Marya
While she’d known that the hours and days in the wake of the tsar’s funeral would be a time of confusion, she’d thought they would be given a moment, at least, to breathe. Clearly she’d underestimated the power of tradition. The lid had scarcely been placed on Tsar Sergei’s tomb before Tsar Anatoli assumed the duties and authority of his father. His formal coronation would take time to orchestrate, but for the practical matters of ruling a people, there was hardly a beat of disruption between father and son. The elder Komarov brother even looked like his father, with the same high forehead and proud nose. If Marya hadn’t seen the funeral procession wend its way through Petersburg, she might have thought the death of Tsar Sergei had been a mad dream, disproven upon waking.
When the tsarina had died—though that had been years ago, when Marya was only fourteen—the city had swelled with sympathy for the two young princes, those somber-faced boys whose mother had been torn from them too soon. Anatoli must have remembered that, from the way he assumed his new role. Turning his own grief into political theater might have struck some as distasteful, but he’d have remembered the last time he’d lost a parent, and he played public sympathy like someone who had seen its power once before. To say nothing of how much stronger the effect was this time, when his father had been murdered in front of him, leaving him to assume a throne he had not expected to take so soon. Even Marya almost felt sorry for him, though the feeling didn’t last long. She, too, had lost a father, and the country had continued on undisturbed.
Even if public opinion hadn’t landed so strongly in Tsar Anatoli’s favor, Marya knew, the Koalitsiya would have struggled to find its equilibrium in those first days of the new regime. Irina’s suicidal act of defiance had shaken members of both factions, enough that even Ilya and Pyotr Stepanovich seemed to lose their footing. For Marya, it was more loss than she thought she could bear. Her two best friends, within days of each other, and their unborn child, too. Felix’s initial overtures to Anatoli had ended in abject failure, but there was still a chance the seed Felix had planted might grow, might still result in a different kind of tsar than his father had been. If there was a chance Irina’s sacrifice might bring a more humane emperor to the Winter Palace, then she would pray for it every night and every morning, and she and what remained of the Koalitsiya would wait. There was work still to do, after all. She could visit the pawnbrokers of Petersburg and bring in a few rubles to feed herself and Felix and the other members of the Koalitsiya who clung to her, now that neither Isaak nor Irina were there to center what remained of their group. Life had to carry on, even as it crumbled.
Today, three days after the tsar’s funeral, she was dealing with an irate pawnbroker who kept a shop just south of the Catherine Canal. As a rule, she tried to avoid Nikita Fyodorovich as much as possible, as neither his personality nor his prices were any great enticement to spend time in his company. But Alevtina had become especially nervous at the idea of pawning stolen goods after the death of the tsar, and while this collection of engraved silver spoons hadn’t exactly been obtained by legal means, they were nevertheless burning a hole in the pocket of her greatcoat.
“You wouldn’t offer that price to a dog, Nikita, so don’t insult me that way,” she said, leaning both elbows on the counter.
Nikita ran two fingers along his mustache. “Times are hard, Masha.”
“Times have been hard since Petersburg was a swamp,” Marya shot back. “After a hundred years, the excuse runs a little thin. Look at them again and tell me they’re not worth more.”
He scowled at the spoons in Marya’s hand. “Unless you’ve brought me another pair of eyes to look with as well, the offer stands. If you don’t like it, try for a better one elsewhere.”
On another day, under other circumstances, she’d have dug in her heels and negotiated for a better price, but the deaths weighing on her heart left her short on patience. She shoved the spoons back in her pocket and prepared a vicious retort, one cruel enough that it would have startled Isaak if he’d been there to hear it.
The bell above the shop door startled her out of speaking.
Both Marya and Nikita stared at the man silhouetted in the doorway, dressed in the green and red of the Semyonovsky Regiment. The shop was small, and the soldier’s shoulders could almost touch both sides of the doorframe. One hand hung loose by his side, the palm perhaps twice as broad as Marya’s. The other held a pistol. Once Marya spotted it, she could not tear her eyes from it.
“Can I help you?” Nikita said. His voice, belligerent moments ago, had faded into an obsequious shadow of itself.
The soldier did not move. He reminded Marya of a golden eagle she had seen once as a child, its claws wrapped around the outstretched arm of the Bronze Horseman. The bird had remained perfectly still except for its eyes, which seemed to take in every moving soul beneath the statue. The stillness had only made the bird more threatening, its perfect poise an illustration of the terrible movement possible in an instant.
