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A moon hanging over the rooftops of Petrograd, enveloped in a drunken haze. Sounds of street dog fights and sleepy alarm bells from a fire eight blocks away from the bridge. A fine stone bridge over the Neva River. A young woman drags herself out and over the low walls meant to divide the Neva’s waters from the inhabitants of Peter’s City. Somehow, regardless of the cold of an April night in Russia, she goes back to the bridge, not halting until she is at its crest. The gentleman who comes after her to the bridge notices the trail she has unconsciously left: river water and blood, dyeing the bridge in a more unsavory shade. The gentleman – but no, he is not really a gentleman so much as he is a onetime student, now a worker out of necessity. His name is Pavel Aleksandrovitch Maridetsky, and he is not planning to stay much longer in Petrograd, or even Russia for that matter. Pavel Aleksandrovitch is bound for Paris, as it seems many Russians are in these days after the Revolution and the end of the Great War. He has convinced himself that there will be something better for him in Paris.
But come, the story returns to its heroine and she stands waiting with moonlight in her wet hair. To be honest, Pavel Aleksandrovitch is more interested in this strange young woman right now than he is with Paris or the train tickets in his jacket pocket.
“Madam, excuse me . . . madam!”
She watches his progress along the bridge, then allows him to join her by its edge.
“If I may be so bold, do not jump. There is nothing better at the bottom of the Neva.”
Smiling, the young woman steps towards Pavel Aleksandrovitch. “I’m not going to jump again. Once is enough. And you are right; there’s no good at the bottom of anything.” She laughs then and Pavel Aleksandrovitch wonders if she isn’t unusually joyful for someone who tried to destroy themselves.
“I am crazy.”
“Pardon?”
“No, it was nothing. I was lying to you . . . where are you going?” she asks him, speaking as if she has known him for a long while. “I know you are going somewhere. Everyone is. Even my family was going.”
“Paris. Paris, France.”
“Yes, I know where that is. I would like to go to Paris. Would you take me with you?”
Perhaps because he sympathizes with her state of dispossession, Pavel Aleksandrovitch finds himself leading her to his aunt’s apartment. As he takes her hand – since she stumbles and would trip over the cobblestones – it is not only wet, but sticky as well. Warm and sticky. When his aunt tends to her at home, he washes the blood from his own hand.
They leave for Paris the next morning, early, as that train is the only one where they find empty seats. Pavel Aleksandrovitch’s aunt does not question him about the stranger from the canal; she only splits the food from her basket into thirds. She is not a curious woman. Her right name is Marina Vladimirovna and she doesn’t object to the extra passenger, as she is already in the habit of looking after unwanted people. Pavel Aleksandrovitch’s parents left him behind when they left Russia for the States.
The young woman stays awake only long enough to board the train. More of a girl, Pavel Aleksandrovitch notes. Her hair, still damp with river water, is of some indiscernible light color, almost golden but with a look as if it was tarnished. He decides that she must have cut her arms, as his aunt has carefully bandaged her from bony shoulders to slender forearms to skeletal wrists. When she wakes and stares at him without comprehension, her face too is like death, eyes too large and framed by thick purple veins, mouth bloodless and set. Pavel Aleksandrovitch first thinks she has no memory of him as well, before she laughs at him and points to the sun-bleached Russian countryside slipping away.
“There! Isn’t it like Anna Karenina? She went on trains a great deal, I think, and do you know that she threw herself down too? But that was only under the train, so she escaped without any consequences.” She stopped. “I have consequences though. Bridges and canals and rivers aren’t as good as trains. Would you know that if I was to do it again, I wouldn’t choose that bridge? Too many other people died there.”
His throat is dry “N – no. No, I couldn’t know that.”
As quickly as she had turned to him, she is facing the window again, nothing but her hair, bloodstained dress, and the back of white-bandaged arms visible. “But I wouldn’t do that again . . . I think I already told you that. I would go back to the parts with my family, but not the bridge. Didn’t I tell you that too?”
“You have been asleep, madam. My aunt and I, neither of us know much of you.”
