How warm it was under the bearskin rug, the snow tickling our faces, the song of the runners. “I wrote to you constantly,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever respond?”
He put his arm around me, pressed close. The smell of him, I almost fainted.
“I wrote when I could. In wartime you have to know it’s hit or miss.” I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. But that letter from January didn’t get to me until April.
We trotted up the Fontanka, past the Ciniselli Circus and the Engineers’ Castle and across the end of the Summer Garden with its famous fence of gilt and iron. “On nights in bivouac, I imagined us just like this. This sleigh, this snow, this light.” He closed his eyes and recited, “O madman, tell me—when, where, how / Will you forget them, in what desert? / Ah little feet, where are you now?”
He was reciting Pushkin for me. I was witness to a Kolya I’d never seen before, a Kolya come a-wooing. It was intoxicating. He was trying to seduce me—an old family friend no more. I saw that he thought of himself as a Pushkin—romantic, spontaneous. He caught my indulgent smile and knew he’d been caught at it. He took off his glove, slipped his hand inside my muff. We intertwined fingers, our hands a new creation.
Soon we entered the open Field of Mars, where he and Volodya had paraded with their regiment two years ago August before they’d shipped out to the front. “Faster!” he called to the driver. “Let’s fly!” And we sailed through the lilac shadows of the winter afternoon—the city powdering itself in snow like an old empress before her dressing table. We flew up Millionnaya Street, where Varvara’s father lived, and out onto Palace Square. “Around!” he called, and we circled the Alexander Column as though we were in a crazy chariot race, then left behind the red Winter Palace and the yellow General Staff Building and the Admiralty with its gilded steeple, to cross St. Isaac’s Square with the cathedral dome blurred in the falling snow and past the Bronze Horseman—Peter forever rearing, facing the river.
We slowed and turned southward, as did his hands under the rug, tracing my thick woolen stockings up to the long bloomers, inching above the garters, finding naked flesh. He was shameless. Such pleasure. I let my head rest on his arm, my eyes closing. Oh God, the moan that escaped me—I hoped the driver was discreet. When I opened my eyes, I saw the impish look on Kolya’s face as he undid the bow at the leg of my knickers. How far would he go? I tried to stop the progress of his hand, but it was like trying to stop the assault of an army. I felt the honey dripping from me—I had to admit that doing this in a sleigh right in public made it all the more exciting.
“Tell me you love me,” he said. “Tell me what was in those letters.” Cupping my bottom in his hand.
“You better stop,” I said.
“Why?” Kolya said. “Don’t you like it?”
There was no answering that. Onward we went, and I realized I must have seen couples do this a thousand times. What a child I was not to have noticed. I groaned again as he caressed the soft skin, my wet warmth, and I clung to him, to his heavy overcoat, to a bucking release that I’d only experienced in the slightest bit alone with my legs wrapped around my pillow. Who was shameless, after all?
“Driver, a left.” We turned onto the Catherine Canal Embankment. “Third door.”
“You said we were going for chocolate,” I sighed.
“I’ll make you some,” he said.
The sleigh pulled up in front of an apartment house near the Bank Bridge, where the griffins grinned with their golden wings, bridge cables in their teeth. “Whose house is this?”
“A friend.” He unhooked the rug on my side. “They’ve left it to me.”
I’d been by this building a thousand times. The windows looked haughty to me, judgmental, staring down at my wobbly-legged, flushed-face condition, my hat all askew.
People were walking by on the embankment. I wondered if anyone could tell what we were about to do. If anyone would recognize me. Kolya squeezed my shoulder. “Are you afraid? I can take you back if you want.” Bravery, in love as in art. No, there was no turning back. He would soon return to his unit, or something else would intrude. I knew this afternoon would never come again. He heaved himself out of the sleigh, took my arm. I noticed I was almost as tall as he was now. Had I grown in a year? I raised my fur collar against my burning cheeks as Kolya paid the driver. And it struck me in this moment what a timeless scene this was—the man paying the cab as the woman waited, half hidden in the collar of her coat. How many men, how many women had lived this exact moment? I felt so at one with them, through time. Now I was the woman, and he was the man. Our time and place, now.
Together we walked to the building’s front door and up a short flight of stairs. I would tell no one about this—not Varvara, not Mina. Part of being a woman would be to have just such secrets. He unlocked a door on the second floor. We hung our coats and hats in the entry. He removed his tall boots, and I my slushy overshoes. I threw my book bag in the corner. Inside, a warm sitting room awaited us, with small side chairs and a wide divan covered in olive velvet. Would it happen here? My heart pounded so hard I missed what he said. He repeated himself—“It’s too hot, don’t you think?”—and opened the fortochka in the tall casement window overlooking the Catherine Canal. The delicious coolness mixed with the heat was like a cold cloth in a fever. He bent over and touched my heavy coiled hair, breathed in the scent as if it were a flower. I offered my lips, but he only touched them with a finger, rolling the lower one down ever so slightly.
I hadn’t even noticed the gramophone with its green bell until he went to it and, after cranking it vigorously, lowered the arm. Strains of the tango from New Year’s Eve emerged into the air. He held out his hands to me, he in his cavalry uniform, khaki tunic with gold buttons, blue breeches with their double red stripe, standing in his gray socks, perhaps knitted by one of my classmates. His cropped brown curls lay flat to his scalp, the moustache he sported nestled into the corners of his upturned mouth like twin commas, those clever blue eyes alight…
We began to dance. Not the relatively decorous tango of that New Year’s salon, but pressed together from breast to knee. I felt him hard against me, the full length of him. Now it was not the suggestion of lovemaking, but the thing itself. He pressed me back, our feet turning but deftly, never tangling. I surprised him with a tango kick. He laughed. Better watch me, Kolya. I could follow, but there were other sides to me as well, even as a sixteen-year-old virgin. The play of the gaze—the look away, then suddenly, nakedly, back. The very air leaned against us like a dog hoping to be petted.
“I knew it would be like this,” he whispered into my hair. “I could dance with you to the end of time. Remember how you danced Swan Lake?”
I was seven years old. I’d just seen the ballet, had to show everybody the white swan and the black. “I’m a glutton for attention.”
“You believed it—that’s what I loved. The way you threw yourself into it. I knew you were those swans. I saw how you would be someday. Glorious. I’ve been waiting for you, Marina.”
I had been waiting as well. All this time, masquerading as a nice, well-bred girl when I was a stream in flood, a length of fire, the fall of a hawk. And he knew me—he had always known this lay under school uniforms and children’s party clothes, inside the camisole with the blue ribbon. He knew me at six, had waited for me as a peasant waits for the pears to ripen in summertime, watching that tree all the time he goes about his hoeing and reaping. Now he would reap the rewards of his patience.