But Mayakovsky didn’t read polemical work that night. Rather, he recited a long, complex love poem. Now I learned how vulnerable a man could be, even a terrifying man like that, protesting that he was only a cloud in trousers, proclaiming that love could turn his maddened flesh to sweetness. I tried to imagine being the recipient of such a passion. Would it frighten me?
“Look—it’s Vera Kholodnaya,” Mina whispered. Suddenly her fretting about the exams and her parents was forgotten as she watched the star of our silent kinofilm taking a seat near the stage. The most famous woman in Russia after the empress herself. The actress watched the poet, enraptured, and I saw that unconsciously, Mina sat up straighter, held her head more gracefully.
Next, an improvised play unfolded, the actors making fun of the gentlemen who’d paid their good money to see Karsavina and the immortal poets bestow their gifts—the so-called pharmacists. Two of them came to the stage to play soldiers in foxholes, and everyone laughed, including the men themselves. No hard feelings.
After the skit, she took the stage, her shawl wrapped about her, her long white hands, the grave white face. The voice that emerged from her lips was like that of a cello, a medium, and sent shivers through the audience. I had hoped she would recite her poem about this very place—“We Are All Carousers and Harlots”—but instead she recited poems about the war in a voice like time itself:
Give me bitter years of fever,
Choking, sleepless suffering,
Take away my child, my lover,
My mysterious gift of song—
Thus I pray after Thy Service,
After many anguished days,
So that clouds which darken Russia
May be lit by glorious rays.
Such bravery—to offer Fate such a sacrifice. To give anything, even her lover, even her gift. I would never have had the nerve to tempt the gods that way. I was too greedy. My sticky-handed heart wanted everything—lovers, lyres, and laurel wreaths. Why did she have to show me the impossible heights? Her words tore my soul to shreds. The whole assembly, even Mayakovsky, thundered their applause as she returned to her seat, flinging appreciative shouts like garlands. Then she turned back into her other self, laughing and relaxed, as if she hadn’t just dared heaven to destroy her.
Gathering myself while I still had the courage, I wove my way to her table and stood before her. No sound would come from my mouth. Her eyes were very blue—blue and full of light. I’d thought they were brown. I managed to say, “These are for you,” and thrust out a fistful of carefully copied-out poems.
She considered me and my outstretched offering, her arm resting across the banquette behind her friend. Her eyes were mischievous and gay. “Recite one for me.”
Right here in front of Kuzmin? She was waiting—I couldn’t refuse her. Should I pick one that was most technically correct? Or the one I’d written about her? My voice hoarse, my lips dry, I began:
O blessed bird of prey
With curved beak and eye of jet
Who sees each tiny creature dart
Sweeps him up, his sweetness pulsing…
Her pretty friend applauded when I was done, and Kuzmin lit a cigarette and squinted against the smoke. But she, the poet, the eagle, simply nodded and extended a hand for the pages. “Marina Makarova,” she read from the page. “Are you in love, my dear?”
I nodded. How did she know?
“Is it going well?”
I laughed. What could I say? “He barely knows I’m alive.” She took a card from the table, the card of the Stray Dog Café, and signed it: To Marina—Bravery, in love as in art. A.
Now, in the salmon-pink bedroom, I began again the poem of the kiss, the furs, the fire, the snow.
VARVARA—FOREVER PUSHING ME ahead, opening doors I was afraid to pass through, even though behind them were things I desperately wanted. I try to remember how it was before she came, when it had been just Mina and myself. My life had been sweet and dull, a normal bourgeois Petersburg girlhood: studying, going to the kinotheater on Nevsky Prospect—at first accompanied by my governess but later with my brothers, with Mina. We watched detective films, westerns, romances, Kholodnaya in Children of the Century and Her Sister’s Rival. With her clear eyes and round face, Mina would grow to resemble her, though not back then, when she was still a chubby, bespectacled mama’s girl. Away from school, she and I spent most of our time together, but at the Tagantsev Academy, we kept to our own groups. I drifted restlessly between cliques—the literary set, those melancholic Ophelias, and the drama girls, livelier and more flamboyant but also histrionic and full of vicious gossip. Rather than follow me into such exhausting company, Mina retreated with one or two other misfits to study for the next exam and secretly eye the popular girls with an air of wounded longing.
Then Varvara came, the volatile reagent that forged of us a third element. We’d heard she’d spent the fall at the Catherine Institute, a school for the daughters of the aristocracy, but had been asked to leave after a month or two. Before that, they said, she’d been living in Germany, a residence already exotic and questionable, but had to return home because of the war. At the academy, Varvara quickly polarized girls into advocates and detractors—mostly the latter. But how brilliant she made us feel, how advanced. She galvanized us. I abandoned my theatrical crowd, and Mina her drones, and we began to spend all our time in one another’s company. While I had been reading Idylls of the King, Colette, and Dostoyevsky—and Mina her eternal Dumas—Varvara was already tearing through Hegel, Engels and Marx, Kropotkin, Gorky, and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?
I remember the first time I brought her home for tea, secretly hoping she’d say something shocking, so I could be a rebel-by-proxy—but she’d been irritatingly polite, her dark eyes glittering at the sight of the sandwiches. She’d praised the light streaming through the tall windows, the excellence of the cooking, the warmth and tidiness of the flat. But eventually she grew more talkative, telling Mother about her aunt in Germany, with whom she had been living when war broke out and the Russians were called home. “Really, it’s a shame we’re at war. We’ve got so much more in common with Germany than with England.” She had no idea that we had Volodya serving under arms or that Father was a sworn Anglophile.
“Weak or strong?” Mother asked, so picturesque in her blue silk blouse, pouring tea from the silver samovar.
“Strong,” Varvara said.
Mother asked casually, “And where does your family live, Varvara? Are you near here?”
In Petrograd you never had to ask, What does your father do? How much do you live on a year? What are your prospects in life? You only had to ask, So where does your family live? My mother was a master of strategy, a Suvorov of manners.
“On Vasilievsky Island,” Varvara said, accepting her tea, which was served in a cup and saucer, English style, rather than in glasses. She dropped two cubes of sugar into it. Three. Four. My mother’s good breeding wouldn’t let her stare. But Seryozha kicked me under the table, rounded his eyes.
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