“You’re in violation of an edict from the tsar,” the soldier said.
Marya darted a glance at Nikita, who had gone deathly white. “What edict is that?” she said. “This is a legal business.”
“By order of Tsar Anatoli,” the soldier began, as if he’d recited the words that were to follow a dozen times in the past hour, “all Petersburg citizens are to clear the streets between the hours of six in the evening and six in the morning. Curfew stays in place until the threat against the imperial family has been fully uncovered and eradicated. Violation of curfew is considered a criminal offense.”
The only sound was the steady tick of the half-dozen clocks crowding Nikita’s shop, insistent and mocking. The punishment for a criminal offense needed no elaboration, no matter who was now tsar.
“The assassin was arrested at the scene, I thought,” Marya said carefully. It felt like a betrayal, using the word assassin when what she meant was Irina Tverskaya, my friend, who you and your men killed, along with her husband and her child.
The soldier scoffed. “The tsar isn’t foolish enough to believe the assassin worked alone,” he said. “And his mad brother’s on the loose as well. Get yourself home, devushka, before you find yourself tangled up in danger that doesn’t concern you.”
Her mouth had gone very dry. If this soldier only knew how deeply this danger concerned her. The curfew must have gone into effect only hours before. How many members of the Koalitsiya had been left exposed and uninformed in the streets of Petersburg that night? What might they say, under pressure from the Komarovs’ brutal questioning? She could feel Nikita’s terror radiating from behind the counter. The pawnbroker might not have known in exactly what circles Marya ran, but he could sense how much danger they both now faced. There’d been enough death of late without adding this man to Marya’s tally.
“Yes,” she said, ducking her head. “Of course.”
The soldier took half a step to the side, granting barely enough room to pass. She could feel his heat against her as she slipped by, smell the sour scent of his breath. Every moment, she expected a hand to close over her arm, the cold kiss of a pistol against the small of her back.
The moment she reached the blessed cold of the street, Marya gathered her skirts and ran.
Tsar Sergei had been severe. Cruel. Distant. Under his watch, people had starved, people had died, while he and his ministers sat in their gilded palaces and held balls and hunted in the same woods where peasants who voiced even the slightest opposition were apprehended and shot without trial. Under his watch, poor men had fallen under French guns while rich men talked strategy behind a screen of cigar smoke. But Tsar Sergei had been predictable. An observant man could always anticipate what he would do next. He listened to his ministers, to tradition.
Unlike Anatoli Sergeevich, who played by no rules now, and called down the wrath of hell.
Since the night the new tsar instated his curfew, the evening streets had become eerily silent, a dead man’s veins drained of blood, occupied only by the most daring lawbreakers and the hungriest rats and birds. The Koalitsiya had abandoned the apartment off Preobrazhenskaya Square—the specter of surveillance there made it difficult to breathe—and fractured into fragments, and Marya didn’t know where to find half its members now. She stayed with Felix and Oksana and a few others in a small room near the Haymarket, where they sat each night saying little and watching the lamps cast shadows on the bare walls. The stillness was agonizing. Worse yet were the sudden bursts of noise: raised voices, smashed glass, the whip crack of gunfire. Worst of all was the silence that followed.
Curfew was only the beginning of Anatoli’s response to the death of his father. Soldiers wandered the streets in packs, stopping people for questioning with no warning and no justification beyond the quickness of the suspect’s walk or the quality of their overcoat. More than one man stumbled home just before curfew with his clothes torn, eyes blackened, and nose bloodied, fully aware that his injuries were a sign of getting off lightly. Still more simply vanished, lost to the void of the tsar’s prisons and labor camps. After one particularly bloody series of arrests, Marya forbade Felix from setting foot outside the apartment. If the tsar’s soldiers caught sight of him—the renegade Komarov, responsible in part or in whole for the murder of the former tsar—Anatoli couldn’t devise a death he’d consider painful or slow enough. Felix put up no protest at all, which felt worse than if they’d had to physically restrain him. It was clear he held himself personally responsible for failing to sway his brother, and the guilt of it had begun to eat away at him. It was awful to see the energetic, passionate man that had once been Felix Sergeevich fade into the shadow he became, haunting the corners of their one shabby room, picking at hangnails until his fingers bled.
