She must have been aware of things before, since even dogs and babies are aware of things. But the first time she was aware of being aware of something—and perhaps that is the beginning of memory—was when she got it clearly fixed in her head that some things had two names. And she was one of them. She was Dawn. But if she was called that here, in the new place where she had gone with Mama and Papa, people would laugh and think it was the name of a river.
In the old place, Dawn was the sunrise. It happened every day.
In the new place, a special dawn had happened when she was a baby, in the month of November, or October as they called it here.
Rossvyote was what they called the rising of the sun here, but here Rossvyote was not a proper name for a little girl and so Papa called her Aurora, which meant something like Dawn but not quite. It was the name of a famous battleship, the ship that had started the Revolution. When Papa said it to grown-ups who were just meeting her for the first time, they would smile and say that she was a good little oktiabriata, October Child.
Then words came to her like the seeds of cottonwoods when the wind blows in the spring, so fast that she could not open her mouth to breathe without catching several upon her tongue. The new place was Petrograd or Saint Petersburg. The old place was America or the United States.
Sometimes you could tell what a person was thinking from which word they used.
Kommunalka was the name of the place where they lived. It meant something like house. But no one lived in those anymore. Houses were for Whites. Houses were bourgeois. Reds lived in kommunalkas. This one had been a house before, but the Whites who had lived there had gone to France and taken all of their bourgeois things with them. Reds had appropriated it and hung blankets up to make walls so that men and women could be separate. It was like camping out in America. Not real camping out, like Mama did in Montana, but play-camping. Papa and the other men lived on one side of the blankets and Dawn and Mama and the other women lived on the other. Mama could not understand as much pa-Roosky as Papa and so she did not know what the other women were saying about her.
When one of the other grown-ups was chasing her, Dawn could drop to her hands and knees and crawl under the blanket to the other side where that person could not follow; but Dawn was allowed to go everywhere except when certain things were happening on the other side of the blanket. Then Mama would pull Dawn up onto her lap and hug her until she fell asleep.
Some parts of the kommunalka were for men and women both: the kitchen, and the room with the big table. But the men always sat around the table while the women stood in the kitchen. Once Dawn asked, “Did we run out of blankets?” thinking that there ought to be a blanket between those two rooms. Mama laughed in a strange way that did not make Dawn feel like laughing, too, and marched out of the kitchen into the room of the big table with water dripping from her hands. The men looked up at her surprised, and Mama said something about Dawn and blankets to Papa and said, “Out of the mouths of babes” in English. After that was a lot of shouting, the only part of which Dawn understood was that people were angry. She was told not to feel bad, but she did anyway.
The women said that Mama’s pot had too many pieces of meat, which was bourgeois. Mama had to stand in front of her pot until it was all cooked or else it would disappear, she said. Dawn liked to be in the kitchen with her, but the other women were always telling her to get out of the way. One of them, Galina, even liked to kick Dawn. She would call, “Out of my way!” even though Dawn wasn’t really in her way at all and then she would try to get close enough to Dawn to kick her. Dawn enjoyed the game, and nearly always won, until one day Galina came up to her without speaking and spilled boiling water on her from a pot and gave her a scald on the arm, a red blotch shaped like a star. Papa took Dawn away screaming and put butter on the scald, and not just Mama but all of the other women shouted at Galina.
After that Dawn spent less time in the kitchen so that she would not be underfoot, which was her new favorite word. She spent time in the room with the men, which smelled always of papers. For papers came into the kommunalka like snowflakes during a blizzard, to the point where they sometimes had to be shoveled out. But often the men would tell her to go and play, and she would crawl under the blanket and go to a cold, empty part of the house. There were no other children there, and she had no brothers or sisters. They did not bother with families, because families were bourgeois and sentimental.
One evening, when she had been sent to play, Dawn heard Papa on the other side of the blanket, talking about America and how things there were very bourgeois and sentimental and religious, so that getting a divorce from Mama was difficult, but here in the Soviet Union he just pulled off his gold ring and he was divorced just like that.
She thought she might have dreamed this, for the scald on her arm was making her sleep strangely. But the next morning she saw that the ring was gone from Papa’s finger. She asked Papa what had become of it and he looked at another man, who made a funny face, and then he looked down at the table and said that he had given the gold to the People, to buy bullets to fight the Whites.
“Then why don’t you pull out your gold tooth and melt it down too?” asked Antonio. He was Italian. He was always saying things like this. Sometimes the other men would laugh. Other times they would become angry and tell him not to say such things. This time, Papa became silent.
