Where was our Whitman? I wondered, imagining he was here somewhere, in a trench or a hospital like this one, putting it all into words that would reach across time to break your heart. Maybe this Brusilov Offensive would be the thing to break through and end the war. But the looks of this ward made me wonder. I asked a few of the men about the offensive, how it seemed to be going, but none of them had any idea. They went where they were told; they trusted in God.
I gazed back at the crowded ward, like a terrible mirror house. How many men lay mangled in wards like this in Russia right now, their bodies ruined? Could we really afford to lose so many? Wouldn’t we run out of arms and legs? Though they said we were winning, I couldn’t help wondering what losing would look like. I thought of Volodya… but there were no officers in these wards, only common soldiers. Bad luck to think it. He’ll be fine…
And why did I think Volodya and not Kolya? He could have been shot just as easily. And yet somehow I felt he would be protected—if not by God or the Virgin or spirits then by his own buoyancy. Surely he, if anyone, would know how to evade the bullets and grenades. Yet I knew this was childish thinking. Kolya Shurov was only a man like any of these, blood and muscle, with arms and legs that could be lost, flesh that could be torn, eyes that could burn. Charm couldn’t dissuade bullets or bayonets, land mines or poison gas. But still, I couldn’t quite believe it. Volodya was heroic, an officer of cavalry, the type who could be killed defending somebody else, could trip a land mine. He would be the one to lead any charge. I prayed God to bring him back, safely and soon.
When I told Varvara what I was doing with the wounded men, she shook her head slowly, said the only cure for what was going on in this country was to end the imperial nightmare and agitate for a socialist state. She told me to read Das Kapital. “Better to work for change that affects everyone.” I knew she was right, yet what about the man in this bed, groaning, his body in plaster? Sometimes simply holding someone’s hand was better than all the Hegelian dialectics in the world. Varvara had not seen the glow in a man’s wounded face as I approached his bed, how happy he’d been to be asked the most mundane questions, how glad to simply have been sought out and addressed as a man.
I moved to the bedside of a soldier with a blond beard. His leg had been amputated at the knee, and the smell was nauseating. Sick as he was, his letter to his sweetheart brimmed with affection and humor:
Dearest Olya,
I’m here in the capital enjoying the fine life. Only the big tankards of kvas, the dancing girls. They send us violins to sing us to sleep. If I hadn’t lost that leg, it’d be a holiday.
The man in the next bed smoked a twisted cigar. “She’s probably sleeping with the foreman, brother,” he interjected. “Women don’t wait, and that’s the truth.”
I flushed, thinking of the boys I’d kissed when I thought Kolya had forgotten me. Wait for me…
“Shut up, Yid,” the blond man said.
“I bet you get back, there’ll be another kid who looks nothing like you.” The cynic was reading a book. The first literate man I’d seen here.
“Keep it buttoned, or I’ll shove your face in,” said my soldier. “She’s a treasure, barynya. She’s my angel.”
“Should I put that in?” I asked. “My treasure, my angel?”
“Yes, write it all down.”
I added these to the other phrases. “What else?”
A tear rolled down his cheek into his beard. “Tell her I’ll be back soon, I’ll warm her up and how…” Then he remembered who he was talking to, a sixteen-year-old studentka. “A thousand pardons, barynya. Forgive me, I’m not used to fine company.”
I wanted to see the title of the volume the other soldier held in his hands. “What are you reading?” I asked him.
“Nothing for you,” he sneered. “Barynya.”
My eyes watered as though I’d been slapped in the face. The other men had been so grateful… he obviously had a poor opinion of women.
“Bedbug! Louse. Don’t listen to him, barynya.” My bearded private defended me, though he could barely lift his head for fever. “If I could get out of this bed, I’d beat his Yid head in.”
Finally I could see the title of the man’s book. Chernyshevsky’s radical Chto Delat’? What Is to Be Done? It made me all the more curious about this rude fellow to see that he was reading the same book Varvara was so fervent about. “You’re not an officer?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he said, smoking his twisted cheroot. “If I were an officer would I be here? No, I’d be in Tsarskoe Selo on a featherbed, eating eggs on toast.”
“You got that right,” said my bearded man.
I finished his letter and moved to the bedside of the literate man. The smell of his cigar was sharp and bitter.
“Mind if I ask you some questions?” I asked. He wasn’t an amputee and probably would be sent back to the front, but he interested me.
“Why not?” the man said. “I have a few moments.” He put his book on the gray sheet, his cigar stuck between his teeth.
His name: Evgeny Isaakovich Marmelzadt. From Petrograd. Unmarried. No children. Profession, typesetter. Literate. “Why aren’t you an officer?”
“Steblov, tell her why I’m not an officer.”
“’Cause he’s a Jew, barynya. Who’d follow him anywhere except to the pawnshop?” The blond-bearded soldier laughed.
Marmelzadt took his cigar from his teeth. “I rest my case.”
An odd little man, rude and yet willing to talk. Thinning sandy hair, a wide bony jaw. Unlike the other men, he wasn’t intimidated by my clean clothes and educated speech. In fact I had the feeling he considered himself superior to me. “Excuse me, Evgeny Isaakovich, can I ask you one more question?”
“Maybe. Let’s hear it.”
“Do you think the offensive will succeed? That we’ll win the war?”
He smiled a rancid little smile, reading the tip of his cigar as if a joke nested in its glowing nib. “Everyone’s going to lose this war, little missy.” He squinted, sticking it back between his teeth. “Walk away from your pretty streets, your Nevsky Prospect. Stop looking at yourself in the mirror long enough to take a good look around.”
“But Brusilov—”
“Forget your Brusilov. He can’t save it. This whole country is sinking like a stone. It’s rotten, everything in it is rotten. These poor fools can hang on to their saints and their tsar as much as they like, but when this offensive fails, then you watch. You heard it here first. Thank me later.”
I felt his disapproval like a lash—especially the part about looking at myself in the mirror, which of course I did constantly. But I needed to know what someone other than my father thought. I wanted to argue with him—his words cast such a chill, even on a hot day. As I moved on, I felt his gaze following me. I thought of him as we took a cab all the way back to Furshtatskaya Street.
5 Fathers and Sons
AUTUMN. THE BRUSILOV OFFENSIVE died and crumbled in the mud of Galicia—just as the sour-faced soldier had predicted. Not enough support at the right time, Father said. Territoriality, shortsightedness, and squabbling among the generals had undermined our best hope for victory. Gloom pervaded the house—gloom at school, irritability in the street and in the classrooms. Mother decided to cheer us one night by pulling out an old photo album with silver hasps. We curled up with her in the little sitting room that served as our library, me on one side, Seryozha on the other. Above her hung the Vrubel portrait of her as Igraine, all sea and mist. Near the Russian stove with its blue tiles, Miss Haddon-Finch worked on a jigsaw puzzle while Avdokia sat on a little rush-bottomed chair mending a hem. The scent of cherry tobacco wafted down the hall. All was as it used to be when we were small, and we sat next to Mother, watching her turn the big black pages of the old album like pages in a book of fairy tales. For a moment, I could forget the war, the men, even Kolya, just to dwell there, a little girl, smelling Mother’s perfume.