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Pasha was proud of his father. Antipov was the centre of the family orbit, the successful man of the city, the intellectual, and finally, during his arrest, the unbowed leader of men. Pasha had a hard time not crying out or weeping softly when the police beat him and his father and even directed a few baton blows at Auntie Fenya, but his father was stoic and marched out with only his blood to testify to any hurts the police had given. Pasha wanted nothing so much as that his father might one day be equally proud of him.
To Pasha, Darya Mikhailovna, his mother, did not understand her husband or her son. She hated the move to Moscow even as she had complained a few years before about the move to Bryansk from the small railway town – village with a refueling siding, really – where she had grown up and Pasha had been born. Her ambitions for her family were small, while Antipov's were great. Antipov chased every new position, every promotion, every banned pamphlet, every newly opened opportunity. Darya had lost the rest of her family in the famine before she met Antipov and wanted nothing more than that this new family she had built survive. Bryansk had killed the baby, and Moscow had now given her typhus. Antipov was a gambler in comparison, always betting the next job, the next town, would be better, but until he was arrested, he had not lost. To Pasha, that showed his father weighed all the options carefully, even if Darya did not quite understand his explanations. A track overseer was a less dangerous life, with more money available for Pasha's education, than his previous inspection work in Bryansk, even if everything was more expensive in Moscow and the neighbourhood close to the station dirtier. Antipov's aunt had been pushed out of a long life of service, and she could help with the housekeeping, so the dirt would not matter so much. The women grumbled behind his back, sometimes outright shouting at each other when Pasha was trying to study. “What good are these books going to do him?” was a common refrain. But Pasha understood perfectly well that he was his father's next step. Antipov's father had been born a serf, but he became the village blacksmith. Antipov had risen from there to building the railroads, then inspecting the work at someone else's command, and now was able to make demands of the men who had the nice civil service titles, pitting his experience against the generic education of the upper class. Sometimes, he even won those arguments. He had gone from a life of being whipped whenever the master felt like it to giving quasi-scientific advice about rail handling and procurement policies to educated men. Pasha was to start life as the educated man.
Antipov could be a stern man, but he was never cruel with his son or with his wife. Pasha heard so many arguments between husbands and wives break out in drink and violence, but his father was tender with his mother. Still, Antipov was the rightful centre of the household. After his arrest, Pasha felt empty, his world suddenly hollow. He was lucky to run into Antipov's comrade Tiverzin, who arranged for Pasha to stay with him and his mother. Auntie Fenya had a friend she could go to, after she finished weeping about the police and the mess they had caused ransacking the flat, but the friend would not take in a child. Pasha went to Tiverzin's mother because he did not know what else to do. If the strike leaders were being arrested, the general strike would soon end, and he could not bear disappointing his father by dropping out of school to try to find work. Could he even find work as the son of a martyr to the cause (or a traitor to the regime)?
Tiverzina was as unlike Darya as any railwayman's wife could be, Pasha thought when he arrived at the warm flat, dinner ready for him. “When Kuprinka said you'd been evicted, of course I said you could bunk down here. The girls are gone, so you can have their bed while we work out what's next. Eat. You must be starving. Worries empty out the stomach. Kuprinka, I know what Gimazetdin told you. Fatima has my ear. Go. The boy isn't to be tossed over by the horrid police twice in the same day, is he? One son in Siberia is enough for me.” Yet what in Pasha's house would have been a fearful prediction of the utter destruction of the family was delivered by Marfa Gavrilovna as a joke.
Tiverzina appeared practically a member of the union herself. The “girls” were her granddaughters; they were traveling with their mother to bring Tiverzina's younger son back from the military hospital in Krasnoyarsk. No one knew when they would be back or how badly Ilya Savelievich had been wounded by the Japanese. “I have been all over this world with Sava, God rest him, and I have seen things that would make your hair stand on end. There are times to put your nose down, sure, but if the tsar is to live up to his title, he must be the Good Tsar and by God, we will prove his love and mercy however we must. We're God's tools, too, are we not? My cousin Prov came this afternoon to tell me how we have won. The tsar will proclaim a manifesto, giving the people what we have been demanding all year. You see, it has worked. Your father and my son and all of them, we have forced through the army and the bureaucracy so the tsar can show his mercy. The union is a godly thing.”
