The revolutionist, p.15
The Revolutionist, page 15
ROBERT LITTELL
of his comrades spotted us being taken down to the coal room, they held a meeting behind their barracks and voted to intervene. The first explosion you heard blew the door to the coal room off its hinges. The other explosions—the ones you thought were echoes—were gunfire; the soldiers shot the colonel and eight of the nine officers. They're holding the last one for us to take back to Petrograd when you're well enough to travel."
"How long have I been unconscious.'*"
"Today's the twelfth day. We brought a doctor out from Petrograd. He said you had a concussion, that after what had happened you might be afraid to wake up. He advised me not to move you until you were conscious, or dead."
"Where are we.'"'
Lili looked pleased with herself. "I commandeered a bedroom in the palace. You are sleeping in the bed that once belonged to Tsar Alexander the Second."
"If Leon could see me now." Zander had a sudden thought. "And Vasia.'' What of Vasia.'"'
"Vasia needed medical care badly. I sent him to Petrograd in the car that fetched the doctor."
"How was he.'"'
"Physically, he was all right. The blood clotted. A scab began to form. It tortured him to urinate, but he seemed to relish the pain." Lili picked up the bowl of broth. "That's enough talking for one day," she ordered. "Drink this. You need to regain your strength."
He woke up briefly in the middle of the night. His head still throbbed, though not as badly. The total absence of light made him feel as if he were adrift again in space. His pulse raced. His heart began to beat wildly. Then he realized he was not alone in the bed. Lili was asleep in his arms, one hand cupping, covering, protecting his lifeless penis. He tried to will an erection to confirm again that he was whole, but failed. He could feel Lili's moist, warm breath against his chest. He edged a palm flat against the cool skin of her back. So it is you, the flame of the candle, he thought. Then he realized that he had said it out loud. ''ChtoF' she muttered in a faint voice. She adjusted her position slightly, then sank back into a deep, peaceful sleep.
With each passing day Zander grew stronger. He slept less and spent more time propped up in bed. He became dizzy when he stood up, then the spells passed and he began to walk around the room for exercise. He thought about his job in Petrograd, and getting back to it, but when he raised the subject with Lili, she shook her head as if it were out of the question. "Give it time," she said.
Lili seldom let him out of her sight. Folded into the window seat,
THE REVOLUTIONIST
the sun bleaching her face, she told him a great many things about herself that she had never spoken of to anyone before. She had been raised by her maternal grandparents in the countryside because her father, who was considerably older than her mother, didn't appreciate having female children under his roof. "My grandmother was a delicate woman who always spoke French, smoked violet-scented cigarettes to keep what Mr. Pasteur called 'germs' at bay, and cut off any conversation she considered inappropriate by ringing a small silver bell that she kept handy for that purpose. Once, when I was thirteen, I continued describing a bodily function that was new to me after her bell had sounded, and my grandmother had me hauled off to an ice cold shower as punishment. My grandfather, on the other hand, was something of a radical—he entertained the notion that some women were equal to most men, and insisted that I be educated as if I were a boy. He hired a young Polish tutor and organized a school. There were nine of us in the class. I was the only girl." Lili laughed under her breath.
"The boys used to bait me all the time—they claimed I defended what I thought of as my territory before anyone had a chance to attack. I suppose it was true; I suppose, when you come down to it, I was pretty aggressive. The first person I ever made love to was the tutor. We were both virgins, so it didn't go too well. As a matter of fact, it went quite badly. I had shaved off my pubic hair because I thought the visible evidence of my sexuality shouldn't be hidden. He had never set eyes on female genitals before, and it frightened him. I still get that reaction occasionally."
"Why did you become a Socialist.^" Zander asked another time.
"When I was eighteen I converted to Zoroastrianism, which is what the Uzbeks were before they became Muslims; I used to think that the world was a cosmic struggle between the spirit of good, personified by Zoroaster as Spenta Mainyu, and the spirit of evil, Angra Mainyu. Looking back now, I can see that it was my Zoroastrianism that made me ripe for Marx; he also sees the struggle in more or less black and white terms. There are the good guys. Then there are the bad guys."