An officer of the Semyonovsky Regiment stationed on every street corner in the city would have been hard enough, but Anatoli’s retaliation did not stop there. After a week of curfew, strict rationing crunched the city, until the allotment of food for a family of four became barely enough to sustain a single grown man. So it was that when Marya heard of the Imperial Army’s early February raids in the Pale of Settlement—in Mogilev, in Minsk, in Kovno—she couldn’t be certain whether the twisting feeling in her stomach was primarily hunger or guilt. The capture and execution of two Jewish rebels, one of whom had assassinated the tsar, was more than cause enough for Anatoli and his ministers to tighten the empire’s fist on the Jewish communities within its borders. Marya listened to the stories of burned villages, salted earth, murdered children, but did not allow herself to weep. Irina would have had no patience for useless tears. She would have demanded action.
She and Isaak would have demanded exactly what they always had, which was nothing more or less than justice.
“I know what I’m supposed to do,” Marya said to Sofia one night in mid-February, late enough that the sounds of skirmish and gunfire in the street below had died to low murmurs. “But I don’t know if I can do it.”
They sat in the corner under the light of a single oil lamp, Felix and the others sleeping on the opposite side of the darkened room. Sofia’s amber eyes looked as deep as the grave. Marya hugged her knees so tightly her elbows ached, but despite her desperate need to be held, Sofia did not offer, and Marya did not ask. It was hard not to think of that day near the Apraksin Market, when Sofia and Irina had sent her away, when her friend’s face had taken on the hollowness of a martyr. She didn’t blame Sofia—no one could convince Irina to do anything she hadn’t already decided to do, however persuasive they might have been. But the possibility of comfort she always felt near Sofia had turned cold, as cold as the rest of this rapidly unraveling world. No time for gentleness tonight. Tonight, she had to decide.
“If you know what to do, then you can do it,” Sofia said. “Thought and action are the same now. You’re already holding them together, leading them, every day. Doing what has to come next isn’t any different.”
Marya rested her cheek on her knees, looking past Sofia to the lamp resting on the table behind her. In the glow she saw Irina’s wedding ring, the silver chain around Isaak’s neck. She saw hundreds of thousands of people she had never met, engulfed in flames, screaming, cut down in the snow. Sharper than imagination, clear as prophecy.
“We’ve lost so much already. And I can’t be responsible for more, Sonya. I can’t.”
Sofia made a soft sound of disagreement, almost disappointment. She stood up, taking her long black coat from the chair and snaking in one arm. It was selfish to wish she’d stay—Sofia had been a transient presence during these first weeks of Tsar Anatoli’s reign, arriving for a meal and a hurried conversation before disappearing back into the thick of the city. Keeping the remnants of the Koalitsiya alive and informed demanded time and attention, and without Sofia’s help Marya would have been in a constant state of terror, wondering which of her friends had fallen to the new tsar’s soldiers. But even so—even with the new shadow that had fallen over Sofia’s presence—part of her still wished Sofia would linger. It would have been such a small gesture for her to offer a flash of tenderness, if only to break up the darkness.
“The ones responsible for pain are the ones who take, Masha,” Sofia said. “Not the ones who try to stop it. You aren’t to blame for what the tsar has done.”
Marya’s heart ached. She no longer knew whether the ache was loss, regret, hate, or hope. In the past days, they had become impossible to untangle. “I am if I fail.”
Sofia smiled and rested one hand on Marya’s shoulder, her body already angled toward the door. It seemed a profoundly unusual moment to smile, but there was so much comfort in the curve of her lips that Marya couldn’t bring herself to question it. There was such hope in that smile, such confidence, and she would do anything to lay claim to a fraction of that certainty. “You won’t fail,” she said. “Not you.”
She had nothing to say to that. The leadership of the Koalitsiya had fallen to her for lack of anyone else, after it had lost its true leaders one after the other. It was a false inheritance, not a destiny. She was no chosen hero, visited by spirits and guided from the cradle to lead. She was only herself, only Marya.
But perhaps that could be enough.
“There might still be a chance,” Marya said quietly. “If we can make the tsar see. Felix still thinks we can. And I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t try.”
Sofia nodded, then let her fingers trail along Marya’s shoulder, across the back of her neck. Marya closed her eyes, trembling. In a moment, Sofia would be gone again, and Marya would be here, seeing a hundred possible failures flicker before her in the glow of the lamp. But right now, this second, she was not alone. And Sofia’s presence brought with it a powerful, burning faith, one that was beyond Marya’s power to argue against.
“You won’t fail, Masha,” Sofia said. “Just wait and see.”