Daniel Yarosh - The Death of Hercules - A DocuNovel

He leaped from his sprawl on the pillows scattered on the floor, seized a gilded statuette of a coachman set on an inlayed shelf in the wall, and dashed it at his feet. This was greeted with raised glasses and a round of bourgeois vodka seized from the stock of the Chief Stableman, who had only recently been stood up against the privacy wall outside the window of their Hall and executed by a five-member firing squad. Near the end of the reading, Miro and Myrna were lost to the Revolution, locked in a sloppy, drunken kiss while others at the back urged them on. Zalmund watched with droopy eyes, his arm draped deep over Deena’s shoulder. He squeezed her, maybe with a little hint of possession. Was he jealous that others might be looking at her? He kissed her ear, and she leaned into his chest.

In June, a British expeditionary force landed at the northern Russian port of Archangel. They formed the nucleus of the White Russian Army around which crystallized the remnants of the Imperial army officers, survivors of the Revolutionary rampages, and opportunists. Their arrival animated the prediction of Lenin, that Capitalism was not yet crushed.

While Zalmund went to the Cheka headquarters at Lubyanka, Deena lived her fantasy at the coffee houses at Pushkinskaya Plaza. She sipped and listened to heated discussions, shouting and threats to kill the rich pigs of the Imperial Tsar. After a while, the empty talk and idle posing bored her. Then one day, as she dazed at her reflection in the tarnished samovar, an energetic woman in a plain white blouse, long black skirt with high boots and laces marched in, followed by a retinue of younger girls, hairs askew and shuffling to keep up. She sat down at a table and ordered a Turkish coffee like a man.

Her boldness disrupted the radical chic of the coffee house, but the denizens did not readily admit to being phased by the modern. She began giving directions to the girls sitting and standing around the table. She was planning something for the neighborhood, and she spoke in a commanding voice that grabbed the room. Deena was entranced.

“We’ll need you and two others,” she said to the plump woman with the frizzed hair in a bun sitting on her right. “You’ll start in this street and work these six blocks to the West.”

“Who can I take?” the frazzled assistant questioned.

She paused and looked around the room. Her flashing black eyes settled on Deena. “You there! Do you have time tomorrow for the Revolution?” And so, Deena joined the staff of Alexandra Kollontai, who had founded the Office of Women’s Welfare. She had been The People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, the only woman to hold Cabinet rank among the Bolsheviks. But she resigned in disgust at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and had continued outside the government to agitate for women’s rights.

Early the next day Deena met the other women at a makeshift soup kitchen, which was really a huge oil drum suspended over an open fire in a brick-lined pit that was dug in the dirt floor of a basement tenement. They cooked zhandre , a corn-meal porridge made without salt or sugar. “They like it much better when we have a little sugar,” one cook told Deena. But sugar was expensive and hard to find, and salt was three times more expensive. The Women’s Welfare brigade cooked all day, occasionally decanting to a smaller drum, which was then taken out to the street. The drum was refilled with water and cornmeal, and the simmering continued.

On her rounds through the district, Deena saw a thin boy in a tattered grey overshirt kneeling by a stoop and watching her closely. An even younger and dirtier girl, no more than five, stood behind his bent leg, one arm on his elbow and peering over his shoulder. She motioned them to her in the street, but they hesitated. She spooned a ladle into a wooden bowl, and they cautiously came to her. They sat down in the middle of the street, and with two spoons devoured the zhandre from the same bowl.

Deena asked their names and about their families; they were separated from their parents recently and lived with family who seemed not to want them. The parents’ whereabouts was unknown. Were they enemies of the State? Deena thought. Without them, their children could not claim ration cards and were a burden on the others in the family. Ration cards issued by the Bolsheviks were for about one-half pound of bread a day. The bread could be bartered for other staples, such as corn meal and vodka. Without ration cards, food had to be purchased at exorbitant prices on the black market. In this issuance of ration cards, the Bolsheviks routinely decided who would live and who would die.

Deena came home that night exhausted and elated with self-satisfaction. “You should have seen them; they were so grateful for that bowl we made for them.” She sat leaning forward before Zalmund with her hands clasped between her knees. “I felt for the first time on the front line of the Revolution!”

Zalmund was certainly surprised by this turn, and excited for Deena that she had left the self-indulgent prattle of the coffee houses for action on the streets. And, yes, a certain envy that she brought joy into hard lives. He escorted Cheka commanders, who by and large made tough lives harder.

He pulled on her hands and she sat in his lap. He stroked her hair and kissed her cheek. “My Deena,” he cooed in her ear. “You will heal the world.”

Alexandra Kollontai, however, had a political motive for feeding the poor. She was a committed Marxist and had spent time in the Tsar’s jails for her Revolutionary writing. She was not, however, sentimentally attached to the bucolic family notion, having abandoned her husband and two children to purse the revolutionary life. As a radical feminist, she saw the nuclear family as a bourgeoisie relic designed to enslave women in endless labor without compensation. Marriage, she held, was the legal enforcement of that domestic bondage. At the Women’s Welfare Office, she taught the values of free love, divorce and collective childcare.

“And who do you think you must serve?” Alexandra turned her head sharply to Deena, her black bangs flapping on her pale white forehead.

Deena was startled by the question but flattered by the attention. “I live with Zalmund. He also serves the Revolution, with the Cheka.” That silenced the room. The Cheka was feared even by Party members.

“You don’t wear a ring, I see. You did not marry him?” Alexandra continued.

“He did not ask.” Deena looked down.

“Would you say yes?” Alexandra asked.

“It wasn’t like that,” Deena’s voice trailed off. “We just ran away.” Again, the room was silent.

“Goooood for you!” Alexandra cooed, having just taught a lesson. “You live free and love as you wish. I like that. I hope all our sisters have that choice one day. We work, and we are paid our worth. We may choose to raise our children, or work in a factory. We find a man…” she looked around the room “…or someone we love… and that is enough.”

Deena was inspired that she was a model for Alexandra’s rant. She looked at her life a little differently now. Nothing had changed, but she seemed to be more in control. More modern. She came home to Zalmund in a glow. But somehow it was not something she could tell him, just yet.

“Alexandra asked if we were married,” Deena said to Zalmund after their spare dinner of bread and thin cabbage soup.

“She did? What did you say?” Zalmund was well aware that Alexandra had connections to the ruling Politburo, although he suspected that she had little influence outside the Women’s Welfare Office. Still, he saw every day that one word at the wrong time could put a man in a difficult spot.

“I told her I loved free,” and Deena giggled.