"You're leaving out the economics."
"Oh, I never did understand the economics. What attracted me to Marx wasn't so much his concept that the state would wither away as his promise that under socialism the traditional bourgeoisie family would wither away. From my own experience, from everything I could see, the family seemed to me to be a kind of prison in which you served a life sentence. I wanted to be free, and Marx offered me a context in which I could pursue my freedom. When the Bolsheviks approached me about serving as a courier between Petrograd and
ROBERT LITTELL
Zurich, where Lenin was, I jumped at the opportunity. They gave me my chance to break away and I took it. I've been working for them in one capacity or another ever since. And I don't regret it."
As the weeks passed. Zander and LiH became more comfortable in each other's presence. Zander tried to read, and when his head began to ache he closed his eyes and dozed; his dreams, while still vaguely threatening, became calmer. When he opened his eyes again, he would see Lili watching him from her usual place on the window seat. They would exchange wordless smiles and he would drift off again to sleep.
Mealtimes Lili always managed to turn up with something special: a pitcher of fermented goat's milk, blinis with thick cream on them, some cheese made from ewe's milk, a piece of boiled chicken, once some piroshki with cabbage and meat in them, and even a bottle of greenish-colored wine from Georgia. The soldiers who had saved their lives were apparently scouring the neighborhood for delicacies for Zander; on one occasion they hinted to Lili that several of the dishes came straight from the table of Citizen Romanov.
And every night Lili took off her clothes and sponged herself in the flickering light of the candle and crawled into bed with Zander, crawled into his arms as if she fitted there, and covering his penis protectively with her hand, she would fall asleep. And every night he willed an erection, summoned it as if it were a spirit to be raised from the dead. And with each passing night he became more convinced that his manhood was forever broken.
"Not to worry—it will come," Lili assured him late one night, as if she had been monitoring his mounting sense of panic. She started to stroke his penis with the tips of her fingers, absently relishing the softness of the skin. "It will come, Alexander, I promise you."
"No!" The word was indistinguishable from a groan. "It is gone forever. I will never love a woman again."
Lili raised herself on an elbow and stared into the darkness; her emotions, under control for so long, had been stirred up. "You will love a woman again," she informed him as if it were a commandment. "You will love me . . . now."
In the darkness she bent her lips to his penis and slowly kissed it into life. She touched him in places he had been touched before—but never in quite that way; he felt as if he were being branded. Adrift in the pitch darkness of the room, he heard her murmur a line from one of Mayakovsky's poems; she invited Zander's "heart to the body's festival." Melting into the angles of her body until he was no longer sure where he left off and she began, he gratefully, greedily, accepted. He lost track of where he was in the bed, of where the bed was in the room, of where the room was in the universe. His only
THE REVOLUTIONIST
orientation was her; he clung to her as if she could keep him from going under. Her face, her breasts, her thighs, became raw from his three-week stubble. After a while Zander became aware that she was holding back; she resisted an orgasm as if it were a loss of control, a falling into, an aggression. "Come off," she ordered, a note of panic creeping into her voice. Her face contorted. "Come off," she begged several minutes later. "Who gives you the right to do this to me.''" she whispered still later, but Zander never heard her.
And then, abandoning rhythm or decorum, she folded her knees against her chest and ceded.
Lili unwound cautiously; she feared that any sudden movement would send her spinning over the brim again. "Tell me frankly," she said, "do you think of me as a good lover,''"
"To call a woman a good lover is to describe her ability to take pleasure from the act of love," Zander answered quietly. "In this sense you are a good lover."
Lili smiled at a thought. "Men have no idea what it is like to be penetrated," she said nervously, "Someday I will have to show you,"
When they had slept for a while, Lili shook him awake and said, "Now it is your turn," and she made him hard and brought him in measured increments to the rim—and with a flick of her tongue dispatched him over its edge. "You, too, are a good lover," she called after him as he plummeted—there was both laughter and love in her voice—"but can you make a revolution.''"