But what about Mama? Dawn asked. She felt as though she had tried to swallow a big piece of black bread without chewing it properly, though in truth she had not eaten anything since the night before.
“Mama is fine,” Papa said. “She and I had differences.”
Which made Dawn think she must not know the correct meaning of the word “difference” since it seemed that the entire point of a Mama and a Papa was for them to be different. The men at the table were very quiet for once, all looking at Papa, none of them looking at Dawn. Papa said in Russian, “It is not the same now, this whole idea of marriage, of man and wife; it was an invention of the priests, a form of bourgeois morality.”
“Be a good small comrade, Aurora,” said one of the other men, saying it the Russian way: Avrora. “Don’t begin crying, think of the much worse suffering of our comrades who are fighting the Whites.” Which only made her want to cry more, so she turned her face away from the men with their whiskers and eyebrows and spectacles, and stumbled into the kitchen. Mama was not there. Mama had moved to another kommunalka in the next building. She came and visited Dawn after that, and mostly talked about Montana. Then, one day, after the red splotch on Dawn’s arm had faded, she came and hugged Dawn for a long time and cried without speaking, then stood up and smoothed her orange hair and walked out. Dawn went to the window and saw her climbing into a carriage. Her suitcase was in the back, all tied up with rope. She said something to the driver, who popped his whip and made the horse take Mama away. Feeling a hand on her shoulder, Dawn jumped up in surprise, but it was just Papa, on the wrong side of the blanket. In a soft voice he explained that Aurora should not feel bad because Aurora was an October Child, too young to have become bourgeois. “We must strive to alter our consciousness but not you, small comrade.”
Papa walked with her to the United Labor School. She must learn the way by heart so that she could walk it alone. For Papa was busy translating the Twenty-One Theses of the Second Congress of the Third International into English, to inform the proceedings of the Red International of Labor Unions, which was preparing an ideological offensive to cleanse its ranks of naïve anarcho-syndicalism. She could see in his face that it was important. He took her into the school and told the teachers that her name was Aurora. Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva. Dawn protested. Her middle name was Rae. “But my name is Maxim,” Papa said, “and so here in Russia your middle name must be Maximovna.” Whereupon he exchanged a look with the woman who was enrolling Dawn, and she wrote it down thus.
The Whites were losing the war. Different parts of the Red Army came back and marched through Petrograd with people cheering and weeping. A man came to the kommunalka with a tape measure and did sums in his head, moving his lips and rolling his eyes, and said that they had too many square meters and that room must be made for the heroes of the Red Army. Two men moved in, and, on the women’s side of the blankets, Veronika. Veronika marched in wearing black boots that came up to her knees. Her greatcoat was rolled into a long bundle and slung over her shoulder, with a copper pot dangling at the side. She spread her coat out on the floor and slept in it. She took her pot with her to the kitchen and cooked in it, and none of the other women dared make anything disappear, even when she had meat. She would not share her meat with the other women but she would give Aurora as much as she wanted. Veronika was a machine gunner in the Red Women’s Death Battalion. In Siberia she had fought the White Cossacks with her machine gun and been awarded medals. Aurora sat on her lap and ate meat and listened to her stories. Much of these she did not understand. Kerensky had formed the Death Battalions. Kerensky was better than the tsar, but not as good as Comrade Lenin, and so Comrade Lenin had stormed the Winter Palace and defeated him in the October Revolution. Some of the Death Battalions had gone over to Lenin’s side, and to prove their loyalty they now fought harder than anyone else. Aurora asked Veronika whether she, too, could be a machine gunner when she grew up, and Veronika said that it was not like being a regular soldier, it was technical, like operating a sewing machine, which was why women were better at it than men, and she would have to attend to her studies and become clever with arithmetic.
Staying up late doing her sums, Aurora would sometimes hear Maxim Alexandrovich talking about Mama, which was a thing he was more apt to do when he had been drinking vodka with the other men around the table.
In the days just after Mama left, he would say that she was an anarchosyndicalist, which apparently was not a nice thing to call someone, but it did explain to the satisfaction of the other men why he had taken the ring off his finger.
After some time had gone by and they had begun to receive letters from Mama, mailed from Montana, his voice became softer when he spoke of her, and he said that she was more in the nature of an instinctive anarchist, with all of the best intentions but needing an infusion of Leninist theory and revolutionary discipline.
