Open Fire Read online

Socialists walked alongside grandmothers, mothers, and schoolgirls, carrying banners and signs all in red. The crowd was chanting, “Free the people! Free the workers! Free the bread!”

  Sergei chanted with the crowd. With a quick prayer that my father would never know, I joined him. My throat was soon raw from shouting. Everyone around us was cheering, smiling, and so very sure that a revolution was underway. We were alive with it.

  Then the street began to rumble beneath our feet. Something was coming, and we barely had time to look before a regiment of Cossacks on horseback burst from the intersecting road. They pulled their horses to a halt and filled the street, blocking our way. The horses’ coats steamed as they jangled harnesses and stomped their hooves.

  Cossacks, with their stiff wool cloaks and gray furry hats, were the fiercest riders in the Imperial Army, riding across the Steppes before they could walk. At the sight of them, the chanting died to a low hum. The heated breath of thousands of protesters rose wispy and white in the February air.

  “End this march and go home!” the Cossack leader shouted to the crowd. “The Tsar won’t let anyone starve!”

  “Tell that to my boy at the front!” someone jeered.

  “The Tsar’s been starving us for years,” another voice cried out.

  The Cossack raised an open hand at us, his fingers rigid. “You have no right to protest here! If you do not leave, I will break this march apart through force.”

  When no one moved, he shook his head as though disappointed. Then he lowered his hand, slid his saber free of the scabbard, and pointed it at the front of the crowd. “Ready!”

  Forty or so rifle barrels pointed at us and the crowd shifted like a school of fish sensing a predator.

  “Aim!” Click, click, click. Rippling down the line, the Cossacks pulled back the bolts and filled their chambers.

  Some people scurried away, falling upon one another in the grimy slush. But many of us stood still, our feet rooted in the snow. This couldn’t be happening. Surely the soldiers wouldn’t shoot these people. They were only women asking the Tsar for bread.

  The soldiers were aiming at the crowd. At Sergei. At me.

  My heart was beating its way into my throat, and all I could hear was the pulsing of blood in my ears. I could not move. I couldn’t even twitch. This wasn’t my march, but I was here. I had shouted with the others because I believed in what they were asking for.

  Sergei squeezed my mitten and whispered, “They won’t shoot with so many women here.”

  There was a pause—a holding of breath—as everyone prayed the Cossacks would not shoot.

  The commander’s nostrils flared, and my entire body froze in fear. I was afraid that if I breathed, I’d shatter the world.

  “Go back to the Steppes, you Romanov hounds!” A rock whooshed over my head and hit the commander in the shoulder. It tumbled to the ground, the sound muted by the snow.

  “Fire!”

  An explosive sound tore through the air. Bodies slammed onto the street, while other people stumbled back and slid to their knees. Shrieks of fear, pain, and disbelief ricocheted off the rifles.

  Sergei pulled me to his side. For a moment my muscles gave way and I fell into him. I wanted to run, I wanted to disappear, I wanted to go home. But I was not hit. I pulled myself up straight.

  The Cossack leader pulled a glove off his hand and wiped at his forehead before shouting a word I could not hear.

  The men lowered their rifles, spun their horses around, and urged them into a trot. Moments later, they were gone.

  A man barely five meters away was lying in a bright circle of blood that matched the red ribbon pinned to his lapel. Like a soul released, steam rose from the blood surrounding him.

  There was a patch of dark stubble on the dead man’s cheek. Maybe he’d been excited about the protest that morning and his hands had shaken as he shaved. Now he sprawled out on Nevsky Prospekt, never to shave again.

  “They retreated!” Sergei said. “They shot at us, but we won.”

  We didn’t win, I wanted to say to him. They shot at us, fellow Russians, and we fell.

  “Why were people afraid of a woman, Papa?”

  “Men are always afraid of women who have power. Queens, for example, are more frightening than kings.”

  “Are you afraid of queens?”

  “Not all, no. But I would have been terrified of Olga.”