Spring hung in the air like laundry spread across a clothesline; like laundry it was stirred by occasional drafts of dry air and impregnated by faint garden fragrances. The rain, when it fell, felt warm to the touch, and those caught out in it seemed more aware of the sound it made when it hit the ground than its wetness. Sniffing at the spring from an open window, Zander thought about the revolution he had crossed an ocean and a continent to attend. "But can you make a revolution.''" she had asked half jokingly—and half not. It was a pertinent question. He believed as strongly as ever in the existence of his moral center; in its ability to identify areas of absolute evil; in his obligation, before the ghost of his grandfather, before the memory of his brother, Abner, to set things straight where he could. But there was precious little place in this neat scheme of things for Lili; for love; for a sexual joining so intimate that the intimacy itself aroused the participants. Or so it seemed to him now, gazing out from the French windows of a tsar's bedroom, with Lili pressing her ear to his spinal column hoping to catch his heartbeat through his back.
As for Lili, she had always thought of that entity called "a couple"
ROBERT LiTTELL
as a convenient hedge against loneliness, or growing old, or death. With Alexander in her life, she saw things in a different light. She had never before placed much value on her life; dying had always seemed a vaguely disruptive business, an inconvenience more than anything else. Now, when she thought about her death, or even worse, Alexander's, it appeared to her to be an awesome catastrophe; a terrible waste of possibilities; a pointless end to what had become, for her, an endless beginning.
And so they loved each other and lingered at Tsarkoe Selo. Lili summarily banned time from their lives. The only clock, she proclaimed as if it were a biblical commandment, was hunger—for each other, for food.
Yet the revolution, like the ticking of a clock in a bedroom, intruded on their consciousness.
As Zander regained his strength, he and Lili, in early June, took to wandering through the flat countryside surrounding the town. Lili always managed to come up with a picnic for these occasions—a wedge of crumbling goat cheese, a fistful of black bread, a scallion or two, a pinch of salt folded into a scrap of newspaper, some watery wine that would be set to cool at the edge of the river while she and Zander stripped and swam with all their force against the current. Once, she reached an underwater shelf ahead of him, and turning so that she was sitting on it facing him, she let him drift up between her legs to the magnified lips weaving in the current like some delicate pink sea anemone. Afterward they would dry themselves in the sun and nibble at their picnic and share the wine and fall asleep under a wild cherry tree that bore leaves but no fruit, and eventually make their way back toward town as the last pale pigments of the evening's sunset retreated in orderly fashion into the horizon. It was then that the young guardsman would pass on to them the rumors.
"Have you heard the latest. Miss Lili.''"
"Listen to this ..."
"Comrade Princess, would you believe it if I told you . . ."
The picture that emerged made it seem that the revolution was only a matter of time. In Petrograd, the famous Machine Gun Regiment, some ten thousand souls armed with a thousand water-cooled machine guns, had publicly declared for the Bolsheviks. The masses of workers were slowly falling under the spell of Trotsky's piercing logic, delivered almost nightly to an audience packed into the Cirque Moderne, a gloomy amphitheater lighted by five tiny gas spots hanging from wires.
There were other rumors: this or that regiment was said to be leaning in one or another direction; Kerensky was overheard boasting he finally had proof that Lenin was on the German payroll; there was
THE REVOLUTIONIST
the assassination, in a particularly grisly fashion, of the witness who was supposed to supply Kerensky with that proof. The young guardsmen, with no education of their own to draw on, invariably asked Lili and Zander their opinions. Could it be true that the sailors from the Kronstadt garrison, traditionally very radical, were threatening to provoke an armed insurrection.'' In a note asking about Zander's health, Tuohy also mentioned this rumor. Why was Kerensky making a whirlwind tour of the front, talking in his excited teenage voice about the need for victory over the Germans.^ Did it mean that yet another offensive was about to be launched.^ Did it sound reasonable, the story about the Bolsheviks being able to muster twenty thousand armed Red Guardsmen.'' Could anyone say with certainty that the only reason the Germans were delaying an attack to capture Petrograd was to see if Lenin would get his way about taking Russia out of the war.'' Zander and Lili listened to the rumors and shrugged their shoulders and eventually retreated into the bedroom where a tsar had once slept. They drew the heavy curtains and touched a match to the wick of the candle and sponged each other in its dancing light, and then set about exploring possibilities that were assumed to be infinite. One night Lili gave Zander the lesson she had promised on what it was like to be penetrated. Another time she produced half a peach salvaged from that day's picnic next to the river, perfumed her vagina with it and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, alighted, like a butterfly, on the leaf of his lips.
