Chapter One

ate in the afternoon on Wednesday, 10 August, 1921, Dmitri Pavlovich Dumatskoy returned by train to Moscow from the poet Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok's funeral in Petrograd. That morning, Dmitri saw them lower Blok into the ground at the Smolensky Cemetery. Dmitri had been part of the long procession that followed the coffin to the grave. The air was hot, the sky without clouds. The blue was a Blok blue, the blue of the poet, Novalis, and the German Romantics; and the Russian painter, Vrubel, at whose funeral Blok spoke in 1910. It was the blue that symbolized for Blok and his generation the "other world". How distant that world truly was from the day of Blok's funeral. It had been the world of 1900: poetry as religion; mysteries and their revelations; a preponderance of dream visions. It was the new dawn, a fresh beginning based on ineffable and mystical presentiments about the future of the Homeland. A symbolic art grew from the need to express the inexpressible. And that day, the day of Blok's funeral, there were no speeches made at Blok's grave.

Dmitri deboarded the train in Moscow at the Petrograd Station, part of a large complex of freight and passenger stations and railroad yards located at the eastern end of the city. He began the 10-minute walk to his first floor apartment in a house at 120 Novokirovskaya. He was greeted by the high-pitched noise of whistles, the reeking smoke of burning coal, the hot tarred caulking of the tracks, and the dry worn wooden smell of railroad ties. Once on Novokirovskaya, the streetcar tracks that ran west to the Kremlin flashed sharply into Dmitri's blue eyes from the slanting rays of the sun. As he walked, he thought of how much Blok's life and work meant to him - from as far back as 1903, when Dmitri had read Blok's first published poems in literary journals. Blok's integrity as a man, the lyricism of his essays and prose works, and the incomparable music of his verse created a heroic image in Dmitri's sensibility.

Dmitri had the eagle profile of fourteenth century Italian poet, Dante. Dmitri resembled most closely the portrait done by Giotto. Although done after Dante's death, the only one painted by someone who knew the poet during his lifetime. Dmitri was lanky, a little over 6 feet tall. He was born in 1889 in Starry Gorod, a small town 40 miles south of Moscow. An only child, rare for those times and that place, he had a good childhood. Rare parents, a curious match: A big, tough, uneducated railroad worker of a father - Pavel Kirilovich Dumatskoy. He wasn't a good reader. He preferred to have his poetry - which he loved - his Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyuchev recited to him by his wife, Tatiana Andreevna, to whom he was devoted. Small and thin and wiry, Tatiana in those days was a woman of great energy and curiousity. Not a great beauty, but with a face graced by a perpetual smile, she was a teacher of Russian grammar at the local school for the young ladies of the gentry. She managed to instill into her son, Dmitri, a love for the language and its greatest written achievements. When Dmitri was still a schoolboy of 16 in early 1905, his father, Pavel, was killed in Mukden, defending his country against Japan in the first battle he ever fought as a member of the Russian Army. Dmitri entered Moscow University in 1907. After earning his degree, he was asked to stay on as a graduate fellow in literature, working in research studies under several professors. That idyll in academia was shattered by the rapid and horrible succession of the war with Germany, and the Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War.

As he began to climb the six steps up to the front porch of the house on Novokirovskaya, Dmitri glanced up quickly upon hearing the sound of children arguing. Several of them were leaning out of both the second and third floor windows, taunting each other and hollering. Nine people lived in those two small front apartments of the house.Dmitri felt a burning sensation, followed by a sharp pain in his right thigh. At that moment, he was back in East Prussia, 1914. On a charred grassy beach of a Masurian lake, blood erupted from his right leg. Comrades screamed that he had been hit by artillery fire. The Russians were being driven back. Dmitri would spend months in a hospital tent in Bialystok, and then sent home to recover... The children continued arguing, the sensation in Dmitri's thigh ceased, and the image of the war faded.

Dmitri unlocked the front door of the house and went into the small foyer. To the left, stairs went up to the second and third floor apartments. The foyer was papered with a crude representation of a scene from Book 13 of The Odyssey by Homer: Odysseus returns from Troy to his homeland of Ithaca and presents himself in front of the Cave of Nymphs. The garishly painted serene look on Odysseus' face never failed to disgust Dmitri.

He went through the door to the right that led into a small sitting room. The one window was wide open. It was very hot, and the smell was musty. The table with its old lamp on a worn doily, two over-stuffed armchairs, and a shabby loveseat all sat heavily on the faded brown carpet Dmitri and Zina found at the bazaar on the Arbat. He moved through the arched doorway that opened to the pantry to the right. He began yelling to his wife. He knew she would be on the sun porch.

"Zina, Zinochka, I'm home darling!"

"Mitya, you're here! Hello!" she answered.

Dmitri's wife, Zina, eight months pregnant with their first child, had been experiencing painful swollen hands and feet all week. She had reluctantly, but wisely, confined herself to bed for the last few days. Zina could barely walk, and couldn't make a fist at all.

Zina's pregnancy caught the Dumatskoys by surprise. Dmitri was thrilled! Zina, a little less so, even disappointed! She felt that a baby would interfere with her career as an artist, which was just beginning to blossom. Not only did she need time to paint, but she needed to meet people, exchange ideas, and make contacts. And she loved the night life of Moscow, the clubs and cabarets. She could not possibly do all those things and have a baby, too! She was often depressed, and cried almost every day. Dmitri thought it was due to her hormonal changes. She let him believe that, not telling him the real reason for her negative state of mind.