All of it just made Aurora want to curl up into a ball and suck her thumb, which was no way for a small comrade to behave, but she did it anyway, sometimes nestling with Veronika under the greatcoat. To her, Mama was a woman on a horse with long orange hair that blew in the wind. Aside from an image of a great blue lake in Chicago, this was the only memory of America that she still had.
Sometimes, after months had gone by, Papa would call Mama a cowgirl instead of an anarcho-syndicalist or an instinctive anarchist, and then make a sound like laughing, encouraging the other men to laugh with him, which they did. After that, it was always “cowgirl.”
It rained. It rained more. It rained most of the time. It rained all of the time. As Aurora walked to school, mud would grow on her shoes, making her feet heavy until she stomped through puddles to wash it off. The best puddles were in the street. One afternoon she was doing this and she heard a bell ringing. She remembered a thing Mama had said once in English: clear as a bell. She had not understood its meaning until the sound of this bell, so sharp and close, came into her ears like an icicle. She looked up to see that it was the bell of a streetcar, which had stopped next to her. The conductor was pulling the bell rope with one hand and gesturing with the other. She turned around and saw an automobile coming. The driver, a clean-shaven young man in a black leather coat and a military hat, was looking toward her with his green eyes and so she assumed that he would go around, but his black leather fists on the steering wheel did not move decisively to one side or the other, making only tiny corrections to avoid potholes. She sidled up next to the streetcar, feeling the hum of its motor against her head, and the automobile whooshed past, hurling up a wing of brown water. In the instant before this collapsed over Dawn’s head, she saw through the automobile’s rear window where a man in black leather was holding up a lit cigarette in one hand and, in the other, a white page with a list typed on it. Someone had been drawing on it with red ink. The thought came into her head that this man must have a daughter who had used the paper for coloring. She wondered for a moment whether the paper was important and the daughter was going to be punished for using it so.
Then all went brown. She was gasping and rubbing the water out of her eyes when a hand grabbed the collar of her coat and pulled her aboard the streetcar. It was the conductor, very angry—but not at her. “I can see from your clothes that you are not some wild hooligan child—where are your parents?” he demanded. She said that one of them was in Montana and the other at such-and-such an address.
The conductor sat down slowly in the wooden chair at the front, where the levers and knobs were. He had a huge black mustache that reached out from his thin face like the parts of an insect that grab food. He put his hands over his eyes like a man weeping or praying, and the ends of his mustache fidgeted as his lips moved. He was almost silent but Aurora could hear him saying the names of streets. Then he took his hands away and blinked his blue eyes out the windscreen as if surprised to find himself there. “It can be done,” he announced in a clear voice. He sounded happy but the people riding in the streetcar groaned, and one of them demanded to be let off “before you get up to any of your conjuring, Grisha!” Grisha did something with levers that caused the car to move forward. Soon he rid himself of the complaining passenger, and later of several more who did not approve of conjuring.
They came to an intersection of streets where the rails went every which way, like steel noodles flung onto a table. Grisha leaned forward, peering down at them and, wiggling his mustache-ends with further incantations, he then pulled on a lever that made the streetcar’s lights go out and the whine of its motor sigh down to nothing. The little points in the rails before them moved, shifting sideways, and a moment later the streetcar veered left, gliding dark and silent onto a new course. Men snapped their newspapers, reading of Whites and Wobblies. Grisha heaved the lever again, the lights came on, the motor hummed, and the streetcar moved confidently to the next intersection of rails—where Grisha did it again and switched them onto another new track. After a while Grisha had to ask Dawn to leave off screaming whenever it happened, for she was very excited about how a tiny movement of the points could effect a shift in the course of the giant vehicle and all the people aboard, and her squealing every time was making it difficult for the other passengers to read their books and their newspapers.
“You see, there’s one in that doorway, and a whole mob of them just disappeared into yonder alley,” Grisha said, when not mumbling street-names. He was referring to small persons in bad clothing. Aurora saw them frequently in certain places and had learned to avoid such parts of town. “War orphans, runaways, peasants from the back of beyond. Imagine coming to a city to escape a famine! Those little ones don’t go to school, do they?”
“No, they don’t go to school.”
“The Chekist driving that car—he mistook you for one of them, playing in the street—so he didn’t care if you got run over,” Grisha said. Then he turned his blue eyes on her and shook his finger. “Don’t let yourself be mistaken for one of them!”
“What’s a famine?” Aurora asked. “Can it come into the city?” She assumed it was some sort of monster.
