to the ground, startled at a shout from a doorway. Now I understood the peasant’s terror when he encountered mighty Petersburg for the first time—the din of Nikolaevsky station, the bustle on Nevsky Prospect.

As the sledge scraped along toward the station, I couldn’t help but read the signs and portents. I hadn’t spent months at Ionia, trapping and hunting, without learning to read the news in sticks and hairs and tracks in snow. All the signs were bad. I saw it in the lean, blue-tinged faces of the arrivals struggling up from the station. Two sallow, soot-eyed women in black coats and too-thin shoes dragged a heavy suitcase between them, loaded no doubt with silverware and bric-a-brac to trade with the peasants for food. He who trades on the free market trades on the freedom of the people. A grim-jawed, silent group of workers following them had to be a food-requisitioning brigade. They neither spoke nor joked—they knew their assignment: to relieve peasants of their grain without recompense so they could feed their own starving brothers. I could see them pulling into themselves, hardening for the job ahead. A number of workers traveling alone walked up the main road, collars raised, a self-provisioning holiday. Their faces told me everything. No food in the city, no help, no end in sight.

Behold, the station. The old man helped me down from my throne of logs, the horse snorted its clouds into the white air. The days of hard travel had taken their toll on my body, I moved like a woman of eighty. Pine pitch and splinters stuck to my sheepskin and squirrelskin gloves. I held on to my snowshoes and game bag, unable to adjust to the assault of so many people. Travelers pushed past me as if I were a turnstile.

I gazed up at the arches. Here was where I went wrong. Here was my chance to begin again.

I shoved my way through the station and out onto the platform, where a train stood steaming, stinking, its wheels terrifyingly outsized. After the timeless introversion of the countryside, the noise scoured my ears, the child’s jerking alarm took my breath, and I clutched my snowshoes to my breast. First- and second-class passengers paced the platform, stretching their legs and doing furtive business with the peasant women selling piroshky and roasted sunflower seeds, while third-class travelers huddled in the barn doors of the boxcars, not daring to leave the train, their wooden bunks rayed behind them like shelves in a poor shop. Everyone heading east, east, east, away from Petrograd, into the snowy countryside, toward the Urals, escaping the turmoil and starvation in the capital of Once-Had-Been. My determination wavered. It slipped, shattering against the train’s iron wheels.

Perhaps the boy I’d been—Misha, that cheeky lad—would have chanced it. He had his way of staying afloat, but I couldn’t conjure him now, not with the child on the way, my face gone round, my breasts past binding. I was a woman in full and there was no escaping it.

Wisdom does not consist of making the best choice among many. Wisdom is understanding when there is no choice and taking the step that must be taken, without complaints or sighs. Hoisting my small bag higher over my shoulder, I walked to the platform’s end and climbed down, strapped myself into my snowshoes, and followed the rails through the fog.

A switchman’s shack emerged from the milky white. I knocked at the poorly made door, the pearly gates of this sooty heaven, and swung it open without waiting for an invitation.

Inside, a blackened stove warmed the small hut—no better than a wooden crate—where four men seated on boxes played cards. The kettle boiled. Steam coated the one greasy window. But which was the switchman, the one in charge? Him, I decided—the bald one in spectacles, pencil behind ear. The other three, railwaymen: a pensioner—a little bantam cock—and two burly men, one missing an arm, his coat sleeve pinned up neatly. Firemen or mechanics, I thought, the one-armed man wounded in the line of duty, and still drawing rations. Oh, to be the boy Misha again! Misha would know how to talk to them. He would swear, tell a dirty joke. Eh, brothers! But trapped in this irrevocable female form, I had to appeal to mercy, if I could find it. I hated negotiating from weakness, but I could do it if I had to.