Pasha spent a sleepless night in the girls' bed. Was it the union or Tiverzina who was looking after him? How could he possibly tell his mother what had happened? Could he go back to school when the general strike was lifted? Would anyone hire him if the union leaders were all arrested? He finally fell asleep near morning, waking to Tiverzin arguing with his mother.
“Of course I'm going to the celebration – why shouldn't I?”
“We have no reason to trust the tsar, the troops, or anyone else.”
“You don't have to come. Pasha will come with me.”
“Didn't that boy go through enough yesterday?”
“Kuprik, I'm not an idiot like half your union. Who took care of you and your brother and your sister without a husband to fall back on?”
“Mama, it isn't you I don't trust.”
Pasha stuck his head out the bedroom door to see Tiverzin and his mother sitting across the table from each other rather than coming to blows as he had feared. “Did you sleep well, my dear?” Tiverzina asked him. “There's a rally today in support of our victory. You will come, won't you?”
“Victory?”
“The tsar has signed a manifesto granting us everything! It is all just as Prov said yesterday.”
“Not everything,” Tiverzin tried to correct her, but she waved him off.
“Yes, I'll come. Of course I'll come.” Pasha dared hope that “victory” also meant “amnesty” and his father would come home and he would not have to tell his mother anything at all about the past two days. His father could not fail to be proud to see him take part in the liberation. There had to be a liberation, right? How could there be a manifesto granting the demands of the strikers without an amnesty for the men making the demands?
The demonstration was brilliant to Pasha's mind. The jubilant of all classes marched through the streets of Moscow, singing the Marseillaise and “Victims They Fell” at the top of their lungs. Some marchers tore flags from the buildings and ripped them into their constituent colours, waving the red strips gaily as the crowds trampled the white and blue. They paused for a while to listen to the speeches at the Technical School, where many repeated Tiverzin's warnings that the manifesto was incomplete and no amnesty had been guaranteed, but Tiverzina scoffed at the naysayers. Pasha wanted to believe Tiverzina, who had seen so much in her life. If they had won, there would be an amnesty and his father would come home.
They marched on to the Butyrka prison and somehow over a hundred prisoners were released. They had won another great victory, and this buoyed Pasha's spirits momentarily. But none of the men were Antipov. They heard later, through Tiverzin, that another column of demonstrators had attempted the same at Taganka prison, but they had been fiercely attacked by hooligans, and a Bolshevik leader had been murdered. They all three went to the funeral two days later, an interminable procession mourning the quick failure of the pure liberty they had perhaps only half believed in.
Prov Afanasyevich, who had brought Tiverzina the original news of the manifesto, continued to insist that an amnesty would be announced any day. “It has been signed!” But every day, there was no news, no instructions for Prov Afanasyevich to bless the tsar for his mercy. The strike ended, and Pasha finally visited the hospital to see his mother. He felt himself lucky that she had entered a delirium, for that allowed him to delay the hard news.
In November, in the midst of yet another strike from Petersburg that was not quite catching on, Tiverzina asked Pasha to accompany her to another demonstration. This time, her son was far more firm in his denunciations of the project, though he was finally sleeping at home again. “Of course Pasha wants to come with me. We're demanding the amnesty we were promised.”
“No one promised the amnesty.”
“Prov said it was signed! But really, if your lot don't calm down with the strikes, no wonder no one listens to the rest of us.”
“We're not striking with Peter! And who do you think you'll be marching with?”
“With good boys like Pasha. You are coming, aren't you, Pasha?”