When a visitor suddenly turned up, they scrambled into their clothes, curious to see who it might be. As a precaution. Zander fetched his German pistol, which had been returned to him by the guardsman, from its hiding place under a cushion on the sofa and stuck it into his waistband. "What is his name.-"' called Lili, struggling with the tiny pearl buttons of a high-necked blouse, but the young guardsman who brought the news admitted he hadn't bothered to ask.
Gasoline being next to impossible to come by, the visitor had arrived, rather dramatically it seemed, in an open carriage pulled by a troika of horses. The driver, according to the guardsman, had managed the team with extraordinary skill. Holding the mare in the middle to a rapid trot, letting the flankers canter with their heads flared outward, he had come flying into the courtyard at full tilt before reining in next to the guard's hut. Hearing the beat of the horses' hooves on the cobblestones and the tinkle of the silver bells strung like a necklace to each bridle, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas had come rushing to their upstairs window. "Can we have a ride, then.'"' the princess Anastasia, the most impulsive of the four, had called
ROBERT LITTELL
down gaily, only to be shooed away from the window by the imperious arm of the tsarina, who, if she had guessed the identity of the troika driver, would surely have tried to kill him with her bare hands.
"Felix!" cried Lili when she set eyes on the visitor.
"Lichik!"
"Felix, come meet a comrade"—Lili, for once flustered, didn't know how to introduce Zander—"a comrade from Petrograd, and much more." She lifted her chin and smiled warmly in Zander's direction. "Much more, yes. His name is Alexander Til. He is my friend and my lover and a brother to me, like you. Alexander, meet my twin brother, Felix."
Zander realized that he was face-to-face with Felix Yusupov, the princely slayer of Rasputin. But where Lili was clearly a princess in a worker's guise, Felix was more like a peasant masquerading as a prince. He had coarse features that reminded Zander of a whore's rouged face. His lips were fixed in a permanent pout, as if he bore an unspoken grudge against the world. His gestures, darting forays into the air with long, feline fingers, conveyed nothing so much as feminine exasperation.
"Can we talk, Lilionochek.'^" Felix asked almost plaintively.
"You can trust Alexander," Lili started to say, but Zander was already heading for the door.
"He wants to speak to you alone. Such a thing is normal—I am not offended."
"He is at least discreet, your latest," Felix said as the bedroom door closed behind Zander.
"There is a strong possibility," Lili told him, settling onto the sofa, "that my latest, as you so neatly phrase it, will be my last."
Felix laughed out loud. "Since you do not have the look of someone who is thinking of giving up men, I assume you mean to say you have stumbled into a serious love affair. Well, tant mieux,'" snapped Felix in a way that made it clear he didn't believe a word she said.
"How did you know where to find me.'"' Lili demanded. She was not particularly pleased to see her brother; the ugly scenes he had made in Paris, and later in the Steamboat, were still too fresh in her memory.
Felix sat down next to her, pulled off his boots, and wiggled his toes. "My feet smell, but I rather like the odor. Ah, Lissik, as far as the Bolsheviks are concerned, I have a revolutionist's credentials: Felix Yusupov, the man who shot Rasputin. Of course the reason I put a bullet through the bastard was to save the tsar, or at least the institution. Rasputin was giving royalty a bad name, not to mention a lot of bad advice on how to fight the war. When it comes to choosing between my class and the riffraff in the streets, FU stand with my
of his comrades spotted us being taken down to the coal room, they held a meeting behind their barracks and voted to intervene. The first explosion you heard blew the door to the coal room off its hinges. The other explosions—the ones you thought were echoes—were gunfire; the soldiers shot the colonel and eight of the nine officers. They're holding the last one for us to take back to Petrograd when you're well enough to travel."
