‘I will not let you hurt Dmitry. You will not see Valentin Andreyev again,’ says the Countess softly. ‘Never again. And in return, I will not bear any grudge against you. Fair is fair.’
Tonya waits by the cellar steps, toeing the dirty snow with her boots until they are streaky with it. The sky is shedding light. Valentin may not show up today at all, with everything that goes on now. She straightens, prepares for the walk home, and finds herself unable to take that first step.
Would she leave Dmitry to be with Valentin?
No. It cannot be. She and Valentin might want each other now, but what happens when the passion ebbs? When the shouting on the streets turns to normal conversation, when there is no longer any cause to set him on fire? Living in squalor, ageing too rapidly, they would both grow haggard and broken. Disillusioned and embittered. They would turn on one another. She would regret giving up so much to be with him. He would despise her for regretting.
‘Tonya!’
She looks up, flinches at the happiness in his face. He knows none of her turmoil.
‘I knew we would see this in our lifetime,’ he says. ‘I knew it.’
This is the way Valentin often speaks to her. Our lifetime, in the singular. As if it is already the two of them against all else.
‘I have to get home,’ she says. ‘I should not have come at all.’
‘Stay with me tonight, Tonya.’
Tonya feels something cramping up, seizing in her lower belly. He might invite her to stay, but for how long? Valentin is always in action, always on his way to something exciting and important. She pretends to understand his desire to overthrow the monarchy, to rebuild the world upon its ashes, or however he puts it in his speeches. She wants to believe what he believes, and there are times, when he is speaking to the crowd and his every word brings her to her knees, when she almost does.
But when she is alone, she knows she is no socialist. She is no revolutionary. She has no cause. She is only Kukolka, the little doll of her home and village. She has never stood for anything. She has never even stood on her own.
‘I can’t,’ she whispers.
‘Tomorrow then, milaya.’
She searches for something else to say, perhaps in jest, to lighten the mood between them, but none of this is light-hearted any more.
‘Can I see you home?’ he asks.
‘You can come with me as far as the river,’ she says. The Neva, the boundary between their worlds, his and hers. Their world, Valentin might say, but he is a Bolshevik. He is a dreamer.
In the bath, Tonya hugs her legs to her chest and sighs. Taking baths is one of the most indulgent luxuries of her marriage. At Otrada, as a child, Tonya would stand in a tub hardly larger than a bucket, sniffling, while one of the maids would dump creek-water over her head, with Mama looking on critically, silently. Now the tub is long-legged and made of silver, and the water is pleasant, soapy, scented with perfume.
Now the only person who keeps her company does not look her way at all.
Olenka comes from a village outside Petrograd and sends most of her money home. Sometimes Tonya feels a funny urge to say that she, Tonya, comes from a village. That she, too, is friendless in this town. But the lady’s maid always turns away just in time.
It’s surely for the best. The servants do love their gossip. That’s how Tonya knows, for instance, that Olenka used to work in the textile mills, that there’s enough fluff in the maid’s lungs to make a full set of bedding. One day many years ago, as the story goes, Dmitry’s mother happened to be visiting Olenka’s workplace on a charitable mission. The hour was lonely enough for the girl’s weepy cough to be discerned over the sound of grinding machinery. The kind-hearted Anastasia rescued Olenka, installed her as a servant in this very house.
That is what the Lulikovs do. They rescue people.
Tonya should treasure that beaded handkerchief, what will soon be the only remaining piece of her mother-in-law. But she realises now that she has not seen it for months. She has no idea where Anastasia’s handkerchief has gone.
Its loss is a small thing, but somehow foreboding, and despite the comforts of the bath, to which Olenka will add new, warmer water at any moment, Tonya feels cold.
In the early morning the sound of volleys and machine guns is deafening. It rattles in her bones: Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Valentin halts to look down the embankment. He is close enough for Tonya to reach him, to touch him, but it often feels too hopeful to take his hand. As if they are facing the same way.
He once told the crowd that they will live two lives, but she is already living two lives.
‘The police districts have all fallen,’ says Valentin, turning to her. ‘The courthouses are on fire. All that’s left is for Nicholas to abdicate the throne. It’s time to take a side.’
Tonya clutches at her shawl to keep the wind from tearing it away.
‘You could go home and pack a case, meet me later,’ he says. ‘And never go back.’
He was never going to be satisfied with alleyways and ducked heads. She knows him well by now, and he does not do anything in the half-light. Valentin Andreyev believes in absolutes, in right and wrong. It is what separates the Bolshevik Party from the other revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries, the Anarchists. There will be no compromises.
His Bolsheviks will have all, or nothing.
‘I am in love with you,’ he says. ‘Will you come? Will you take my side?’
There is no trace of uncertainty in his face. Whatever is overtaking the city, it has found them. It is between them, like a third party. It is unavoidable.
‘I’m not like you,’ she says, at half-volume. ‘I don’t have your strength of will—’
‘Do you not feel the same about me?’
‘I could never fight for anything, not as you—’
‘Do you not,’ he says, ‘feel the same about me?’
Valentin has said often enough that people are wrong, that the real war is not with Germany, not with the Kaiser; the real war is within. Russia against herself. But he is wrong, too. It is her, Tonya, against herself. Maybe it has always been.
‘I do,’ she says faintly.
He lets his breath out slow. ‘I’ll be there tonight. By our bridge, from eight o’clock. I won’t leave until you come.’
In the distance, the machine guns still fire: Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! It is the music of revolution. Petrograd is collapsing around them. He kisses her, whispers: Until tonight, Antonina. He makes her feel grown-up, worldly even, but this is an illusion, because she is young. Too young for a soul to know itself, Mama would say. Never mind another’s. Tonya slips her shawl over her face. Valentin is striding away. He turns to wave at her and she waves back, her insides rippling, her heart racing. She sees, in the street beyond, a serene line of the Tsar’s Cossacks on horseback. Their lances gleam in the sunlight and their horses’ tails dance in the wind.
When Tonya goes to check on Anastasia, she finds Olenka inexplicably present, standing motionless by the fireplace. The curtains are as firmly shut as always. They have made this place an early grave. The Lulikov matriarch is propped up against her pillows, her eyes going to glass. She sounds as consumptive as Olenka, every breath a labour.
‘Shall I read to you today, Anastasia Sergeyevna?’ Tonya asks, unsure.
‘I wrote to my son, you know,’ says Anastasia, her lips barely moving. ‘I told him not to marry you. Especially without his own mother there to witness it.’
‘I—’
‘But when he brought you here, I saw how he was fixated. My Mitya is just like his father.’ Anastasia’s good eye blinks hard. ‘I tried to make you feel welcome. How I’ve tried, and this is my reward!’