Of course he went. But the joy of the first march had faded with the turn of autumn into hard winter. It began to snow, the first snow of the year, during the march, and this time, there was the blood and fear and hate that the Taganka marchers had run into last time, but now it was for everyone. Pasha was separated from Tiverzina in the crowd, and as he tried to make himself as small as possible in a doorway, he feared his father's shame nearly as much as he feared the Cossack making his horse dance at the trapped demonstrators. His father had been beaten, but he walked into prison unbowed. Pasha had failed to even protect an old woman.
“That was a poorly done demonstration, Kuprinka!” she complained afterwards. “Your bunglers can't even organise a march without leading us into boring speeches and blind alleys.”
“We didn't plan the march, and I told you to stay home. They aren't proclaiming any amnesty, in case you hadn't noticed. Really, Mother, you taught me that you sometimes have to lay low, and with the Black Hundreds out, this is a time to plan, not to act. It's not my march, so blame the Cossacks, not me.”
Tiverzin was arrested at last near the end of November. The police took in all the ticket collectors from the Brest line, and one of them betrayed Tiverzin. The police came during the day, when Pasha was at school, so he came home to find Tiverzina and Fatima, the porter's wife, cleaning up the mess. “They didn't do much,” Fatima tried to tell him, but Tiverzina was repeating every single sorrow. From a brief look around, Pasha knew Fatima was right; the police had ripped open all the mattresses in his flat, but here, they must have just pulled the bedclothes off. There was no straw on the floor, nothing much broken. Everything had been pulled out of every cabinet, but the furniture was upright. Having a son valiantly wounded in the war against Japan was a protection even when the other was a Bolshevik.
Word must have spread of Tiverzin's arrest, for Tiverzina's other granddaughter, a seamstress about Pasha's age, came that evening with dinner for the two of them. “I told Mama you probably weren't thinking much about it. How awful everything is, when after the manifesto it should have been so nice!” Olya was a nice girl, Pasha thought. She talked and joked with him, and having the two young people in the house took Tiverzina's mind off her sorrows, for she laughed and joked along with them. Olya conspired to make a party a few days later and brought a friend, who was the most beautiful girl Pasha had ever seen. They sat around the samovar, old Tiverzina and the young people – even the porter's son came upstairs for a while – and told stories and laughed and said nothing about Antipov and Tiverzin and the amnesty that did not come.
The hospital insisted around the same time that they could keep Darya Mikhailovna no longer. Without Tiverzin, Pasha did not know what to do. If he quit school, how was he to find work? The railway would hardly take on a traitor's son, certainly not after the last round of arrests. His father would be ashamed that his grand ambitions had come to naught. And Pasha liked school. He shared his father's ambition. But was it for him to add more sadness to his mother's life when she had now effectively lost a husband, too? Tiverzina would let her stay for a few weeks, but she was always waiting for word from her Ilya and his family. The continual strikes kept delaying the mails. Pasha knew he was but a temporary lodger until her own family returned. Yet he brought his mother there because they had no where else to go. For her part, Tiverzina insisted that Darya should eat properly after such an illness; the hospitals could never feed a person well.
“Where's Fedora Pavlovna?” Darya asked when she saw that Tiverzina was the only old woman in the flat.
“She went to live with a friend who can't take me. Marfa Gavrilovna's son worked with Papa. They're good people here.”
“You're still in school?”
“Whenever the teachers aren't on strike.”
Darya shook her head. Pasha was certain she was disappointed that the school was no better than her husband, getting everyone sent to prison. “I don't want to stay here without your father.”
“Where can you go?”
“Home. Why not?”
“Who will look after you?”
“There's more work for a boy in the country than there is here. We should be able to get the family plot back.”
It would be a living death, to give up everything Antipov had worked his life for, his father Ferapont Ratmirovich had worked his life for, to struggle as the peasants they no longer were. It was her sadness speaking, Pasha decided. She did not want the hard work, either, surely, just the familiar air in her sorrow. It's not fair to any of us, Pasha thought. What would Papa do? He never fought her. How did he do it? After much thought, he asked, “What would Papa say?”
“He isn't here. Maybe I could go with him? When he is sentenced. They let some of the wives follow into exile, I think.”