The girl from the canal laughs a wild little laugh, but keeps her back turned. “Well I don’t either, so I couldn’t help you.”
It is another hour before she speaks again to Pavel Aleksandrovitch. Now, Marina Vladimirovna sleeps, as does an old man in an English tweed jacket. The remainder of the car is vacant.
“I wasn’t asleep now, you know.” He nods politely, so she continues. “Before I was. I should be angry with you for that; I would have wanted to see St. Petersburg for a last time.”
“Petrograd, you mean.”
“No. St. Petersburg. My family always called it that, and Papa was someone who should have known its proper name.”
“I see.”
“What are you called?” The girl from the canal stands and Pavel Aleksandrovitch stands as well, frightened that she will fall and start to bleed again. “And your age? No, sit. I want to sit next to you now.” She brushes her hands rapidly over her skirts after sitting down and Pavel Aleksandrovitch wonders if she remembers how they came by those bloodstains.
"I have decided you aren’t a dirty Bolshevik. I can’t just trust anyone. But you never answered me: what is your name?”
“Pavel Aleksandrovitch Maridetsky.” He wonders why she seems so delighted by this. “I am twenty.”
“How nice! One of my sisters was almost twenty and the other was a year older than you. But I am over a hundred by now.” Fixing her eyes on him, she scoots closer. “No, I was lying just now. I do a lot. I’m only seventeen. It was in the papers with all the announcements, like an obituary almost. I read it. Did you read it, Pavel Maridetsky? See how I was rude and didn’t use your patronymic? My uncle was also Pavel Aleksandrovitch. He was older than twenty, otherwise I would confuse you.” Here the girl stops and looks at the old man in the tweed coat as if she suspects he isn’t really sleeping.
“My Uncle Pavel is dead. I read that too.”
Pavel Aleksandrovitch would ask her what she means, but the girl from the canal has already tucked her feet under her on the seat and her head is on his shoulder. She whispers pitifully, “I want to sleep now, Pavel. Sleep helps me.”
She sleeps there for the remainder of the train into Paris and his aunt Marina Vladimirovna knits after she wakes. Pavel Aleksandrovitch reads a newspaper that was left on the seat opposite him. It is old by almost three weeks, but he has nothing better to do and newspapers have been rare in Petrograd. “Tsar Nicholas’ family killed with him,” trumpets one headline, “Tsarina, young heir, and four daughters shot by Soviet order”. Pavel Aleksandrovitch looks carefully at the sepia photograph accompanying the article. “The Grand Duchesses Olga, Tatiana, Marie, and Anastasya” is the caption but in the photograph – four sisters in identical white dresses – their faces are obscured by excess ink. All but that of the youngest.
When he is finished with the paper, he folds it gently and sets it, picture down, on the seat. The girl from the canal has not stirred.
In the station in Paris, the girl wakes in the feeble light from the electric lamps. Pavel Aleksandrovitch does not speak to her and she only looks frantically about her for a moment before remembering the train. He steps down first and Marina Vladimirovna passes down their bags to him and the porter before being helped down herself. The girl from the canal stays at the edge of the train and looks down at the smoke billowing up from beneath her and catching the folds of her dirty white dress. Impatient, the old man with the tweed jacket prods her and mumbles something in incomprehensible French. She clings tighter to the handrail.
“The train will not move now. You can come down.” Even as he says this, Pavel Aleksandrovitch is conscious of how silly it sounds. She will not come; she is confused – that much he knows about the girl by now. But people are moving through the smoke – over and under and around it – towards the train and she must come. The train will go back through Brussels, Amsterdam, and Berlin to Petrograd with the girl clinging to the handrail if she will not come with them. Pavel Aleksandrovitch doubts she wishes to return to Petrograd.
“My aunt has our bags and we will go to the apartment now and you can rest there . . . you should like Paris. Don’t worry about the train; this is a good sort of jump. Come, Anastasya.”
The girl seems as if she will speak, but choking on the words and smoke, instead flings herself off the train with all the wild abandon that Pavel Aleksandrovitch imagines accompanied her jump off the bridge. He catches her before her feet can touch the platform and notices that her eyes have lost some of their hard, desperate look.