The Dumatskoys' bed was in a closed-off room across from the pantry, slightly bigger than the closet next to it that contained the toilet and tiny sink. But for the last few weeks, Zina had been sleeping on a cot in the sun porch, a thin rectangle of space, 5' x 15' with eight screened windows that overlooked a small yard bordered by oak and maple trees. A door opened to steps down to the yard. A door that was seldom locked. The breeze could be wonderful there. Since the intense heat began in the middle of July, she and Dmitri spent most of their time there. They took meals there. Zina painted her watercolors. Dmitri brought home work from his job at the Ministry of Education.

Zina was sitting in the sun porch on the cot, with her back leaning against the border between two windows. Beyond her lovely head with its bountiful long brown hair, through the screens the leaves of the green oak and maple could be seen suspended motionlessly, and surrounded by a thin haze. Her red swollen feet were dangling over the side of the cot. Her legs were marked with tiny scratches from Pino, the white and black kitten, who just then jumped onto the windowsill to Zina's left. She had panties on, and a blue and white sailor shirt that just covered the big bulge in her belly. The little tan dog, Destiny, Dmitri's present to her on her 21st birthday, was running in the yard, and could be heard barking frantically since she had first heard Dmitri's voice calling to Zina when he came into the pantry. Two books on Greek mythology were lying on the cot next to her. One was open, and a bunch of Tarot cards marked the page. Zina loved to read Greek Mythology. She was in the process of making a systematic study of the subject. Dmitri could get her all the books she wanted. Right before she became pregnant, she began to study the rudiments of the Greek language with an instructor at Moscow University that Dmitri had contacted, Evgeny Gavrilovich Uchitelnitsky. He agreed to tutor Zina. For a Christmas gift the previous year, Dmitri bought Zina a set of Tarot cards with the images and characteristics depicted and explained in terms of Greek mythology. Since she had become pregnant, the process of the mythological reading and the language study had been slowed profoundly. And then there was her painting - which was her first priority.

Dmitri saw that Zina was crying. Her brown-green eyes were rimmed with red. He gently sat down next to her on the cot, and looked lovingly at her face. Her skin was soft and clear. She had a charmingly crooked nose from the time her dog, Muffet bit her there when she was a ten year old living in Novgorod. Her nose was broken. The bones were not set properly. He embraced her and kissed her. Then Zina began crying even more.

"What, you're not glad to see me?" he joked with her.

She stopped crying enough to answer. As her lips parted, her teeth, pearl-like and even flashed white as paper.

"Of course, I am."

"But?"

"But I can't do anything! I can't even pick up a pencil or brush. It hurts so! I just have to sit here."

She whimpered softly. Then, as if just remembering something, she shouted,

"And now this! This is too much! This cannot be! Dmitri look!"

She pointed to a little round table to her right in the corner of the porch where Dmitri had a few books piled. They were on Tsar Ivan IV. Zina had been looking through them. A lamp was next to the books.

"Over there!"

Dmitri found a letter there. It was officially stamped by the Moscow Housing Commission. His brow furrowed as he scrutinized the letter. After he finished reading, he sat down on the chair at the table and looked at his wife.

"I told you this would happen. I warned you that my father would be the one coming to live with us. That fiend, Podly, the great Housing Commissar Podly has known all along who he would send to live with us. When he sent us the first decree, telling us to prepare to accept a tenant into our apartment... I knew who it would be!"

Dmitri looked away, into the calm and stillness of the yard, away from the mounting fury in Zina's eyes. He knew that her rather subdued tone of voice betrayed the onslaught of an explosion. He tried to mollify things a bit,

"Zina, we have had the unheard-of luxury of living alone in these five rooms in Moscow for nearly a year..."

"Yes, and now the baby is due to arrive on 12 September." Zina interrupted. "Back when we received Podly's first decree, I did a Tarot card reading, remember? I posed the question: 'Will my father be the one coming to live with us?' Look, the first card, the Covering Card, the Significator, it reflects my situation, inner and outer, at the present moment: Death. The Death card! Something must come to an end. Life here in this apartment, as we knew it, our happiness. Position two, the Crossing Card - what is generating conflict, the obstruction, the problem: The Devil. The Devil card! Confrontation with all that is shadowy, shameful and base. Forget the cards in between! Here, look at Position ten - the Final Outcome, the outgrowth of all of this - The Hanged Man. The Hanged Man card! The sacrifice of something that has previously provided security! Prometheus hangs tied to the rock as the vulture approaches again to devour his liver. Just as that man, that vulture will devour us. Oh, Dmitri - again and again!"

"Can you never forgive your father?"

"That filthy drunk? Never!"

Zina struggled to get off the cot.

"Please sit down, Zinochka!"

"I have to go to the toilet!"

Her swollen feet padded heavily on the wooden floor of the porch and the pantry. At the door of the closet where the toilet was, Zina turned to Dmitri who had followed her,

"I can't accept this! I won't! You must go to Podly! You must convince him that we can't accept this! We won't! Do you hear?"