"How long have I been unconscious.'*"
"Today's the twelfth day. We brought a doctor out from Petrograd. He said you had a concussion, that after what had happened you might be afraid to wake up. He advised me not to move you until you were conscious, or dead."
"Where are we.'"'
Lili looked pleased with herself. "I commandeered a bedroom in the palace. You are sleeping in the bed that once belonged to Tsar Alexander the Second."
"If Leon could see me now." Zander had a sudden thought. "And Vasia.'' What of Vasia.'"'
"Vasia needed medical care badly. I sent him to Petrograd in the car that fetched the doctor."
"How was he.'"'
"Physically, he was all right. The blood clotted. A scab began to form. It tortured him to urinate, but he seemed to relish the pain." Lili picked up the bowl of broth. "That's enough talking for one day," she ordered. "Drink this. You need to regain your strength."
He woke up briefly in the middle of the night. His head still throbbed, though not as badly. The total absence of light made him feel as if he were adrift again in space. His pulse raced. His heart began to beat wildly. Then he realized he was not alone in the bed. Lili was asleep in his arms, one hand cupping, covering, protecting his lifeless penis. He tried to will an erection to confirm again that he was whole, but failed. He could feel Lili's moist, warm breath against his chest. He edged a palm flat against the cool skin of her back. So it is you, the flame of the candle, he thought. Then he realized that he had said it out loud. ''ChtoF' she muttered in a faint voice. She adjusted her position slightly, then sank back into a deep, peaceful sleep.
With each passing day Zander grew stronger. He slept less and spent more time propped up in bed. He became dizzy when he stood up, then the spells passed and he began to walk around the room for exercise. He thought about his job in Petrograd, and getting back to it, but when he raised the subject with Lili, she shook her head as if it were out of the question. "Give it time," she said.
Lili seldom let him out of her sight. Folded into the window seat,
THE REVOLUTIONIST
the sun bleaching her face, she told him a great many things about herself that she had never spoken of to anyone before. She had been raised by her maternal grandparents in the countryside because her father, who was considerably older than her mother, didn't appreciate having female children under his roof. "My grandmother was a delicate woman who always spoke French, smoked violet-scented cigarettes to keep what Mr. Pasteur called 'germs' at bay, and cut off any conversation she considered inappropriate by ringing a small silver bell that she kept handy for that purpose. Once, when I was thirteen, I continued describing a bodily function that was new to me after her bell had sounded, and my grandmother had me hauled off to an ice cold shower as punishment. My grandfather, on the other hand, was something of a radical—he entertained the notion that some women were equal to most men, and insisted that I be educated as if I were a boy. He hired a young Polish tutor and organized a school. There were nine of us in the class. I was the only girl." Lili laughed under her breath.
"The boys used to bait me all the time—they claimed I defended what I thought of as my territory before anyone had a chance to attack. I suppose it was true; I suppose, when you come down to it, I was pretty aggressive. The first person I ever made love to was the tutor. We were both virgins, so it didn't go too well. As a matter of fact, it went quite badly. I had shaved off my pubic hair because I thought the visible evidence of my sexuality shouldn't be hidden. He had never set eyes on female genitals before, and it frightened him. I still get that reaction occasionally."
"Why did you become a Socialist.^" Zander asked another time.
"When I was eighteen I converted to Zoroastrianism, which is what the Uzbeks were before they became Muslims; I used to think that the world was a cosmic struggle between the spirit of good, personified by Zoroaster as Spenta Mainyu, and the spirit of evil, Angra Mainyu. Looking back now, I can see that it was my Zoroastrianism that made me ripe for Marx; he also sees the struggle in more or less black and white terms. There are the good guys. Then there are the bad guys."