They leave the train station and the girl still clings to Pavel Aleksandrovitch, her pitiful white-bandaged arms wrapped about his. He struggles somewhat with his bags because of this, but she doesn’t notice and even he isn’t overtly conscious of it. The passengers pouring about them are nothing to her, nor does she take note of their passage through the recently rain-washed streets, or even the apartment that an older Russian émigré has let them have. It is a decent apartment, pink-papered, and with no curtains so that the bursts of light from passing automobiles in the street reflect up into the rooms. The girl shares a room with Marina Vladimirovna, but is asleep before Pavel Aleksandrovitch has finished unpacking. It does not take long as there wasn’t much for them to bring and from other émigrés they hear the same. Some they speak to have lost family to Bolshevik firing squads and others are separated from those who have not escaped Russia yet. It is becoming harder and Pavel Aleksandrovitch wonders if they might have been stopped if they had tried to leave any later, especially with the girl from the Neva. He believes someone back in Russia must be looking for her.
He has found a job for her as a dishwasher in a café run by an old Frenchman who speaks some Russian. She is beginning to not mind as much when he leaves her there with the portly Frenchman and curious waitresses and seems happy when he picks her up, pink cheeked with her hair curling damply about her face from the steam. She chatters blithely to him as they walk back through the streets, clinging tightly to his arm, and often he doesn’t understand what she speaks of. Her strung together speeches consist mostly of childhood memories, but she will change the stories and if he asks her about her first version, she only laughs and says she was lying.
Pavel Aleksandrovitch has never heard the girl mention the canal. Coming back to the apartment at the day’s end, he has noticed no outward agitation when they pass bridges. They never cross them. He does not trust himself enough to keep her from harming herself if they should. Likewise, he worries about knives and scraps of metal and broken glass. She no longer wears the white bandages on her arms, but the mauve scars ascending from her wrists have a withered look, as if someone has picked at their scabs, angry at their very existence.
He comes to fetch the girl at work one night in mid-July. He is late. At the café, the elderly Frenchman says he has not seen her since their lunch break. There is some celebration in the city and as fireworks combust over the rooftops of Paris, Pavel Aleksandrovitch sees nothing of the girl from the canal, of her stained white dress and tarnished gold hair. Embers of violet, scarlet, and chartreuse fall in parabolas through his vision, but the girl is gone. Not one of the dancers pouring out of the sweat-perfumed nightclubs has her eyes. His steps lead him away from the cafes and to the bridges, especially those along the tree lined avenues with big yellow and light blue houses set between the trees like gems.
The girl from the Neva canal has not jumped yet when Pavel Aleksandrovitch sees her. She is sitting, embracing the stone wall of a bridge like a long lost loved one, her arms locked when he tries to pry her away.
“Anastasya, come away from here,” he tells her, feeling that he is competing with the fireworks for her attention, as she trembles violently with each burst, fingers digging deeper into the cracks in the wall.
“No. One year ago, my family died on this day. I read of it in the papers, but not until a while after,” she says. “I should have died.”
“When I read of it, I also grieved for the Imperial Family, but you have survived, so you must live. If you destroy yourself, you only finish what was begun by their killers.”
The girl thrusts her bleeding arms towards him. He would take hold of her wrists to keep her from the bridge, but they flush out fresh blood under his fingers and the girl flinches. She looks out to the canal.
“I don’t know if they were imperial . . . I think I lied about that. They were just my family and I was just one of the sisters.” She stands poised for a moment at the crest of the bridge, then, with a great shudder, steps back from the edge. “All I know is they were the sun and stars and all that was wonderful in my world. And now they are gone and all that is over. But I think you’ll be my moon now if you please and that will have to be enough for all the darkness.”
“You lied,” he repeats.
“And I am crazy. That isn’t a lie. But I don’t think I will jump again since I like you better than dead people from newspapers.”
They leave the bridge. She is tired and he heart-sick. But not once does Pavel Aleksandrovitch allow himself to wonder if Anastasya is lying.