  2

  “You stood your ground against those Cossacks. You were as brave as the men,” said Sergei. His eyes roamed over the street, over the fallen. “They have paid the price for freedom.”

  I hadn’t been brave. I had been frozen in fear. If one of those rifles had been aimed at my chest, I would have died because I’d been too petrified to run. My heart pumped with the sludge of a coward.

  Briefly I wondered where Masha had gone. She’d been so far back from the attack, she had to have been safe, and hopefully she hadn’t seen anything. She was resourceful and with friends. She’d make her way home without any problems.

  Sergei tugged me out of the middle of the street and beneath the awning of a bookstore. He tried to push the door open, but it was locked. “Let’s get farther away before the Tsar makes them come back.”

  “He’s not here,” I said numbly we turned off Nevsky Prospekt onto the nearest side street. I shuffled in the slush, careful not to slip.

  “Who isn’t here?” he asked.

  “The Tsar,” I said. “He’s not in Petrograd right now. He’s at the front, near Riga.”

  Sergei slowed, but I kept going, my body shaking with adrenaline. I crossed my arms and stuffed my mittens into my armpits to try to quell the shaking, but there was nothing I could do for the twisting in my gut or the image of the dead man imprinted in my mind.

  “How do you know this?” Sergei demanded.

  “I overheard it.” We’d reached the narrow footbridge that crossed the Griboyedov Canal. The stones were slick, despite the salt someone had sprinkled, but I didn’t bother grabbing the railing.

  “You don’t just overhear the Tsar’s location, you know,” he said, taking hold of my elbow. I didn’t shake him off like I usually would when a man offered me help I didn’t need. His touch grounded me, pulled me away from the dead man and back to the bridge. “That doesn’t happen.”

  “It does when you meet with a group of officer’s wives once a week on your father’s orders. They all like to show off their secrets. Such as how the grand duchesses and Alexei Nikolayevich have the measles at the moment.” That discussion had been full of concern, especially for the Tsar’s young son.

  Sergei’s eyes glinted with interest. “I knew there was more to you than was obvious at first glance.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of that. “I need to go home.”

  “I’ll escort you. Who knows what sorts of people are on the streets right now?”

  I thought of the man lying in the snow and how his body steamed from the holes in his coat. He had died in front of me. I wasn’t afraid of anyone I might meet on the walk home, but I did not want to carry that image alone. “All right.”

  —

  The trolley service had been canceled because of the protests, so we arrived nearly an hour later, our boots soaked through and our noses as red as those socialist armbands. Sergei had tried to buoy my mood with talk of the golden future that was sure to come after the revolution. Once the Tsar abdicated and a socialist government took power, Russia’s troubles would end. We’d all have what we needed, he said with conviction, and no one would be sponging their wealth off the backs of the poor. There would be equality and justice, for man and woman alike.

  His words were cream and berries on my tongue. But as sweet as the ideas were, I knew a revolution would be tart, biting back.

  “The Tsar won’t willingly give up his power,” I said. “And his supporters will resist change every step of the way.”

  “Yes, but there are more of us than there are of them.”

&nb
sp; I ignored the expectant look he gave me. If he was hoping I’d volunteer my own loyalties, he would have to cope with disappointment. Did I want the Tsar to abdicate? I wanted him to listen to his people. To do more for those in need. But I also wanted Russia to win the war, and I doubted unrest on the home front would make that easier.

  The army private at the entrance to my apartment building gave me an odd look when I brought Sergei in, but he didn’t stop us. I had been worried he wouldn’t let a socialist follow me upstairs, but Sergei smirked and mumbled something about “revolution in the ranks, too.”

  “It’s on the third floor,” I said as we headed up the steps, leaving wet prints on the marble tile. “Our housekeeper has the day off, and my brother has been home all day, so please forgive any mess,” I added half-jokingly. My heart kept pace with my feet, each beat reminding me that I was bringing a man to my home for the first time. My brother, Maxim, would be there of course, so there was no reason for this nervous cant of my body.

  “You should see the state of my rooms,” he said with a laugh.