"You're leaving out the economics."
"Oh, I never did understand the economics. What attracted me to Marx wasn't so much his concept that the state would wither away as his promise that under socialism the traditional bourgeoisie family would wither away. From my own experience, from everything I could see, the family seemed to me to be a kind of prison in which you served a life sentence. I wanted to be free, and Marx offered me a context in which I could pursue my freedom. When the Bolsheviks approached me about serving as a courier between Petrograd and
ROBERT LITTELL
Zurich, where Lenin was, I jumped at the opportunity. They gave me my chance to break away and I took it. I've been working for them in one capacity or another ever since. And I don't regret it."
As the weeks passed. Zander and LiH became more comfortable in each other's presence. Zander tried to read, and when his head began to ache he closed his eyes and dozed; his dreams, while still vaguely threatening, became calmer. When he opened his eyes again, he would see Lili watching him from her usual place on the window seat. They would exchange wordless smiles and he would drift off again to sleep.
Mealtimes Lili always managed to turn up with something special: a pitcher of fermented goat's milk, blinis with thick cream on them, some cheese made from ewe's milk, a piece of boiled chicken, once some piroshki with cabbage and meat in them, and even a bottle of greenish-colored wine from Georgia. The soldiers who had saved their lives were apparently scouring the neighborhood for delicacies for Zander; on one occasion they hinted to Lili that several of the dishes came straight from the table of Citizen Romanov.
And every night Lili took off her clothes and sponged herself in the flickering light of the candle and crawled into bed with Zander, crawled into his arms as if she fitted there, and covering his penis protectively with her hand, she would fall asleep. And every night he willed an erection, summoned it as if it were a spirit to be raised from the dead. And with each passing night he became more convinced that his manhood was forever broken.
"Not to worry—it will come," Lili assured him late one night, as if she had been monitoring his mounting sense of panic. She started to stroke his penis with the tips of her fingers, absently relishing the softness of the skin. "It will come, Alexander, I promise you."
"No!" The word was indistinguishable from a groan. "It is gone forever. I will never love a woman again."
Lili raised herself on an elbow and stared into the darkness; her emotions, under control for so long, had been stirred up. "You will love a woman again," she informed him as if it were a commandment. "You will love me . . . now."
In the darkness she bent her lips to his penis and slowly kissed it into life. She touched him in places he had been touched before—but never in quite that way; he felt as if he were being branded. Adrift in the pitch darkness of the room, he heard her murmur a line from one of Mayakovsky's poems; she invited Zander's "heart to the body's festival." Melting into the angles of her body until he was no longer sure where he left off and she began, he gratefully, greedily, accepted. He lost track of where he was in the bed, of where the bed was in the room, of where the room was in the universe. His only
THE REVOLUTIONIST
orientation was her; he clung to her as if she could keep him from going under. Her face, her breasts, her thighs, became raw from his three-week stubble. After a while Zander became aware that she was holding back; she resisted an orgasm as if it were a loss of control, a falling into, an aggression. "Come off," she ordered, a note of panic creeping into her voice. Her face contorted. "Come off," she begged several minutes later. "Who gives you the right to do this to me.''" she whispered still later, but Zander never heard her.
And then, abandoning rhythm or decorum, she folded her knees against her chest and ceded.
Lili unwound cautiously; she feared that any sudden movement would send her spinning over the brim again. "Tell me frankly," she said, "do you think of me as a good lover,''"
"To call a woman a good lover is to describe her ability to take pleasure from the act of love," Zander answered quietly. "In this sense you are a good lover."
Lili smiled at a thought. "Men have no idea what it is like to be penetrated," she said nervously, "Someday I will have to show you,"
When they had slept for a while, Lili shook him awake and said, "Now it is your turn," and she made him hard and brought him in measured increments to the rim—and with a flick of her tongue dispatched him over its edge. "You, too, are a good lover," she called after him as he plummeted—there was both laughter and love in her voice—"but can you make a revolution.''"
