My footsteps rang out in the empty rooms. I felt as though I’d entered my house in a dream. The cloakroom, where I had first kissed Kolya, looked so much larger with nothing in it—the Transrationalists could have lived there quite comfortably. In the main wing, the desolation was even more obvious. The foyer rug was missing, the marble-topped table lay on its side, too heavy to cart away. In the parlor, pieces of wood littered the parquet, and empty frames of the art that normally hung on the walls. The Repin portrait of Seryozha and the Vrubel were gone. A flush of anger returned.

I crept down to Father’s office. Would my papers still be there? The door gaped open revealing the oak file cabinet turned over, its drawers gone. The desk drawers, too, had been breached, broken open with some crude instrument, a hatchet or a crowbar. Yet the green-striped wallpaper was still the same, and, incredibly, photographs still hung on it. My brothers and I. Our Makarov grandparents. All of us at a picnic on the coast of Finland. Only one was missing—Volodya the cavalry officer on his sleek bay horse. Had Father removed it? Or had the Red Guards taken it as evidence of our family’s allegiances? I took a photo of the three of us as children on the porch at Maryino, our legs hanging down, Volodya dark-skinned in a bathing costume, I in my braids and freckles, Seryozha with his floss-blond hair and enormous eyes.

The telephone still sat on the desk. I tried the receiver, depressed the cradle, and—mirabile dictu!—an operator came on the line. “Number, please.”

“Sorry,” I said, then hung up. Would that soon be me, my new Soviet life?

I turned to the big Russian stove in the corner of the room, and slid open a panel in the tile, revealing a metal-lined safe where we hid valuables and important documents, not so much out of fear of theft as fear of fire. I breathed a short prayer of gratitude—they were still there. Birth certificates, passports. My parents’ elaborate wedding papers. My high school diploma and the letter of acceptance into the department of philology at Petrograd University. Only Father’s documents were gone—passport, law degree, his first from Oxford, his MLitt, even his certificate from the Tenishev Gymnasium.

Surprisingly, stacks of ruble notes, gold coins, and Mother’s jewelry—luminescent opals, Indian sapphires with their mysterious stars—were still intact. I took my own documents and a few rubles, stuffed them in my bag, slid the tile closed.

I knew I should go, but it had been three months since I’d seen these rooms. Who could have blamed me for nostalgia? The nursery was as it always had been, but dustier and ice cold. Here we had learned our letters, shared secrets, played endless games of durak. Here I had cast the wax that long-ago New Year’s Eve. I knelt by the old rocking horse, pressed my nose to his, wrapped my arms around his wooden neck and horsehair mane. “I wish I could take you.” The horse forgave me, he was filled with such love. Why hadn’t some Red Guardsman taken him for his own children? “Be brave,” I whispered to him.

My bedroom, by contrast, was a scene of devastation. Pictures askew, anything made of fabric gone: clothing, rugs, the bed just a skeleton of springs. But Seryozha’s watercolor of the Finland shore still hung on the deep pink wall along with the poets’ silhouettes he had so painstakingly cut with his fine-pointed scissors. I took them down and piled them on the bare bedsprings. My jewelry, long gone. The little drawer of the vanity table empty. But the photographs under the glass remained untouched. I pulled them out and stacked them on top of Seryozha’s pieces.

Father’s English bedroom had been even more thoroughly ransacked—clothing gone, wardrobe gaping. The dresser top lay bare of the beautiful toilet set that always rested there, the bone-handled brushes and combs for head and beard, tiny nail scissors, powders and pomades to tame his crinkly hair. Did I dare look into Mother’s room?

I turned the door handle but found it locked. I knocked. “Hello?” Could she have lain down and turned her face to the wall? I began to beat the door with the heel of my hand. “Mama? It’s Marina. Avdokia? Open up.”

I heard the tiny click, the latch turning, like a sound from a grave. In the gap, Ginevra’s frightened face. She pulled me inside, locked the door, and embraced me, patting me, touching my hair, my cheeks. “You’re here… I can’t believe it.”

What a sight! Furniture had been squeezed into every last inch of space—a tumble of chests, chairs, and trunks like in an antiques shop. The nursery piano! They probably couldn’t move the Bösendorfer. Three mismatched beds were lined up against the far wall. Mother, Avdokia, and the English had probably retreated to this bedroom so they could devote all the wood to one stove. In her ornate canopied bed, Mother sat propped up on pillows, her white hair a disordered nest. She was fumbling with something in her hands. At first I thought she was knitting, but there was nothing there. “Mama, where’s Avdokia?” I was afraid to approach her.