“Comrades. Forgive me.” I spoke quickly, holding my hands in the universal language of wheedling. “I don’t want to trouble you, but I don’t know where else to turn. My brother was a Vikzhel man, an assistant engineer. He said if I ever needed help, to turn to the railwaymen.” I rummaged in the sack and pulled out Misha’s papers, presented them to the switchman. “I lost my position, a cook in a boarding house. The woman’s daughter came home from Petrograd and took my place.”

The bald man peered at Misha’s documents. “Assistant engineer? It says he was fifteen years old.” He tried to hand them back to me but I shrank away. My fictional brother was Vikzhel, a union man. They took care of their own.

“He was a good boy.” I had no problem staining my face with tears. Poor Misha! “He gave me his pay. It kept us going. But he died, four weeks ago. Now I have nothing.”

The switchman held the papers awkwardly, he didn’t know what to do with them if I wouldn’t take them back. “So what do you want from us, little comrade? We can’t put you on as a fireman.”

The others chuckled. Oh, so funny. How I hated men who thought what a woman did was ridiculous, what a woman needed. I wished I could pull the gun from my pocket, show him who was ridiculous. But I had to bite my tongue. “I can shovel snow, keep the tracks clean,” I said, pushing on. “Cook, wash. Read. Look, I’m not asking for charity.” I drew myself up to my full height, trying to appear healthy and robust, not like a pregnant girl who’d been breathing her last calories through her metaphysical skin. “I can water trains. Clean the station.” That made them laugh—you were more likely to see a pig fly than a clean vokzal in Russia.

They exchanged glances as if they were passing cards. The old man pulled something from his pocket. “Here’s some chocolate, devushka. Take it. Don’t be shy.”

Now I felt bad that I’d wanted to shoot him. I took the chocolate and let it melt on my tongue like a consecration—dark and sweet, like a drug. Over the switchman’s shoulder, a calendar hung next to train schedules posted on nails. Its pages were roughly torn back to 28 Fevrail 1919. I counted the months on the roof of my mouth. March, April, May, June…The months had never felt so urgent. The burly man with one arm leaned back, hooked his cigarette in his mouth, and with the same hand, threw a card onto the little box that was their gaming table. “Maybe Raisa Filipovna could use her.”

The old fellow puffed out his cheeks, his eyes full of news. “That girl was already halfway out the door. Yulia. Bun in the oven, you ask me.” He cackled, oblivious of the insult he was offering.

The bald man flushed. Had he noticed my condition? “Pardon him, he’s our village idiot.”

“Who’s the idiot, you apparatchik.” The old fellow held up a bony fist. “Burzhui bastard.”

The two-armed man threw a one-eyed jack. “You playing or what?”

Bun in the oven. I wished now I had a ring. Still, I could legitimately present myself as a married woman. Between the chocolate and the chance at work, I was already feeling hopeful. I licked the last of the sweet from my lips. “Where can I find this Raisa Filipovna?”

“A big wooden house on Orlovsky Street,” said the one-armed man. “Number 8. Korsakova’s her name. Tell her about your brother. She has the heart of a kitten. Tell her Styopa sent you.”

“I knew the husband,” said the old man. “A shame. Tomasovich.”

Styopa threw a card. I admired the dexterity with which he used his single hand. “A good man. Eternal memory.”

The bald man glanced up at his calendar, and tore the last page off to reveal 1 Mart 1919, opened the stove door and threw February into the fire.

  

I set out for Korsakova’s. I didn’t know Tikhvin well, only the station and the monastery, and the one inn where we used to stay on our way to Maryino. Where we’d stayed the summer of 1917, between the revolutions, when my father had sent us into the country, and Seryozha to the cadets. I asked directions of a woman who walked with the assured step of one who knew where she was going and was in no hurry to get there, and following her instructions, I passed Sovietskaya Street, Karl Marx Street, Svobodnaya Square—Freedom Square—a snow-clotted commons. The revolution had certainly brought its passion for renaming to Tikhvin, best known for its icon of the Virgin, and as the birthplace of the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, whose house my artistic mother liked to point out as our carriage jounced through the dusty streets on the way out of town. Korsakova—I wondered if the woman was some relation.