In due time—having dropped off several of the original passengers and, after lengthy discussions, picking up a few more—Grisha got as close to the kommunalka as the streetcar lines would allow. He then took her by the hand and led her down the street. One of the passengers protested, but some women shushed him and said that he should be ashamed of himself.
Grisha took Dawn up the stairs and asked for Maxim Alexandrovich. By now it was late and so Papa was home, sitting around the table with the other men, reading their papers and eating kasha. Grisha asked Aurora if this was her father and she said yes. He asked Papa if this was his daughter and Papa said, “Who are you to ask?” and stepped around the table and picked her up in his arms and asked where she had been all this time. “Very nearly under the tires of some Chekist’s automobile!” Grisha answered.
It led to Dawn’s being sent to the other side of the blankets so that the men could talk. Dawn told the story to Veronika, thinking that she would be delighted. But instead her face went red and she stood up and began to stride back and forth across the women’s half of the room and to stare out the window toward the street. Finally Veronika turned around and Aurora saw that she had tears on her face. “You must never let it happen again!” she cried. “Promise me.”
“I will stay out of puddles.”
“No, not that!” Veronika said with a strange laugh.
“I will look both ways and—”
“No!” Veronika dropped to her knees. It was cold in the room; she was wearing her greatcoat, which collapsed all around her and made Aurora want to climb inside of it. Veronika reached out and took Dawn’s arm roughly. “You let him take you!” She said this in a whisper so harsh that it stung Dawn’s ears like the bell of the streetcar. She wiggled Dawn’s arm to show what she was talking about. “You just let a strange man grab you and take you away. To a place of his choosing. Never do it again.”
“Because of the famine?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I can’t tell you, for you are too young. But some men will do a terrible thing to you. The worst thing. It is what Cossacks do.” She was crying now.
“Does it ever get better?”
“Maybe a little. Not all the way. The only thing you can do for it is—”
“Is what?”
But Veronika had gone back to her usual way, which was not to look people in the eye. Aurora’s gaze strayed to the sleeve of Veronika’s greatcoat, the arm that was still reaching out to hold Dawn. There on the elbow was the colored patch with the yellow border that Veronika had embroidered on the sleeve, a little picture of a fat-barreled gun on a stand with three legs.
Papa with Grisha devised a new order of things, which was that each morning Dawn walked to a square just down the street where several streetcar lines converged, and presently Grisha’s car came along and fetched her, always with other passengers aboard who were going other places. In due time he got her to school.
At school the teachers helped them strive to become good little Sovki. The students wore red kerchiefs and faced the Red Corner each morning and sang songs. In the old days, capitalists had forced the workers to stand at the capitalists’ lathes, but now the lathes belonged to the people. Aurora told Grisha that she would one day know how to make parts to fix his streetcar, and she told Veronika that she would make a new barrel for her machine gun.
Veronika would come home after dark with flushed cheeks and tend to her uniform. Dawn asked her if she had been at the front, machine-gunning White Cossacks. Veronika laughed and said no, she had been rehearsing The Storming of the Winter Palace.
This was a thing Dawn had heard of in school, and she was perplexed and alarmed to know that it already needed to be stormed again. She had seen the Winter Palace—it was not far from the kommunalka—and the thought of its having been re-occupied by Tsarists and Whites kept her up at night. But Veronika just stroked her hair and told her that she would see and that it would be all right.
They played games at school, out in the yard. To play cowboys and Indians was bourgeois, the older girls said. Dawn cried because her mother was a cowgirl and her uncles were cowboys. Lidiya—one of the older girls, always sweet to the little ones—took her by the hand and drew her into the game of razverstka, which in some ways was like hide-and-seek. First they would gather up acorns from the schoolyard, which was bordered on one side by a wood of old oaks. The acorns were placed into a hat so all could see how many there were. Some of the children would then tie their red scarves over their faces and count slowly to one hundred. These were the Bolsheviks, or the Reds. The others, who were called Mensheviks or Whites or kulaks, would run all over the schoolyard hiding the acorns. When the Reds counted to one hundred, they would peel off their scarves and cry out, “Razverstka!” and one who was their leader would demand to know the location of the acorns (though he would call them gold, or potatoes, or ammunition) so that they could be distributed to the Workers’ Committees. The Whites would say, “There are none, we swear it!” and this was the signal for the Reds to search for the missing acorns while the Whites counted to one hundred. All the acorns found were then thrown into the hat, and if the number was sufficient, the Whites would have to confess that they were bourgeois speculators and accept their punishment. This varied because the game was different every time. Sometimes it was running a spanking gauntlet, which did not hurt much through the warm clothes.
