Not the Madeira from the Winter Palace, but sweet and warm.

He sighed, leaned back against the rose velvet. “I saw your father,” he said. “I think he’s trying to get himself arrested.”

“Good.” I began to pace. There was a packet of Turkish cigarettes. Did Mina smoke now, too? I took one and smelled the sweet, fresh tobacco. Kolya lit it for me, steadying my hand in his. “Does he regret what he did?”

“I didn’t ask him. Would you have expected me to?”

Funny, I had waited so long to be able just to talk to someone who knew everything, and now that I was here, I found I didn’t have anything to say. Just sitting with him where I could smell him and count his eyelashes was enough. Mina had been lucky to have him even once in her life. And I realized it would always be this way with us. Time, distance, politics couldn’t touch what we had together. Life and death would be our meat, our bread, part of what we were, not separate from us. To ever express what crackled between us would need all the poetry in my possession.

Out of the depths of my grief, desire sent up its bloom of fire, like kindling sheltered from the wind. It found my lips, my breasts—and now my mouth sought his, his hands found my thighs, our clothing falling away, buttons surrendering as we clutched each other on the small sofa. “There’s a bed,” he whispered. Yes, there would always be a bed.

He led me into a room with a high bed. I could well imagine a duchess in her nightdress there—the canopy, the satin pull cord, a view of the Neva behind the yellow drapes. There would always be a bed, and we would be in it, even if it was just a pile of hay. We hadn’t made love since that last day on the Catherine Canal, when I’d still been a schoolgirl and the first revolution was only a rumble on the outskirts of Petrograd. Although the world had changed, we had not. We grappled, clutched, bit, groaned. Our bodies strained to become closer than physical bodies possibly could. How chaste Genya’s and my lovemaking was compared to this. Only with Kolya did I hear the true bass notes of ardor, the soar of its melodies. I couldn’t even say what these last months with Genya had been. Ah Kolya, Kolya, my heaven and my hell. My match, my curse. My eternal love. There was nothing to stop us now.


We lay together, resting, his head on my breast, his smell all over me, his chestnut body hair in the firelight. He toyed with the bangle I never took off. Of course I hadn’t. “You’ve lost weight,” he said, tracing my ribs, my waist, my hips with their bones cradling my flat stomach.

“No food. We don’t have money for the black market.” I inhaled the gorgeous smoke from Turkey, wrapping it around my tongue.

He got up, sturdy, naked, and brought the plate of sweets in from the other room, treats he was going to feed to Mina, to stuff her with like a pigeon and then eat her up. I let him feed me crumbly, buttery white shortbread and cherry-filled chocolates. But the cherry reminded me of Father. “Poor Mina, having to miss this. Did you enjoy making love with her?”

“You can’t always have caviar. Sometimes you settle for eggplant.”

I pinched his nose, shook his face from side to side. “Look at you—you’re not even sorry.”

“I’m sorry for many things, krasavitsa moya.” My beauty. “That it’s been a year since I’ve seen you, that’s very high on my list of regrets.” He kissed my breast. “That Seryozha ended up where he had no business going—that I regret. Your father’s stubbornness. He’s a good man but he’s a man of principle.” He relit his half-smoked cigar, propping himself higher on the pillows. “Always dangerous. Your whole family’s like that—principled. You believe in things, you Makarovs. It’s dangerous business. Give me a Cossack bandit, a whore, a soldier with blood on his hands, but God save us from people who believe in things. You’re the ones who will get us all killed.” He toyed with my hair. “Look at you, look at those big brown eyes. You’re more like him than you would believe.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

He turned his head to avoid blowing smoke in my face. I never liked cigars before, but the smell was his, it completed him. I ran my hands through the curly hair of his chest, down to his soft resting sex, his sturdy legs. “Seryozha didn’t believe in things. He just wanted to make art. And please Father.”

“He believed in beauty. It’s not the worst thing. You’ve got some of that yourself.” He fed me more shortbread. “But God you’re strong.” He tipped my chin up to look into my eyes, and his blue ones darkened in the lamplight. “Luckily. Because there’s no easy road for people like you, the believers in beauty. Seryozha tried to make it out there—you’ve got to hand it to him. I admire that.”

“Are you proud of his heroism?” I thought of that hideous letter.