I found her house on a snow-filled lane—sagging but not the worst on the street, a big two-story wooden structure with a long balcony looking out upon other houses across the street, equally run-down but not so large. I rang the bell, tested the door. It was locked. It had started to snow again, but if I could spend a night in a blizzard in a forest halfway between nowhere and never, I guess I could wait in the doorway of a Tikhvin boarding house until the landlady came home.

Removing my snowshoes and tipping them up against the dark shingles, I took out Genya’s little book and reread his poems, hearing his voice, that concatenation of basso and boyishness:

I know what it’s like

to be fed paper

when what one needs is

 

Bread, wine

love.

I wondered if he still felt the same way. If I hadn’t left with my delightful man that night, if I’d met Genya after his avant-garde play, I might be in Moscow right now, surrounded by poets, instead of starving, pregnant, and looking for work in Tikhvin. It was too depressing to consider. I closed the book, ate the sausage in my satchel, a bit of bread. The doorway arched over my head. I touched the rough shingles. Would I have my baby here? Would Korsakova take me in? And if she didn’t, then what? Death was no conjecture these days, no distant rumor. It was all around, just waiting for me to make a false step. I thought of the romantic idiot who had once strolled among the graves at Petersburg’s noble Alexander Nevsky Monastery, imagining my own beautiful, famous corpse. My funeral procession, the inconsolable thousands who would carry me, the great poet, on their shoulders to my final resting place.

But death wasn’t at all like that. It was my brother Seryozha, cut down halfway to manhood. It was the student shot dead before me by government troops at Znamenskaya Square. It was a boy-thief beaten to death by the mob, dying in Genya’s arms in his grubby apartment. And the astronomer’s son, in the cholera epidemic, shitting out his life in the grass. I thought of all my dead—Solomon Katzev, Andrei Krestovsky, Andrei Petrovin…Death was no velvet shadow. He was a worker in a cold brick factory, short on materials, churning out a tatty product—typhus, cholera, civil war. A robber, waiting in alleys and stairwells, a sign painter even now painting the blue faces of the Formers in the Tikhvin station and hovering around the reeking invalids of war. He was circling the rooftops at Maryino, where the Ionians were still inflowing in the back parlor with their shining doomed eyes.

Would this damned widow ever return? I clapped my hands together, stamped my feet as I watched more amateur speculators propelling their suitcases up the badly cleared street. How desperately we clung to life, each one of us. Where did we find the energy to carry on? I used to think the dead were hopeful for the living, like benevolent old ladies watching young people at a ball. Now I thought they just pitied us.

Two crocuses once bloomed

Between the rails

Of a tram.

The wrong time.

The wrong place.

Once I imagined

A great death.

Plumes and garlands.

But it’s all death, my brother.

We vanish just the same.

At last, a tall woman dressed in black turned up the unshoveled walk, a basket in her arms, already watching me with suspicion.

“Raisa Filipovna?” I called out. She raised skeptical eyebrows. “You don’t know me, but Styopa from the switching house sent me over.” Who should I be? Makarova? Shurova? “Kuriakina. Marina Dmitrievna.”

Korsakova hooked the basket over her arm, fished a key from her pocket, and unlocked the front door. “And how do you know Stepan Radulovich?”

“I don’t.” I vowed I would tell the truth when I could. “I went to the station this morning, looking for work. He told me to come up here.” She opened the door. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow her, or if she would slam it in my face. “They said you might need someone. That you lost your girl.”

She turned back to me then, a firm-faced, dark-haired woman about forty. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

Inside, her house was warm, simple, and clean. Hooks by the door, wood walls, a little cabinet, a braided rug on the floor of the sitting room so old you couldn’t see what color it had been. Clean, wide-planked pine floors, solid, worn furniture smelling of men—a bit sweet, a bit acrid, the strong scent of tobacco. A workingman’s boarding house. Badly printed woodcuts, peasant lubok style, a couple of silhouettes. She hung up her coat and hat, removed her boots, and slid her feet into felt slippers. I was careful to keep my coat folded in, so the gun would not reveal itself as I hung my coat and my fox hat and took off my boots. She gestured to a pair of worn felt slippers and I put them on.