“Maybe.” She had not mentioned Pasha at all. “And I would stay here and continue to go to school?”
“I don't know,” she vacillated. “Your father should decide these things.”
“Papa would want me to stay.”
“Then maybe you should stay. You don't like my ideas of things, so maybe you should do what you like.”
“Mama,” he started to complain, but the thought of his father stopped him. The Antipov family did not quarrel. He tried again. “I have to stay because I have to finish Papa's work. It wasn't just the eight-hour workday, which we don't even have yet. It was free speech and civil rights and universal suffrage. I hear all the arguments, every day. And Papa did everything he did because his father worked to not be tied forever to the land he was born to, so now it's for me to take the next steps. A profession, not just a trade. He would be so disappointed if I stopped because of him.” Other families tried not to anger their fathers, Pasha knew, but for the Antipovs, disappointment was the greatest failure.
It was at last agreed that Darya would find some work in the city – laundry or something – until Antipov's trial and sentencing. Pasha would stay with Tiverzina until Darya could make a better home for him. Tiverzina did most to convince Darya that of course Pasha would stay in school and live with her because she had made promises to her son just as Darya had made promises to Antipov. Pasha was simply relieved to have an adult to lean on. If he were honest, his concern was equally as great for the evenings when Olya and Lara came to drink tea. His father would be disappointed if he left school or gave up a Moscow education for the best a minor city in Siberia could do, but Pasha could not leave Moscow so long as the city had Lara in it.
Some evenings, Tiverzina would cook dinner for a number of her son's former associates, but Pasha liked those evenings less. The talk was of the men in prison, predictions of sentencing, instructions from St Petersburg (“The tsar may live there, but that doesn't make the Peter Soviet our masters!”). There was always a sadness even in the efforts moving forward because there was no victory without amnesty for the political prisoners. At least when the girls came, they laughed all night.
Yet in the end, Moscow jumped to attention when the leadership of the Peter Soviet was arrested. A general strike was called in response, and more to the point, Schmidt and Mamontov distributed weaponry to their workers. When the Moscow Soviet was nearly captured by government troops after someone betrayed a meeting place, the whole neighbourhood rose as one. Demin, Olya's father, came to Tiverzina with the news. “That's it. We're defending our own. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, barricade the troops out.”
“The tsar can't destroy the people, can he?” Tiverzina told Pasha as he helped her carry groceries back to the flat. “We are Russia, too. The Cossacks are always at us, but the tsar, he can be brought round. He can see.” They carried a great many groceries because she was going to cook for the revolution.
Pasha eagerly joined in the developments. Here was his father's work writ large, the whole city turning out in defense of the workers' right to have a voice. It was not just all of Presnya preparing for battle; the beautifully dressed habitués of Tverskaya Street contributed real labour, gaily joking with the local boys like Pasha as they stacked scrap iron and spare rail ties and even the shutters of houses. Pasha was at school with their sons, but he had never shared a word with such men directly. They were shadows until the barricades went up.
The police or the army tore down the first barricade by morning, but they did not trouble the neighbourhood further. Nor did they cart away the materials. So the same people performed the same work over again, with more jokes as to the laziness of the police, and this time they covered their work with water from the Guishars' pump, winter cementing the barricade in place. Olya's friend Lara was a capitalist, she had told Pasha, but she had laughed as she said it. “Madame Guishar is a woman of the old style above all things. I don't think she has a capitalist bone in her body, even if she does own an enterprise. You should have seen how Fetisova had to convince her that we were walking out for the strike, not because we had taken a dislike to her. The woman takes everything personally. I don't know how she gave birth to a level-headed girl like Lara.” Lara opened the gates to the workshop yard and helped carry buckets of water from their private pump alongside the workers building the replacement barricade.