“Sometimes just living is heroism,” he said.

I studied the small mole under his right eye, the peaked eyebrows that faded out into nothingness, his diamond-shaped face with its high oriental cheekbones, the upturned laughing eyes. So rare to see them serious like this.

“You still remember Sir Garry.” I pressed my finger in the dip of his upper lip.

Seryozha couldn’t have been more than four. We’d tried to get Mother’s dog, Tulku the First, to do the hoop trick but he proved untrainable. Sir Garry was also assistant to the mysterious Esmerelda in her “feats of daring.” He’d walk along very seriously, as beautiful as ever a child could be with his big gray eyes and blond curls, and hold a stick aloft for me to hang on to as I wobbled along a tightrope strung between pines two feet off the ground. How solemnly he took his responsibilities. I felt the tears swell. I held out my glass and Kolya filled it again. “Mesdames et messieurs, Damen und Herren… you do it.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, meine Damen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, coming to you direct from performances for the sultans of India and Azakazan, for your amazement and edification…” For half a second, he flashed that smile, which had gotten him out of a million scrapes and probably a million more to come. Kolya had been our ringmaster, wearing gum boots and Father’s old crumpled top hat, brandishing a whip of woven ribbons from our child’s pony cart. “The lovely Esmerelda, from the emerald caves of Capri, performing for you feats of gravity-defying amazement.”

“Vladimir the Cossack and his Horse of Marvels!” I imitated his ringmaster tone.

“That fat pony. It was always trying to bite me,” Kolya said, toying with his cigar. “What was its name?”

“Carlyle.”

“Dmitry Ivanovich’s choice, no doubt. I was terrified of your father in those days. I was sure he’d catch on that I was in love with Vera Borisovna and challenge me to a duel.” He traced the top curve of my breast, then the U of it. “I had my first orgasm thinking about her.”

Only Kolya would admit to such a thing. I wondered how he liked her now—crazy, in her nightdress, trying to untangle that nest of fine chains.

“I lived for those summers,” he said, his fingers in my cropped hair, my head tucked under his chin. I could hear his voice rumbling through his chest. “Listening to Vera Borisovna sing on the porch after dinner—do you remember?” He brushed his fingers against my abraded lips. “She would come and kiss Volodya good night. The windows all open, a gentle breeze, and her in her evening gown, her perfume…”

“Après l’Ondée.”

“She’d kiss him, then she’d come over and kiss me, too. On the forehead. I think it was the zenith of my young life.”

I nuzzled his well-shaved cheek. His lime cologne. Who else would remember her as she had been, in her lilac dress, her bare shoulders, the laughter in the twilight? “Thanks for taking care of her. It was good of you.”

Outside the wind whistled, shaking the outer windows, where in here, only the springs spoke, the crackle of the fire.

“I wish I could do more.” He plumped the fat pillows, sat up higher. “I think the English girl might have better luck getting them out. They take care of their own, the English.”

“I hope so. But Mother doesn’t seem to care anymore. Seryozha’s death was the last blow.”

He stubbed out his cigar, drank off the port, and placed the empty glass on the bedside table. “Just as well,” he said. “What’s left, even if she does get out? No money, no skills. Maybe she could remarry… but if not, can you imagine Vera Borisovna in a bedsit in London, living off charity?”

“Father has friends in London. Surely they’d be of some help.”

He kicked off the sheets, wiping the sweat from his face and revealing the red-gold glow of his body in the lamplight. “Oh, it would be fine at first. The distinguished guest, risking all to flee to the West. Embraces all around. But one week turns into six, then to ten, and they’re wondering if she’s ever going to leave. Hints about the family closing up house and traveling for a while. She gets the message, and so comes the ghostly drift from home to home, begging for a little space. ‘No, don’t trouble yourself, dear.’ I think she knows that. If it were me, I’d rather starve to death in my own bed.”

“I think that’s what she’s doing.”

How callous we’d become, to talk calmly about Mother with such fatalism. If I left Russia with her, I could support her, save her from the fate Kolya had so vividly outlined. But I had turned down Father’s offer of England. I had chosen to align my fate with Russia’s.

Kolya pulled me to him, draping my leg over his hip. I tasted his port wine cigar breath as his lips brushed mine. “I’ve told Dmitry Ivanovich he ought to leave, for her sake.”