All of the good hiding places became known; the Whites couldn’t win. Some of the older boys, who couldn’t stand to lose, insisted on being Reds every time, and the girls, trying to be good, agreed to be Whites, saying that they didn’t care who won. Aurora did care, but she was too small to argue against Lidiya and the other big girls. Andrei, who was not the biggest or the oldest of the boys, but the most furious, took on the responsibility of telling everyone how the game would be organized. For a while Dawn pretended to enjoy the game as she had once done, but when all of her secret places became known, and the big boys became quite loud in their triumph, she cried. The older girls had words with the boys. The teachers came out to see what was the matter. They made Andrei denounce himself. Andrei did it curtly, staring off into the sky, then wheeled around and stomped away cursing. He was angry at Lidiya and Lidiya was angry at him and Dawn reckoned they were enemies now and that was that. Yet they looked at each other all the time, Andrei staring like a dog and Lidiya pretending not to notice, Lidiya then watching Andrei sidelong when Andrei was so busy running or playing that he could not be aware of her gaze.
Veronika went to the station and returned with a tall, skinny old lady in a long black dress, like from an old tintype. This was Tyotya. She came from where Veronika had come from, in the east. She had only a small bag, and the one dress. She had come to watch The Storming of the Winter Palace. The other women in the kommunalka did not like her clothes, her manners—both of which were very old-fashioned—or the cross she wore around her neck or the way she pronounced words or her cooking or how she smelled.
The next day was the storming. It was wet but not too cold. They packed hampers with jars of herring, loaves of black bread, bottles of vodka. In the evening they all walked down toward the Winter Palace, quickly getting lost in a river of people, far more people than Dawn had ever seen in one place. Some of them carried great red banners and marched in groups.
They came out into a vast square in front of the Winter Palace, the biggest building she had ever seen. On the far side of the palace lay the river. Instead of going directly into the square where all of the people were gathering, Papa led her down the side of the palace to the waterfront. A great ship of war was there, painted white, all lit up by powerful lights shining from the top of the palace. Aurora’s name was painted on its prow. She was thrilled by that and spent a long while looking at it, but Papa would only look at her. In time he said they should get back to the square or else all of the good spots would be taken. As they walked hand in hand, Papa told her of how peasants in Massachusetts had once fired a shot heard round the world to fight the imperialists, and a little while later some workers who had heard that shot had stormed a castle full of aristocrats in Paris, but here in Petrograd the shot and the storming had happened on the same night, and they were about to see it. And that was why her name in this place was Aurora, not Dawn.
All of the other people who had come to see it stood in two huge groups cordoned off by ropes. Between those groups ran an open lane, and in the center of the lane stood a column, an old monument, covered for tonight with new work: a scaffold, a high platform, telegraph lines radiating from it to places around the square: a pair of huge stages at one end of the lane, the Winter Palace facing them at the other end, and busy, crowded works stuffed into the corners of the square and the surrounding parks where trucks and horses and artillery pieces were being readied by thousands of people—one of whom, she knew, was Veronika. Papa told her that the director was up on that platform, watching in all directions and telling people what to do by telegraph. Aurora wished to see the director, but he was sheltered from rain by a shed roof, walled off from the wind by canvas, warm behind glass, only the red tip of his cigarette visible in the dark.
For a long time they did nothing but marvel at the two stages, one all in white, the other red, the two joined by a bridge that arched over the lane. The white one was all flat slabs at different heights, like a sort of wedding cake, the red one was like a great machine-city with factories and a tall spire. Stray musical noises emanated from under the bridge, and when Papa took Aurora up onto his shoulders she was able to see that the lane between the red and the white stages was carpeted in musicians, all dressed in black and white and tuning up their instruments, the gleaming brass and the glowing wood.
Some signal must have gone out over the telegraph wires, for suddenly all went dark. “It’s a blackout!” someone joked, and a few people laughed but others cursed him angrily. Then a great boom sounded from the river. “The Aurora!” Papa exclaimed, and then for a few moments all of Petrograd was saying it.