When the shooting started a few days later, Pasha was as excited as anyone. He went to the headquarters at the Schmidt factory, hoping that as the son of a revolutionary martyr, he might be granted some more important work. Rifles were for the Schmidt employees, but he was allowed a revolver. Yusupka, the porter's son, was not even permitted that, weapons were in such short supply. Pasha was proud to be visibly defending his father's honour, supporting his father's ambition, proving himself worthy to be his father's son. And when the shooting got closer, Pasha had never been so scared in his life. Tiverzina rationed her cooking and prayed loudly, yet still she fed everyone who said they knew her son or who came home with Pasha. There was a vaguely familiar boy in a school uniform, who had his own hunting rifle and often followed Pasha home for meals. Pasha clung to him as if he were the experienced general and Pasha a new orderly. Nicky's father was in Siberia, and he told Pasha tales to prepare him, he said, for the life of a revolutionary martyr's son. His mother was also a terrorist, he insisted. They holed up in the same house, defending the same stretch of barricade that Lara had helped build. Pasha could not imagine a better life, for when they won, he would have earned both his father's approval and Lara's.
At some point, the porter's family disappeared and so did Lara Guishar. Tiverzina stayed put, but by the time the main battle began, she had been keeping only the samovar bubbling for two days. The fires spread through the district as the shelling continued. Women and children were hit by shells or splinters as the tenements flew apart under the constant bombardment. The snow turned to red ice, melted by the fires and bloodied by the victims. Pasha and Nicky both ran out of bullets and ran to the cellar of Tiverzina's building, hoping it would not catch fire. Nicky asked how many soldiers Pasha had hit, but Pasha could only shrug. He had not really aimed his revolver at the men so much as fired in the general direction of soldiers' uniforms. Nicky was much less brash in the cellar than he had been on the barricade. The shells whistled through the air before exploding, and the cellar walls did not muffle the screams nearly enough for Pasha's comfort.
Tiverzina joined them in the cellar that evening as the shelling went on. “What is going to become of us? Kuprinka's lot can't leave well enough alone, can they? I should have left with Fatima. Leave it to the craft of a Tatar to slip out in the middle of a battle.” Pasha had watched Tiverzina's sorrows over the past two months fluctuate with the success and failure of the revolution, soaring at the first possibility of something good happening for the working people and cratering at the slightest setback. Nicky had no comfort for the old woman, and Pasha had run out of jokes, but at least he could hollowly reiterate over and over how proud Kuprian Savelich would be to hear how they had tried their best and held out for so long. To say “Kuprian Savelich” was to think “Papa”.
“Are they going to keep shelling the neighbourhood, or do you think they'll invade at some point?” Pasha asked Nicky some hours later. Nicky was chewing at his mittens, Pasha realised after asking the question. So much for his grand tales of heroism.
“They'll stop shelling before they come for us. They don't want to kill themselves.”
“Do you still have your rifle?”
“Of course!”
“Maybe you shouldn't.”
“What did you do with your pistol, then?”
“Left it. A pistol's no good without bullets. Do you think they'll shoot us, or are they going to arrest everyone?”
Nicky shrugged. “Who knows?” His voice wavered.
“Are you going to let them shoot an old woman?” Tiverzina demanded. Pasha hurried to comfort her, but Nicky had raised her ire. “I live here. If there is a here up above us for much longer. An old woman, the mother of a war hero, looking after this poor boy who has nowhere else to go, and you come in with an iron club and put us all in danger?”
“You were praising my initiative just yesterday!” Nicky argued.
But Pasha had begun to understand Tiverzina's moods. Every action she took was to support her sense of what was right in that moment. The revolution was always right, but sometimes you had to keep your head down or there would be no revolutionaries left. She praised her son's actions and deplored her son's actions; she praised him for hiding and railed at him for getting arrested; she marched in the demonstrations and wept when the people were not heard. She cooked for the revolution and might shield the revolutionaries. “Marfa Gavrilovna, Nicky has come home with me from school before, hasn't he? He's been to dinner many times.”
“No one with a rifle has come to dinner at my house,” Tiverzina argued.
“What are you doing?” Nicky asked.