Spring hung in the air like laundry spread across a clothesline; like laundry it was stirred by occasional drafts of dry air and impregnated by faint garden fragrances. The rain, when it fell, felt warm to the touch, and those caught out in it seemed more aware of the sound it made when it hit the ground than its wetness. Sniffing at the spring from an open window, Zander thought about the revolution he had crossed an ocean and a continent to attend. "But can you make a revolution.''" she had asked half jokingly—and half not. It was a pertinent question. He believed as strongly as ever in the existence of his moral center; in its ability to identify areas of absolute evil; in his obligation, before the ghost of his grandfather, before the memory of his brother, Abner, to set things straight where he could. But there was precious little place in this neat scheme of things for Lili; for love; for a sexual joining so intimate that the intimacy itself aroused the participants. Or so it seemed to him now, gazing out from the French windows of a tsar's bedroom, with Lili pressing her ear to his spinal column hoping to catch his heartbeat through his back.
As for Lili, she had always thought of that entity called "a couple"
ROBERT LiTTELL
as a convenient hedge against loneliness, or growing old, or death. With Alexander in her life, she saw things in a different light. She had never before placed much value on her life; dying had always seemed a vaguely disruptive business, an inconvenience more than anything else. Now, when she thought about her death, or even worse, Alexander's, it appeared to her to be an awesome catastrophe; a terrible waste of possibilities; a pointless end to what had become, for her, an endless beginning.
And so they loved each other and lingered at Tsarkoe Selo. Lili summarily banned time from their lives. The only clock, she proclaimed as if it were a biblical commandment, was hunger—for each other, for food.
Yet the revolution, like the ticking of a clock in a bedroom, intruded on their consciousness.
As Zander regained his strength, he and Lili, in early June, took to wandering through the flat countryside surrounding the town. Lili always managed to come up with a picnic for these occasions—a wedge of crumbling goat cheese, a fistful of black bread, a scallion or two, a pinch of salt folded into a scrap of newspaper, some watery wine that would be set to cool at the edge of the river while she and Zander stripped and swam with all their force against the current. Once, she reached an underwater shelf ahead of him, and turning so that she was sitting on it facing him, she let him drift up between her legs to the magnified lips weaving in the current like some delicate pink sea anemone. Afterward they would dry themselves in the sun and nibble at their picnic and share the wine and fall asleep under a wild cherry tree that bore leaves but no fruit, and eventually make their way back toward town as the last pale pigments of the evening's sunset retreated in orderly fashion into the horizon. It was then that the young guardsman would pass on to them the rumors.
"Have you heard the latest. Miss Lili.''"
"Listen to this ..."
"Comrade Princess, would you believe it if I told you . . ."
The picture that emerged made it seem that the revolution was only a matter of time. In Petrograd, the famous Machine Gun Regiment, some ten thousand souls armed with a thousand water-cooled machine guns, had publicly declared for the Bolsheviks. The masses of workers were slowly falling under the spell of Trotsky's piercing logic, delivered almost nightly to an audience packed into the Cirque Moderne, a gloomy amphitheater lighted by five tiny gas spots hanging from wires.
There were other rumors: this or that regiment was said to be leaning in one or another direction; Kerensky was overheard boasting he finally had proof that Lenin was on the German payroll; there was
THE REVOLUTIONIST
the assassination, in a particularly grisly fashion, of the witness who was supposed to supply Kerensky with that proof. The young guardsmen, with no education of their own to draw on, invariably asked Lili and Zander their opinions. Could it be true that the sailors from the Kronstadt garrison, traditionally very radical, were threatening to provoke an armed insurrection.'' In a note asking about Zander's health, Tuohy also mentioned this rumor. Why was Kerensky making a whirlwind tour of the front, talking in his excited teenage voice about the need for victory over the Germans.^ Did it mean that yet another offensive was about to be launched.^ Did it sound reasonable, the story about the Bolsheviks being able to muster twenty thousand armed Red Guardsmen.'' Could anyone say with certainty that the only reason the Germans were delaying an attack to capture Petrograd was to see if Lenin would get his way about taking Russia out of the war.'' Zander and Lili listened to the rumors and shrugged their shoulders and eventually retreated into the bedroom where a tsar had once slept. They drew the heavy curtains and touched a match to the wick of the candle and sponged each other in its dancing light, and then set about exploring possibilities that were assumed to be infinite. One night Lili gave Zander the lesson she had promised on what it was like to be penetrated. Another time she produced half a peach salvaged from that day's picnic next to the river, perfumed her vagina with it and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, alighted, like a butterfly, on the leaf of his lips.