Under the arch of the bridge between the stages, a brilliant disk of light appeared around a man in a long black coat who called the musicians to order with a wave of his baton and then got them playing a great loud piece of music. Lights came on aiming at the White stage, which was suddenly crowded with men and women in fancy clothing: furs and jewels, uniforms, top hats. They applauded a man in khaki who was hissed and whistled at by the crowd. “Kerensky,” Papa explained.
“For real?” she asked, suddenly feeling exposed up on his shoulders, but she could feel Papa’s head shaking between her thighs. “Playacting,” he said.
Play-Kerensky gave a speech. No one could hear it, but he was making all sorts of crazy movements that made him seem quite silly, and the fancy people up on the White stage adored him but the crowd in the square only laughed, and Aurora felt like a silly little girl for ever having been afraid of such a clown.
Lights came up on the Red stage. Workers emerged from factories, moving strongly. “You can tell they’re dancers,” Papa said in English. Some went to work beating anvils in synchrony with the music. A red flag was raised in a crossfire of light beams, and other workers gathered around it as cold people gather around a bonfire. The music changed and Aurora’s ears picked out a tune that they sang every day at the school, “The Internationale.” This grew louder and the lights grew brighter until they all, even the crowd, were singing it. Lenin came out and everyone screamed for him, stopping the show for several minutes. He spoke to the workers, who took up brilliant Red Guard banners and began to wave them gorgeously under the lights. They marched to the bridge and did battle with Whites above the orchestra, the White fighters a fearsome and yet comical menagerie of Cossacks, Savage Battalions, Germans in spiked helmets, Women Death Guards. Kerensky continued talking, trying to make the aristocrats ignore the Red Guards, but then they all fell down as the Reds fired their rifles, and scattered, scooping up bags of money and jewels and silverware. Things became confused. The telegraph must have been busy. Trucks loaded with bayonet-carrying soldiers issued from one part of the square, Cossack cavalry from another. A mock train rumbled along the streetcar track, firing cannons. Artillery pieces were dragged out of a park by teams of proletarian women pulling on ropes and began to make far too much noise. Kerensky was being defended by women; then he wasn’t. People thought that funny. He climbed into a car with an American flag on it and drove down the lane between the two halves of the audience, careened around the base of the pillar, and made straight for the Winter Palace. No one knew where to look for a while; Aurora became drowsy. But then it suddenly seemed that the Red Guards were everywhere victorious, rushing toward the Winter Palace, the Cossacks and the Savage Battalions, the Women’s Death Guard and the workers all merged into one great Red Army, searchlights sweeping back and forth across their multitudes as they converged. But one spotlight remained constant, steadily following a lone figure as he strode down the middle of the open lane, his bald head shining in the light: Lenin. He marched straight up the steps into the Winter Palace. Lights came on in the palace’s many windows and now fighting could be seen, silhouetted figures acting out a panoply of looting, fist-fighting, chasing, bayoneting, suicide, cowardice, and surrender. The silhouette of a man grabbed the silhouette of a woman and held her to him even as she pawed at his face. As each of these little dramas concluded, the light in that window turned red. The entire palace had been limned in a fringe of white light, which Papa told her was made by searchlights on the Aurora, directly behind it. But when the last window in the Winter Palace had gone red, Aurora trained her searchlights up into the sky above it to reveal an enormous billowing red flag being run up. The music and the singing were very loud now, Aurora’s eyes heavy. People in the front of the crowd laughed at something Aurora couldn’t see. Aurora fired all of her cannons; Aurora screamed into the wall of noise and plugged her ears. Fireworks went off from batteries all around the square, and Aurora looked up into a bursting and writhing storm of red light. After it was over, black cinders rained out of the dark sky for a minute. Aurora flinched as one of them went down the back of her neck. Someone behind her flipped up the collar of her coat. She turned around and saw that it was Tyotya.
“I will be Aurora now,” she said, but Papa didn’t hear her.
She was asleep in Papa’s arms before they got back to the kommunalka.
TYOTYA DID NOT GO BACK TO HER OLD HOME IN THE EAST AFTER THE STORMING OF THE Winter Palace. Aurora came to understand that it had never been the plan for her to go home, and that the other women in the kommunalka had seen as much from the very beginning. She would sit in a soft chair that she had shipped in from the country, and do needlework, improving the badges on Veronika’s uniform, adding tiny details to the little picture of the machine gun on her sleeve. Veronika did not approve of the soft chair and called it byt, bourgeois comfort, but said it was all right for an old woman. Sometimes, though, when Veronika was away, Tyotya let Aurora sit in the soft chair for tea parties.