  Sergei had always set my nerves on edge. It had been difficult to focus on chemistry with him in the class. I was drawn to his bright eyes, the way he tilted his head, his gregarious laugh whenever he made a mistake. When I left the university for the factory, I’d attributed those feelings to a chemical that must have been accidentally released in the classroom. A loose jar of poison, perhaps, or a gas leak. Now that he was climbing the stairs beside me, I had to acknowledge it was Sergei who had made me ridiculous.

  I turned the key in the door, pushed it open, and found the umbrella holder tipped on its side, the ceramic latticework cracked and scattered like icing on a ransacked cake.

  “Do you have a dog?” asked Sergei.

  “No.” I dropped to my knees and searched through the sky-blue bits of ceramic and the umbrellas, all in various stages of wear. It wasn’t there. “No pets.” My voice was surprisingly calm. “He took it all.”

  Sergei joined me on the floor. “A favorite parasol?”

  “A little leather bag. I hid it in here so my brother wouldn’t see it. He never uses an umbrella.”

  He scooped up the umbrellas and leaned them against the wall. “And the leather bag had something in it?”

  “My savings. All of it.” Three months’ wages, gone. It’d been stupid of me to leave the bag there, thinking it was safely hidden. I’d chosen the spot because I could dispose of the money before going farther into the apartment, but in the back of my mind, I’d known it was risky.

  Instead of asking me why my brother would have stolen from me, or why I felt the need to hide my money from him in the first place, Sergei started gathering the shards of the umbrella holder into his hat.

  “Do you want me to stay until he comes back?”

  I shook my head. “He won’t hurt me. It’s just that when it comes to money, he can’t help himself. It’s as though someone else steps into his skin and takes him off to the card tables. He thinks he’ll win it all back, all that he’s spent, but he never does. Then he comes home, the real Maxim, and he’s angry at himself. Not at me.” I wiped at my stinging eyes.

  We both reached for the same piece of ceramic, and our fingers brushed. “Doesn’t your father have his army wages sent here?”

  “He does, when they come in. Sometimes the pay’s late, and sometimes it just doesn’t come. I think my father has been taking less money because of the war. We’ve all been trying to do with less, haven’t we? And I thought that if I could pay Maxim’s debts, the ones he keeps gambling to pay back, he could stop. He could calm down, and finish recovering.”

  Sergei didn’t ask, but he raised an eyebrow.

  “He was in a battle last October. He had a torn shoulder, burns and cuts from an explosion, and he couldn’t sleep. He still has nightmares.” My cheeks warmed, and I wished I hadn’t said so much. Then I almost laughed at myself—still protective of a brother who’d taken every ruble I had saved.

  Sergei grimaced. “This war is a nightmare. Russia shouldn’t have agreed to fight in it.”

  “We didn’t exactly accept a formal invitation.” My voice sharpened. “We were invaded by another country!”

  “That’s what we were told, but it isn’t the whole truth,” he said.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Much in the same way you know about the Tsar’s whereabouts. I listen to people who talk.” He winked, doing his best to diffuse my irritation. It didn’t work.

  “What’s the whole truth, then?” I snapped.

  “That’s a talk for another night.” He set his hat full of ceramic pieces on the hall table. “Unfortunately, I live on Vasilievsky Island, and it’s going to be a long walk, so I should get going.”

  Embarrassment at my rudeness flooded through me. “Wait a moment. I’ll get a bowl to put that mess in so you can have your hat back. Would you like some tea, too? To warm up?”

  He glanced around at the apartment and his cheeks flushed pink. “I’d better not.”

  With a nod, I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the first bowl I found and the last bit of cheese, and returned. After pouring out the contents of his hat into the bowl, I gave the hat a good shake and handed it to him with the wrapped-up cheese.

  “What’s this?”

  “A snack. I’m sorry I don’t have any bread to go with it, but . . .”

  He laughed. “That’s why we were out there, wasn’t it?”