A long, rough table dominated the dining hall, a table that had never seen a cloth in any era. There we sat on long benches and I told her my tale, as much as made sense. She gazed at me with keen, dark eyes while I spoke, as if judging the weight of a goose under its feathers. “When is the child due?” she asked bluntly.

Seeing she’d lost a girl to a sexual escapade, I was careful to explain about my husband, the poet Gennady Kuriakin, who had moved to Moscow last autumn.

She grimaced, as if she’d just bitten into something sour. “He left you in this condition?”

For some reason, I wanted to defend Genya, even in the course of this elaborate fabrication. “It wasn’t his fault. Really, he didn’t know. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to make him stay if he didn’t want to. He’s a very ethical person.”

She cocked one of her mobile eyebrows and shook her head wearily, as you would if someone told you they’d just bought a handful of magic beans. “Styopa said you might have a job.” I brought the subject around again. “Said your girl left. I’m a hard worker, and…the condition, well, it’ll be months before it’s a problem. I don’t need much. Just give me a chance.”

“The girl was my eldest daughter,” she said wearily. “Yulia. Well, you can’t keep them young. Eventually the wheat will spring from the earth.” Her gaze fell upon my weathered hands. “Why don’t you wear a ring?”

My ragged hands, the broken nails. I hadn’t had to cut them since I left Furshtatskaya Street, they just tore off. “We married at the district soviet,” I said. “When the Germans were attacking Petrograd. He was leaving in the morning. There was no time for rings.” Our Red wedding. I could only remember Oksana’s geraniums, the petals shedding like little drops of blood.

“Romantics…” The widow Korsakova smiled, and pushed a loose strand of hair back into the black topknot. “I’m glad that’s not dead.” She surprised me. I’d have thought the landlady of a place like this would be a hard-nosed kopek pincher, counting the linens. “Well, all right. I’ll give you a try. But remember, I run a quiet, respectable house. I hear the least breath of scandal, that you’re drinking, running around, you’re out in the street. Baby or no baby. Ponimaesh?”

I was in! It was all I could do not to leap and twirl down the hall as she led me to my room. Only her extreme sobriety discouraged it. We climbed the stairs, walked down a long creaking hall wallpapered in a pattern of tiny flowers the color of old teeth, then up a second, crooked back staircase to a small third floor. She showed me a room with two narrow beds. Cheerful half-curtains of printed calico softened the windows. “That was Yulia’s,” she said, pointing to the bed under the window. “And this is my younger one’s, Lizaveta. She’s at school now.”

After the disorder of the last years, the lunacy of Ionia, I wanted to kiss the hem of her skirt. Such peace. The good order of family life. Thank God for this plain, sensible Russian woman who was making a home for her daughters. Perhaps I would be like this in a few years, streaks of gray in my hair, calm and competent, able to keep other people alive.

She stood in the doorway in her black dress. There was something Akhmatovian about her, her height, her hair, her somber countenance. My savior, my saint. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said. “We have to cling to each other very tightly these days.”

  

And so I took up residence at Raisa Filipovna Korsakova’s. After my duties in former lives—as the servant Marusya at Pulkovo Observatory, as Marina Ionian these last months—I well knew how to make myself useful, and oh, three lovely meals a day! The widow and I worked side by side as she instructed me on the niceties of the domestic arts. It didn’t bother me that she was on the taciturn side unless actively illustrating some task. I had learned to appreciate silence.