Tyotya would get up early in the morning and walk Aurora to the streetcar, and when Grisha brought Aurora home in the evening, Tyotya would be waiting for her. At the beginning of each week, Papa gave a bundle of tea to Tyotya, or sometimes an envelope, and she handed it to Grisha. Some of the other men in the kommunalka did not like this way of doing things and said that it was bourgeois, that Grisha was a speculator, but Papa said that he, Papa, was doing important work for the Revolution and that Grisha was assisting him.
Sometimes she got to school late, because of all the time Grisha spent talking to his other passengers. Some of them paid their fares with money but others brought tea, chocolate, cigarettes, gilt picture frames, Tsarist medallions, models of ships, pelts, table lamps, spoons. As the weather got colder, some brought firewood: chair legs, bundles of lath with lumps of horsehair plaster still a-dangle, molding, shrubbery. It piled up in the back of the streetcar.
Certain men Grisha did not wish to speak to at all. He would go far out of his way to avoid them, but sometimes they would blow whistles and come aboard the streetcar and demand money, tea, or whatever he had that was easy to carry away. Aurora asked if they were police. Grisha said, “Not exactly” or “It depends on precisely what you mean.”
The morning mud became as thick as congealed kasha, then hard as stone, and the wheel ruts in the streets were floored with ice that glowed pink in the light of the dawn, like paint lashed across old leather. Steam covered the windows of the streetcar and it became Dawn’s task to stand next to Grisha and wipe it clear with a rag so that he could see the points and look out for passengers, and the men with the whistles.
Snow began to fall. When they played razverstka now, and the Whites’ hoarding was exposed, the punishment was a snowball firing squad. Once when Dawn was “shot,” she lay on her back waving her arms and legs. When Lidiya came over to find out what was the matter, Dawn said that she had become an angel. She got up to show the wings and the skirts of the angel that she had made in the snow. Lidiya smiled a little bit but said that she should not talk of things such as angels, which were bourgeois superstitions created by the priests as a narcotic for the workers.
A deep snow fell and it became easy to hide the acorns. The Reds became frustrated, their gesticulations like those of the clownish Whites in the storming. Seeing the way Lidiya laughed and mocked him, Andrei announced that there would have to be an interrogation, and he tackled Lidiya into a snowdrift and sat on top of her and tickled her until, laughing and screaming with tears on her face, she told him where the acorns were—a big cache. She and Aurora had buried it together, their secret. Aurora got a sick feeling and almost threw up as she wondered what the penalty was going to be. But no penalty came to her or any of the other small children. All backs were turned, no eyes were on the little ones. Lidiya’s penalty was to swear obedience to the Revolutionary Workers’ Committee, and to kiss Andrei.
After that, Aurora never played the game again. It became all about interrogations and kissing. The smaller children were not invited. Some of the older girls had become sick of it, did not wish to go on being Whites every time, did not wish to be interrogated, and one of them slugged a boy in front of everyone and called him a Cossack. Which made Aurora remember what Veronika had told her about being grabbed and taken by men. Aurora tried to start another game in which the girls were all machine gunners and the boys were all Cossacks. It was popular for one day and then she could not get them to play it anymore.
TIME WAS TOLD BY THE SLOW WALK OF TACKS AND YARN ACROSS SCHOOLROOM MAPS: THE fronts where the Red Army was pushing back the remaining Whites, and the expansion of the revolutionary workers’ state into the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East. Veronika would come and go for weeks, months at a time.
She came back for Tyotya’s funeral. Afterward she gave Aurora a locket that Tyotya had wanted her to have. The lid was engraved with a crest that was familiar to Aurora because she saw it on the gates whenever she visited Papa at work. It was the crest of the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, which had once been a boarding school and had since become the headquarters of the worldwide proletarian revolution. When the locket was opened, there was a cross on one side, in the queer Russian Orthodox style with the slanted crossbar at the bottom, the ramp from hell to heaven, and on the other a bust of a young woman in profile, carved in pink-orange stone, the color of the winter dawn.
The Ukraine became settled enough that Papa felt it safe to journey there in search of his cousins, even if only to bury them. For Papa had been born there and had emigrated to Pennsylvania in his fourteenth year. His trip was supposed to last for only a couple of weeks, but Aurora did not see him again for months.
