Джанет Фитч - The Revolution of Marina M.

She plopped my white fur hat onto her unbrushed hair. “I’ll make sure you receive an invitation.”

I took her up on it, in that first bitter winter of the war. I knew I was a sheltered girl, spoiled even, but she shamed me for it. For instance, I’d been to England, and Baden-Baden and Venice, but not to the poor districts of my own city—say, the Lines of Vasilievsky Island. But Varvara did it every day, and though Miss Haddon-Finch made me promise not to take the streetcar with all the soldiers, the militarization of the city being what it was, I would be damned if I would insist on a cab and be ridiculed by Varvara again.

We got on the streetcar at Nevsky—it was already filled to capacity with soldiers, and more kept jumping on—and I noticed to my astonishment that not a single one paid the fare. The conductor didn’t demand payment, either. If these officials of the tram system were afraid, who would keep order if something happened? I clung tightly to my book bag, as Varvara had instructed, and tried to see out the windows, which were completely steamed over. It was impossible in any case, we were crammed in so tight. Snow had been falling all day, obscuring the city like a veil.

The tram groaned and squealed across the Neva, and Varvara pushed and shoved our way off near the university. My relief at being free of the rough hands patting me down faded as we began to work our way west past the wide streets called lines, once intended as canals but never dug. They formed long ugly blocks perpendicular to the Neva, and grew worse as we walked away from the university toward the docks in the four o’clock twilight. Men followed us, shoving one another. Some called out, “Hey, sweetie! Hey, darling!” “Krasavitsa moya!” My beauty. “Hey, Red, here I am. Give us a kiss!” Frankly terrified, I tried to swing along at the same pace as my long-legged friend, telling myself that Varvara encountered this every day. No wonder she exuded confidence. Nothing else would seem intimidating by comparison.

We passed a long red apartment house, where dirty children played in the wet snow and women loitered in the doorways, their drawn faces watching us pass in our school uniforms. “That’s a brothel,” Varvara said.

Prostitutki . I thought of Sonya Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment. The women called out to workmen and university students from their doorways as snow fell on bits of their ragged finery—a worn astrakhan coat, a hat with a drooping feather. A ragged child watched us as if we were queens, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“This way,” Varvara drawled. “That is, unless you want to meet them. They’re stupid as chickens.”

She led me through a dirty courtyard and into a back building, up some dark, sour stairs, then down a hallway to a battered door. She used her key. “Avanti.” She gestured, and I found myself in a dreary room taller than it was wide, dense with old furniture and decorated with pictures in ornate frames—gloomy oil paintings, several lithographs of Volga landscapes.

The place smelled of mold. Two dusty windows facing the yard provided a bit of illumination. In the red corner, an icon of St. Nikolas the Wonderworker hung behind a smoky blue icon lamp. And a portrait of our emperor, Nikolas II of All the Russias. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The emperor presided over Varvara’s home. We had a few icons, but never that.

“I know,” she said, following my astonished gaze. “I can’t believe it myself.”

A woman in rusty black silk sat in a chair so quietly that at first I didn’t see her. She gazed out the window, a book in her lap. That it was Varvara’s mother was obvious—she bore exactly my friend’s features—the high bridged nose, the sharp cheekbones, the black eyes—but with all the life drained out of them. Her mother didn’t turn her head, or acknowledge us in any way. I wondered if she really was a countess—hard to know given Varvara’s sense of humor. A maid came in, wearing a dirty gray apron and carrying a battered samovar. She had one white eye. We sat at a small table and allowed this pitiful creature to serve us tea weak enough to be mistaken for dishwater in etched tea glasses delicate as frost on a windowpane. She rolled as she walked, like a sailor. Varvara passed me a small sugar pot filled with little tablets. “Saccharine,” she said. “It’s sweet. But don’t use too much.”

She dropped the little pill into her tea, and I followed suit. Fascinating. Already a new world. The woman served some bread and hard cheese that tasted of nothing at all. That eye haunted me, like the vulture eye in Poe’s story. I loved the old man… The maid brought Varvara’s mother a glass of tea as she sat in her chair by the window. “When I was a girl,” the mother suddenly said in a cracked voice unsteady as the round wooden table, “my mother had a French laundress—Marie. And all she did was press pleats. Only pleats.” She imitated a laugh, like paper crinkling. “Now all we have is poor Dasha. Comment tombent les puissants… ”

Varvara snickered, and her mother turned to her with the impossibly sad expression of a Byzantine saint. “That hair,” said her mother. “You look like a guttersnipe.”

“I am a guttersnipe,” Varvara said.

Her mother sighed and addressed the portrait of the emperor, or perhaps the saint. “You see what I must endure? Death will be a blessing.” She went back to contemplating the ruin of her life out the dirty window.

“Tell Marina about your matched team of white trotters,” Varvara said. “The countess was always particular about her horses.”

“Orlov trotters,” her mother said, her voice like leaves blowing across an empty square. “Polkan and Yashma. They were smarter than people. Which doesn’t take much.”

After another pale glass of tea, the servant brought out supper. The countess did not join us for a rotten cabbage soup with bits of some sort of chewy, gamy meat, but was served separately on a table before the window, with a napkin as a tablecloth and a small vase with a silk flower in it. Varvara nodded at me as I ate. Horsemeat. This beast in my mouth had once pulled a wagon. I chewed and chewed, the gristle preventing me from thoroughly masticating it. Finally, as discreetly as I could, I spit out the rubbery bit in my napkin.

Afterward, Varvara asked if I’d like a tour of the flat. It surprised me that she wanted to show me more of this squalor. Very seriously, she began with the windows, introduced in turn as left and right. The table. A narrow wardrobe holding her few clothes. Her bookcase, overflowing with historical and political texts, dictionaries in German, English, French, Latin, and Greek. The divan on which she slept at night— “Ma chambre” —over which she’d hung pictures carefully cut from journals. I made out Engels, Kropotkin, a wood engraving of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People —which seemed in rebellious confrontation with the two Nikolases in the red corner. A small kitchen, in which we disturbed the servant at her own tea.

She indicated another door as “La chambre de ma mère” but did not, thank God, open it. I worried there might be a coffin hidden inside.

The conveniences were at the end of the outer hall, shared with the neighbors. “I’d recommend leaving that to the imagination.”

After that, my friend was eager to go. I approached her mother, mustered my best dancing-class curtsy. “Thank you for having me.” Varvara glared at me. Her mother returned my gesture with a reluctant nod of the head. “It’s good to see some people still exhibit a modicum of breeding.”

We walked quickly away from her building in the stunning cold and darkness. Varvara strode at double speed, still angry at the curtsy. We had to hook arms together against the stinging wind, the hard bits of snow jabbing our faces. I didn’t know whether to apologize for not believing her when she’d said she ate horsemeat, or express my sympathy at the way she had to live. I felt ashamed of my new warm coat, my white fur hat, my parents, our big tiled stoves, our bathroom, and that I never once thought them extraordinary.