“Marfa Gavrilovna has a son in the military hospital in Krasnoyarsk. She's looking after me. If you get rid of the gun, we can say you got stuck here with us when all of this started, that you visit from school all the time. If we get arrested, we're done. Will they shoot an old woman and two schoolboys? We lie low for a while. Isn't that what you said your mother does?”
“It's a very nice rifle,” Nicky complained.
“Then you can't hide here with us.” Pasha had let Nicky boss him around on the barricade, but he was the boss here. It was his house too, now. The house where people protected him, where Lara visited, where his schooling was respected. It wasn't home without his father, but it was his place in the world for now, and some boy with an expensive coat and expensive rifle wasn't going to put that in danger. “You have to leave now. You can come back without the rifle. We'll tell the story, won't we, Marfa Gavrilovna?”
“It's sort of true,” Nicky admitted. “The girl who helped carry water, I know her. Her name is Larissa Guishar. A girl I grew up with is a schoolfriend of hers.”
“Lara is a friend to everyone,” Tiverzina told him. “Throw away the rifle, and we will do what we can.”
Nicky came back without the rifle and with stories of how much of the neighbourhood was in flames. “We can risk getting water, in case anything catches here, but maybe we should just lay low, like you said.” It must have been bad, Pasha thought, if Nicky was coming around to Tiverzina's way of thinking.
The army did find them, but none were arrested. Tiverzina prostrated herself and wept and praised Ilya, who was coming home without a leg but never complained because he so loved the tsar it was a pleasure to give his life for the glory of God's representative on earth. The soldiers contented themselves with beating the boys under her protection, but they were allowed to go back upstairs. The neighbourhood smelled of smoke, and they could hear the screams as the fires spread. Pasha and Nicky settled at the window to watch, but the smoke blocked much of the view. It was not at all as they had expected when they had taken up similar positions on the barricade.
Nicky stayed a couple more days, and the three of them lived off tea and some remaining biscuits. The army came once more, then the police, and each time Tiverzina presented them with the last letter from Ilya, insisting on her patriotism and her good boy's sacrifice for the tsar, while the two boys in high school uniform hung back in silence. The police sought to make an example of men of fighting age, not old women and schoolboys who had no fathers to threaten.
By Tuesday, the pacification was absolute. The neighbourhood was charred black, the gutters were frozen red, and neighbours began to crowd in to whatever buildings were left. Nicky slipped out at night. The porter's family returned and started making allotments of who might shelter in the halls. Pasha was pleased to see that the Guishars' enterprise was unmolested, so Lara must surely return. Olya came and threw herself at Tiverzina. “How did you do it, grandmother? Still standing, always!”
“The Cossacks are terrible men, but your uncle is a war hero. They respect that.”
“We're just lucky the building didn't catch fire,” Pasha told her. “The Guishars' didn't, either.”
“I saw,” she said, obviously relieved. “Filat says they went to the Montenegro, so surely they'll be back soon. Papa was arrested yesterday but they let him go this morning. They don't know what they're doing. I've heard it's over a thousand of us dead from those horrible shells. Our flat only has three walls left!”
Olya's family crowded into Tiverzina's flat well into the new year as Demin looked for a new room. Luckily, he kept his job and Olya kept hers, and Demina proved much like her daughter rather than like Pasha's mother. Pasha could take only so much weeping, and he had a hard enough time keeping Darya together at a distance.
She was living above the laundry that had given her work, but she could not have Pasha there, and he was in no hurry to join her. Presnya was a scene from hell, but he was glad to return to Tiverzina's flat every day after school. Even crowded with her daughter's family and word that Ilya would be ready to travel in the spring, it was becoming more and more Pasha's home. The outside of the building was charred with smoke, like a crucible, and in it he had learned more than his mother could ever have taught him. He had done his part in the rising, and he hoped his father would be proud, but now he saw it was better to keep his head down with Tiverzina, to work hard in school, and to become the new generation of Russia his father wanted him to be. Nicky Dudorov could get himself shot; Pasha Antipov had greater ambitions.