The men around the table fell silent when Aurora was nearby. Antonio, the Italian, walked with her one morning to the streetcar and asked her about school, and whether she talked to the teachers or the other children about her father and what he did, and who he associated with, and what he said around the table, and the other men who lived in the kommunalka. He was speaking of these matters as an adult speaks to a child of how babies are made. But Aurora had seen how the daily flood of papers had been funneled down to one, which was Pravda, and she had picked up certain habits from the older children at school, who had become coy about what they said and whom they said it to—particularly after one of the teachers had, without explanation, ceased to exist, and the other teachers had denounced her, all using the same words and phrases.
“No,” Aurora said, “I say nothing.”
“Good,” Antonio said.
A week later, he disappeared. All assumed the worst until he sent them a postcard from Rome.
There was shooting at night, not just small arms but machine guns. Lying awake, Aurora felt the same vague dread as when Grisha had spoken to her of the famine. But Veronika came home from the front, listened to it for a few minutes with the distracted stare of a doctor with a stethoscope, and said it could not be real fighting. It was like the Storming of the Winter Palace, she explained. But then, sensing that some of the other women were awake, she added, “during the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917.”
The Chekists—for it was they who did the nocturnal shooting—raided different neighborhoods on different nights, and in the morning the children at school would compare notes as to who had heard what. Some had not merely heard but seen, and these never wished to talk. Aurora did not understand why until the Chekists visited their neighborhood.
They shot sporadically from midnight onward, just frequently enough to make sleep impossible. Then, just before dawn, they came down the street in a flatbed truck, firing pistols in the air. Most of the women flattened themselves against the floorboards, but Veronika rolled up to her feet, strode to the window, and pulled the curtain aside. One of the other women screamed at her, but Veronika turned around with a look on her face that Aurora would always remember, and said, “If they wanted us dead …”
Aurora ran to the window, wrapped herself in the skirts of Veronika’s greatcoat, and looked. The truck had already rolled past, but at a stately pace. Men in long black coats stood on its back with feet planted wide, gazing about like old statues of tsars. The truck went into the intersection where Aurora waited for the streetcar every morning. In its wake came automobiles, trundling along so slowly that Chekists were able to step out of them every so often and take up positions along the street.
“You’ll be late for school,” Veronika predicted.
They opened a jar of herring and breakfasted. Everything was silent, out on the street and inside the kommunalka where people were sitting near windows.
“It is all because Comrade Lenin is sick,” one of the men said. “When he recovers—”
Another man told him to shut up, looking at Aurora.
“Everyone knows it!” the first man said. But now everyone shushed him. There was a general movement toward the windows. Aurora slipped along in Veronika’s wake. At the last moment, the man who had looked at her noticed her and threw out an arm crying, “No!”
Aurora dodged under a blanket to the women’s side. The windows were thronged. She went on to the lavatory and locked the door behind her. She stood up on the seat of the toilet and threw open the tiny window of painted-over glass that they used to let in fresh air. Directly below her the truck was passing by. Four Chekists stood at the corners of the flatbed, submachine guns slung from their shoulders. The bed itself was covered with persons, packed side to side, head to foot, like sardines, all facedown, their hands wired together behind their backs.
Cold air came in through the little window, which was of a perfect size to frame her face and shoulders, like the cameo that Tyotya had given her. The street was still, a few snowflakes drifting down, as if in the van of a blizzard. All of the other windows on the street were closed. Aurora knew that behind them people, hundreds of them, were peering. But hers was the only face visible. The faces of the Chekists on the near side of the truck swiveled to look at her, and she fancied she was illuminated by them as the faces of the actors at the storming had been lit by the sweeping beams of the searchlights. Lit, and warmed, for she felt blood wash into her face as she was seen.
One of the Chekists recognized her, and she him. He had been looking stern, but a happy grin flashed onto his face. “Aurora Maximovna!” he called, and took one hand off of his submachine gun to give her a cheerful wave.
She was about to call greetings back—for polite habits overrode all sense and circumstance—when the head of one of the prisoners moved suddenly, turning and then lifting off the truck’s plank bed. A pair of blue eyes, rimmed in white, stared out from a face otherwise masked in red, unrecognizable were it not for the way frozen and clotted blood dangled from the long ends of the mustache. Then some instinct of shame or mercy made him close his eyes. Grisha banged his forehead down onto the boards and buried his face between the feet of the man lying next to him.
She was not sure she had even seen it. Her gaze went back to the young Chekist who had greeted her. He was still smiling but seemed crestfallen. “It is I!” he called.
“Good morning, Andrei Sergeievitch!” she called back.