Eight railwaymen lived in the house, including one-armed Styopa, who watched me tenderly as I carried pots and passed food, even helped me clear the table. He whispered to me, “Come to me when the lights go out. Fourth door on the right.” I smiled, neither refusing nor accepting. But it made me happy. He was a kind soul, robust and not unattractive, his hair and moustache had some gray. His gray eyes accepted his fate with the simple courage I’d seen in the military hospitals in Petrograd. God knew it had been a long time since I’d had a man. But I would not push my good luck at finding this position. He watched me as I sewed buttons onto trousers and darned socks on a wooden egg.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I rarely had a spare moment. Korsakova ran the place like a German. Monday was laundry, Tuesday the floors, Wednesday the windows, Thursday the stairs, and so on. When I wasn’t scrubbing pine floors with lye soap or boiling acres of laundry, hanging hectares of heavy corduroys in the kitchen, making beds or roasting kasha or grinding oats or peeling potatoes, I was standing in miles of queues for bread and flour and fuel and matches, and Liza’s milk ration. Was I complaining? Not I. Our tenants’ Vikzhel rations were generous, first category. They even got fabric and galoshes—theoretically. I ate like a queen—at least a Soviet one.

This was my life. I had no friends besides thirteen-year-old Liza, Styopa Radulovich, and the other boarders. I avoided befriending the women in the queues. It was a gossipy town and they asked all kinds of pointed questions about Korsakova and Liza and the wayward Yulia. You couldn’t give women like that a toehold. Oh, the hours of listening to their chatter! Whose daughter was sleeping with soldiers behind the barracks for a piece of their Red Star rations. Whose daughter had been raped last Tuesday and left for dead. She never could identify the rapist. They wanted to know things about me, where I was from, did I have a sweetheart. It made me wonder why they didn’t join the Cheka if they liked interrogation so much.

So although I was lonely enough to howl, I kept to Liza and the guests.

  

Spring crept closer, then arrived, turning the world to mud. The unpaved roads transformed themselves into deep brown rivers. Icicles crashed from eaves of the wooden buildings, and now the poor city folk had to struggle ankle-deep in mud with their offerings, their patched clothes spattered with Tikhvin. Workers with their sad plunder, and out-and-out bagmen groaning under huge sacks of flour and potatoes, headed for the station, where they’d boldly load the bumpers between cars for the trip back to Petrograd. The air crackled with anxiety—anyone could be shot for speculation, and yet, no one could survive without it.

I put off registering my presence with the authorities. The more invisible my document-poor life, the better. But eventually, Korsakova too was visited by the local Chekists. Searching—for what, food, weapons, counterrevolution? Or more likely, just to harass the Vikzhel men. Trade unionists tended not to be Communists. Everyone was turned out of bed—the railwaymen, Raisa Filipovna. Every room had to be searched, even the little girlish one at the top of the stairs.

Luckily we heard them beating on the front door. I turned on the lamp. “Liza,” I whispered. “I need to hide something.”

She sat up, her innocent face eager for secrets, her hair all tangled above her braids, as fine as thistle floss. I reached under my mattress and showed her the bundle of cloth in which I’d wrapped the ugly hunk of metal that had taken Andrei’s life. “Is it a gun?” she whispered excitedly.

I could hear the men arguing downstairs now. Trade unionists and Bolsheviks made a volatile mixture. “I’m sorry, I was traveling. I didn’t think—” Strangely, I’d forgotten there was an outside world, with Chekists combing every corner for counterrevolution.

Liza jumped out of bed and knelt, scrabbling at the floorboards under her bed with her fingernails. She pulled up a board, grinning. I saw something pink in there—a blouse? And books! I’d forgotten, children were natural spies, they always had their secrets. I threw the gun in with them and she quickly replaced the plank.

We could hear furniture crashing on the second floor, men shouting. Liza rounded her eyes at me, her sharp little chin, her blankets up around her neck. “They’re coming.”

“Don’t worry, they’re not looking for schoolgirls.”