  With a grateful tip of his head, he wrapped his fingers over mine, pressing them gently into the hat brim. “Thank you. And thank you for being there with me today. You were incredible.” His fingers were hot on mine, melting any last traces of winter.

  “Thank you for walking me home.” I stepped back and slipped my fingers out of his.

  He pulled open the door but then paused. “I have an idea.” He looked out into the stairwell and then back again, his eyes as bright as they had been during the walk home. “There might be a way for you to earn some extra money.”

  “I already work a full shift at the arms factory.”

  “Yes, but you . . . know things,” he said carefully. “You hear things. About the Tsar, for example. There are people in the city—good people with good intentions—who would like to know these things too. And they would pay for that information. It could be after your shift. Whenever you have time.”

  Who would possibly want to know the gossip of a bunch of bourgeois officers’ wives? “The newspapers?”

  “The Bolsheviks.” He looked more man than boy then. “If this revolution is going to be effective, we need to know everything that’s going on.”

  I stared at him. If I helped the Bolsheviks, I’d be turning my back on my family’s support for the Tsar. The ghosts of my brave, loyal ancestors would haunt me.

  But they had not been on the street today. They hadn’t seen first-hand the brutal truth of a government that does not know or care for its own people.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, and I shut the door on him with a soft click.

  —

  I made myself drink a cup of tea before stripping out of my dress and draping it over the back of the chair in my bedroom. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to wear it again without thinking of this day, of the gunfire I’d survived.

  Was this what Maxim had felt after a battle? He’d been at the front for two years before he was wounded severely enough to come home. I couldn’t imagine how he’d felt night after night, peeling off his uniform, cleaning his pistol, and just breathing. Maybe there’d never been any relief. Maybe those nightmares he had didn’t come from only his last battle, but from of all of them, accumulating like beads on a string. Until it snapped.

  My brother was not the same boy I’d grown up with. He had left for the front jaunty and grinning, giving me a salute and a kiss on the cheek before leaping onto the train. He’d promised to bring me home a pointy Kaiser’s helm from a German soldier, but when he returned last autumn, his e
yes were flat and his smile was gone. There were no kisses and the only promise he made was that he wouldn’t lose the game this time.

  I was brushing out my hair when I heard the front door open and shut. Quietly, I set the brush on the dressing table and swirled around in my stool, gripping at the dry, peeling wood beneath the seat. It took him a few minutes to reach my room. His long, thin frame filled the doorway, the shadows cast by the lamplight shifting across his face.

  Maxim had a certain way of slouching that said both that he was sorry and that there was nothing he could do about it. “You’re up late,” he said. His voice was coarse, probably from a bottle of vodka burning its way down his throat.

  Resentment warred with pity as I looked at him. We’d been so close for so long. With a father in the army and a mother who’d run off when I was eight, we’d relied mostly on each other. But I couldn’t count on him for anything now.

  Quietly I asked, “How did you find it?”

  “The money?” He looked surprised. “I tripped over the umbrella stand, and when I went to clean it up, I found that little bag.”

  I laughed. “You did a hell of a job cleaning up.”

  He had the decency to look ashamed. “I got distracted.”

  “Maxim,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady, “until the war is over and we get everything the army owes Papa, we need every single kopek. The money in that bag was to pay back your loan, which, if you haven’t forgotten, must be paid by the end of June.”

  “I’ll find work!” he insisted. “I won’t go gamble there anymore. I’ve been kicked out, anyway.”

  Thank goodness for small mercies. And yet . . . “You can’t work extra jobs. The army will just call you back to the front if you do.”

  He shook his head sharply. “I can’t go back to that. It’s over for me.” I noticed he was gripping the doorframe as though it was the only thing that could hold him up. “I’ll write to Papa and ask him to get me released from my commission. Then I’ll find work here and we’ll pay it all back. That’s what I need, don’t you see? I need a project. Something different.” His right cheek dimpled, and I wanted to both squeeze him in a hug and impale him with a sharp stick. This was the look that had gotten him out of a lifetime of trouble. “I can write well. Maybe I can write for a newspaper. With Papa’s connections . . .”