“She’ll be back. She’s off selling a few things,” Ginevra said. She hugged me suddenly, awkwardly. She was never very physical. “Oh, child.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and her face withered like a cut bloom. She motioned for me to come out into the hallway. She was only twenty-eight, but she looked forty. Her lips trembled as she tried to speak.

“Is it Papa?”

She shook her head.

A great hand wrapped itself about my throat. Volodya?

She shook her head again and started to cry.

Seryozha. Oh God.

She told me that it had been in the battle for the Kremlin, the first week of the Bolshevik insurrection. Moscow had been more prepared to fight the takeover than we had been and the Provisional Government had pitted the cadets against the Red Guards and revolutionary soldiers. Thousands of them. Boys, defending the city against seasoned men.

“We had a letter.” Her voice was as empty as the hallway, with all its staring doors. “Please, Marina, you’re hurting me.” I hadn’t noticed that I was gripping her arm, digging my fingers in. I let her go. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll show you.” She scurried back into Mother’s room, shutting the door behind her. I stood in the hallway, my mind a howling waste.

After a time, she emerged and held out an envelope to me, her back against the door, as if I might rush at her. Bagration Military Academy. Beautiful stationery, bearing the Romanov eagle. I pulled out one big, creamy sheet. I had never hated anything so much in this world.

Dearest Sir and Madam,


It grieves me to inform you of the death of your son, Sergei Dmitrievich Makarov, in the battle for the Kremlin, October 28, 1917. He fought hard and honorably, as befits a Russian soldier. You can be proud your son died heroically, in defense of the rightful Government. He was a fine soldier and a fine young man.

With my greatest sympathies, Captain Yuri Borisovich Saratov

He’d been dead since October. I stared down at the page as if I expected the letters to rearrange themselves and spell something else. “Does Father know about this?”

She answered quietly, holding my hands. “Dmitry Ivanovich was going to give himself up for arrest, to go in with the ministers, but this changed his mind. He said he still had work to do.”

This was how you saved Russia, Papa? “You could have at least sent word.”

My governess sighed as if she could expel all the sorrow and guilt in one single breath. “No one was allowed to speak to you.” Tears dripped from those watery English eyes. Her nose was red and runny. She blotted at herself with a wadded handkerchief.

My mouth felt full of the metallic bitterness of dirty kopeks.

I was alone now. Absolutely alone. What good was all our knowing, all our love, our secrets and shared memories? A fanged animal lodged in my throat. I tore at my neck, trying to let it out.

Ginevra caught at my hands. “Marina, don’t… for pity’s sake…”

I would find Father in whatever high-ceilinged drawing room he was in, talking so importantly about Russia’s future, and I would kill him.

“Ginevra?” Mother appeared at the door, barefoot in a white nightgown—a frightened ghost. She saw me but gave no sign of recognition, only fear and stupefaction. The Englishwoman pushed between us.

“Come, Vera Borisovna. Let’s go back to bed.” She ushered my mother back into her room.

I was still standing in the hall when my governess returned to the door. “Don’t go, Marina. Come talk to your mother.” She faced the figure now sitting on the edge of the bed, the quilt around her shoulders. “Vera Borisovna! Look who’s here. Look who’s come to see you.” She waved me closer. I saw that the last months had turned my mother into an old woman. Her beauty hadn’t disappeared, but her flesh was thinned, her bones sharpened, her lips chapped and pale. Her eyes, so much like Seryozha’s, consumed her face. Ginevra tucked her back into bed, drawing the bedclothes up around her, plumping her pillows.

My family had disappeared—brother, mother, father. Here I thought their lives had continued without me, but there was no home anymore. Not for any of us.

“Are you able to get some food for her?” I asked.

“Avdokia trades things. And Nikolai Shurov has been a tremendous help.”

Kolya was here? Kolya, taking care of her? “He’s been here?”

“He’s saved our lives—you don’t know,” she went on, tucking the lace-edged sheet over the edge of the blanket. She was back to her resolute, tranquil demeanor. How could she have calmed down so fast? But her tears had been for me. Seryozha had been dead for months. She’d had time to get used to his death. His death! She went on talking. “We can’t get a thing out of the banks, what with the teller strike. Nikolai sold some of the paintings, and told us to hide the money in the stove, her jewelry. Thank God he got to us before the last sweep. They took everything.” We watched my mother, her hands fiddling again. I could see now that she was working a tangle of thin necklaces, trying to get them apart. “We’ve heard from Volodya. He’s joined the Volunteer Army in the Don.”