The search was messy and frightening. They finally reached the third floor, burst through our crooked door. Liza and I clung to each other as a flat-cheeked dullard with pale blue eyes searched our room, pulling the mattresses off the beds and the drawers from the chest, making a great racket as the men shouted on the floor below. I was as frightened as Liza, but trembling as I was, I noticed the search wasn’t as careful as Varvara’s would have been. He didn’t even look behind the lubok print of the Donkey, the Bear, and the Fox, or run his hands over the wallpaper, feeling for seams, let alone check for loose floorboards. I could have hidden half the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland in here and he would have missed them. They had no idea what they were looking for, just throwing their weight around to terrorize the populace.

They herded us down to the dining room and made everyone produce their papers, and thus I was found out. No labor book. No travel propusk, no registration with the housing committee. It was a problem for both me and the widow.

Styopa Radulovich in his nightshirt, his thick strong hairy legs. “Doesn’t the Cheka have anything better to do than harass housemaids?”

“Tell us why we shouldn’t arrest her right now,” said the Chekist in charge, a lean small man with one drooping eye. “And you too.” He turned his good eye on Styopa and the bantam and the mechanic Berkovin. “I don’t like the looks of any of you. You Vikzhel men are getting too big for your pants.”

“She’ll come tomorrow,” said Korsakova, deflecting the attention from her precious boarders. “I’ll make sure of it, Comrade. You have my word.” She was as white as white paint, there in her dark shawl and her nightgown.

“We know where you live,” said the lead man. “All of you.” They left with a great clattering on the bare wooden stairs, a crash as they knocked one of the prints down. The statement hung in the air long after they’d gone.

The Tikhvin Soviet was housed in a fine yellow building on Svobodnaya Square, a surprisingly elegant structure. Clearly Tikhvin had once been an important commercial center before its present decline. I languished there for most of the day, standing in long queues, leaning against the walls, my ankles and calves killing me. People coughed, they scratched surreptitiously. Would I be able to get papers as a proletarian this time? Marina Kuriakina? Allowing me a life of some kind or condemning me forever—no rations, my child permanently branded as a member of a counterrevolutionary class. Or would I simply be arrested, taken away to some Cheka cell? I couldn’t bear that again, not ever.

Dusk had gathered outside the windows by the time I received my permission, my propusk, to move to the desk at which I would receive my labor book. I didn’t complain—I just prayed I wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow. Propusk in hand, I approached the wooden desk of a humorless woman behind a typewriter and, more importantly, the tray bearing its array of precious rubber stamps. After standing all day, my legs felt like watermelons, my ankles like logs. There was only one chair and the woman was sitting in it. Her mouth was wide but pinched, it looked like her teeth hurt her.

Slowly, carefully, I answered her questions. Sticking to the truth in all the small details, lying only in the large ones.

Familia:

Kuriakina.

Imia:

Marina.

Otchestvo:

Dmitrievna.

Mesto Rozhdenia:

Petrograd.

Data Rozhdenia:

3 February 1900

Obrazovanie:

Primary.

Professia, spetsialnost:

General Labor.

Klass:

Proletarian.

Semeinoe Polozhenie:

Married.

Sweat poured off me in rivers, even in this unheated office. The woman worked in knitted gloves, coat and hat, the tips of her gloves cut off. In demeanor, I did my best to straddle the line between Bold Proletarian and Supplicant Peasant as I described the robbery on the train from Petrograd. A bourgeois bagman (describing Kolya in every specific) had made much of me, and then stolen everything—my papers, my money. I hadn’t even known it was gone until disembarking at Tikhvin, when I found a bag of small rocks and an old calendar instead of my belongings. To weep for this woman was no difficulty. Then I praised the widow Korsakova in quasi-religious tones, which I then “remembered” was un-Bolshevik. What a performance. Komissarzhevskaya herself would have called for an encore.

“And where is your husband now?” asked the woman, who looked like a raw-boned cow.

I shrugged. “Don’t know. He was leaving for Moscow last time I saw him. Looking for work in the Information Section. He has a friend there. He was going to send for me, but I waited and then got tired of it. Maybe he