When a visitor suddenly turned up, they scrambled into their clothes, curious to see who it might be. As a precaution. Zander fetched his German pistol, which had been returned to him by the guardsman, from its hiding place under a cushion on the sofa and stuck it into his waistband. "What is his name.-"' called Lili, struggling with the tiny pearl buttons of a high-necked blouse, but the young guardsman who brought the news admitted he hadn't bothered to ask.
Gasoline being next to impossible to come by, the visitor had arrived, rather dramatically it seemed, in an open carriage pulled by a troika of horses. The driver, according to the guardsman, had managed the team with extraordinary skill. Holding the mare in the middle to a rapid trot, letting the flankers canter with their heads flared outward, he had come flying into the courtyard at full tilt before reining in next to the guard's hut. Hearing the beat of the horses' hooves on the cobblestones and the tinkle of the silver bells strung like a necklace to each bridle, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas had come rushing to their upstairs window. "Can we have a ride, then.'"' the princess Anastasia, the most impulsive of the four, had called
ROBERT LITTELL
down gaily, only to be shooed away from the window by the imperious arm of the tsarina, who, if she had guessed the identity of the troika driver, would surely have tried to kill him with her bare hands.
"Felix!" cried Lili when she set eyes on the visitor.
"Lichik!"
"Felix, come meet a comrade"—Lili, for once flustered, didn't know how to introduce Zander—"a comrade from Petrograd, and much more." She lifted her chin and smiled warmly in Zander's direction. "Much more, yes. His name is Alexander Til. He is my friend and my lover and a brother to me, like you. Alexander, meet my twin brother, Felix."
Zander realized that he was face-to-face with Felix Yusupov, the princely slayer of Rasputin. But where Lili was clearly a princess in a worker's guise, Felix was more like a peasant masquerading as a prince. He had coarse features that reminded Zander of a whore's rouged face. His lips were fixed in a permanent pout, as if he bore an unspoken grudge against the world. His gestures, darting forays into the air with long, feline fingers, conveyed nothing so much as feminine exasperation.
"Can we talk, Lilionochek.'^" Felix asked almost plaintively.
"You can trust Alexander," Lili started to say, but Zander was already heading for the door.
"He wants to speak to you alone. Such a thing is normal—I am not offended."
"He is at least discreet, your latest," Felix said as the bedroom door closed behind Zander.
"There is a strong possibility," Lili told him, settling onto the sofa, "that my latest, as you so neatly phrase it, will be my last."
Felix laughed out loud. "Since you do not have the look of someone who is thinking of giving up men, I assume you mean to say you have stumbled into a serious love affair. Well, tant mieux,'" snapped Felix in a way that made it clear he didn't believe a word she said.
"How did you know where to find me.'"' Lili demanded. She was not particularly pleased to see her brother; the ugly scenes he had made in Paris, and later in the Steamboat, were still too fresh in her memory.
Felix sat down next to her, pulled off his boots, and wiggled his toes. "My feet smell, but I rather like the odor. Ah, Lissik, as far as the Bolsheviks are concerned, I have a revolutionist's credentials: Felix Yusupov, the man who shot Rasputin. Of course the reason I put a bullet through the bastard was to save the tsar, or at least the institution. Rasputin was giving royalty a bad name, not to mention a lot of bad advice on how to fight the war. When it comes to choosing between my class and the riffraff in the streets, FU stand with my
