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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 122 (previously 38a) - On the Shelf for September 2019 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2019/09/07 - listen here)

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Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2019.

What a month! I spent half of August traveling to Dublin Ireland for the World Science Fiction and Fantasy convention--and the other half either preparing or recovering from it. I love travel, but wow is it exhausting. I hope you enjoyed the audio post cards episode I recorded in odd moments at the convention.

This podcast has always straddled the fuzzy line between strictly historical material and historical fantasy. Even when I’m looking at queer women in historic literature, there are often fantastic elements, whether it’s the chivalric romances of Yde or Silence, or the classical mythology or Callisto and Diana, or simply the fantastic (if sincere) beliefs of previous centuries in the possibility of spontaneous changes of sex.

Those overlaps are one of the reasons why I decided to open up next year’s fiction series to include stories with fantastic elements the reflect the types of motifs we find around queer characters in the literature of the past. I plan to be cross-promoting the call for submissions in SFF circles. And, of course, ordinary historical stories are solidly on-target as well. I hope you’re encouraging all the talented authors you know to consider submitting something.

Publications on the Blog

The blog has been discussing articles in a collection about representations of singlewomen in medieval and early modern England. This is one of many topics where historical studies of women in general offer a useful grounding for queer characters. One of my favorite articles covered in August include a discussion of how the profession of money lending became a profitable side-line for singlewomen in the early modern era--one that not only provide an income but often served an important community function. Another favorite article takes an in-depth look at how playwright John Lyly--the author of the gender-bending Gallathea--regularly subverted tropes about unmarried women in his work.

Not all the articles in the collection are of direct interest to the Project and I skim through a lot of them in the first half of September. After that, I’ve decided it’s time to delve into some of the foundational works on the history of gender and sexuality that often get mentioned in passing but that have been languishing on my to-be-read list for years. Books and articles like Joan Cadden’s The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval, Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, John Boswell’s several books on same-sex topics in history, and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. (I confess I’m not looking forward to slogging through that one, but it’s one of the texts that everyone is in conversation with.) I’ll be leavening those with some shorter articles just to keep my brain from breaking, and I haven’t picked which books I’ll start with, but expect some serious philosophy on the blog for a while.

Book Shopping!

And as I record this, I have just put in an order at Amazon for copies of all the books in the list that I haven’t previously bought.

Author Guest

This month’s author guest will be Olivia Waite, whose recent release The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics has been taking the f/f historical readership by storm.

Essay

This month’s podcast essay is still to be determined. I hope I don’t make a habit of deciding essay topics at the last minute! If I get my act together, I may do an Anne Lister show, now that I’ve finally caught up to the rest of the world in watching Gentleman Jack, but that will depend on lining up the guests I want to include. And honestly, I may need to spread my Lister coverage over several shows!

Recent Lesbian Historical Fiction

And now it’s time for the recent, new, and forthcoming f/f historicals! We start off with four July publications falling in the early modern period.

Under the Microscope by Kim Finney from Cygneture Books caught my attention sufficiently that it’s in my To Be Read pile, though long-timer listeners know that’s no guarantee of when I’ll get to it.

Ezzabell Chetwood the scholar, is invisible. To her society and in history she does not exist. Only Ezzabell the dutiful wife, is appreciable. Ignoring conventions is dangerous and following her heart has consequences. Is she willing to pay the price extracted for her transgressions? It is England in 1677. Public writing is a male pursuit. Science is a pastime of the privileged and religion dominates the culture. The use of microscopes has begun to reveal previously unknown world’s of miniature life. Ambrose Chetwood, an eccentric natural philosopher and his wife - Ezzabell, a gifted botanical illustrator, are on the brink of important scientific discoveries. The crucial role Ezzabell plays in her husband’s work is a silent one and Ambrose is guilt-ridden at treating her as if a colleague. When Ambrose forces Ezzabell to take on a lady’s companion - Thomasin Dansby, his unwanted action impacts upon their lives in unanticipated ways. In a society that considers women to be without intellect and non-conformity can mark a woman as a witch, a naive Ezzabell is ultimately confronted with the ugly outcomes of the choices that she makes. Thomasin, a younger woman with frivolous fancies, sees her removal from London to rural Chelsea an indignity. She has no desire to live amongst bumpkins, denied of easy access to the attractions of a burgeoning Restoration City. It does not take her long to connect with the village’s noble residents. But she finds something unexpected in Chelsea that although disorienting anchors her to the Chetwood Estate.

Worlds Apart, self-published by Stein Willard, is set in the mid 18th century though the description feels somewhat loosely moored in time.

Lady Tia Bellingham, the Duchess of Camphor wanted the near impossible: to stop the centuries’ old exploitation of the poor and down-trodden. But the darling of the English Court could not be seen as the one behind the ruination of her peers, and those most likely to make themselves guilty of such immoral practices. She realised that she needed help – more specific – she needed the help of Britain’s most dangerous and elusive criminal, The Maverick.  The dark, decaying slums of London were where Oasis felt most comfortable. Born a secret and raised in secret, it wasn’t difficult to hide her true self in a place where no one would come looking. As the feared outlaw, The Maverick, she ruled the underworld with an iron fist; her justice swift and lethal in her quest to protect the innocent and destitute. It’s only when the captivating Duchess of Camphor came knocking, that Oasis found there were certain depths to her that only the blonde beauty could access.

Beggar’s Flip by Benny Lawrence from Bedazzled ink is going to get the benefit of the doubt from me as a historic novel simply because I loved her book The Ghost and the Machine so much. But this sequel to Shell Game feels a bit more like a secondary-world fantasy as far as I can tell from the description.

Darren–socially awkward, exiled noblewoman turned pirate queen–and Lynn sorta kinda Darren’s slave girl, sorta kinda Darren’s life coach, and altogether the bossiest backseat helmsman that ever set foot on a pirate ship are at it . . . again. Darren receives a message delivered by her dying brother pleading for her to warn their father about a traitor. Meaning Darren has to return home to Torasan Isle, and to the father who keeps sending assassins after her. Lynn thinks it’s crazy, insane, and obviously certain death for Darren, and is not overly happy about the idea. As usual, Lynn is right and chaos ensues.

This is the second time in the last half year that a non-English book had turned up in my search that looks relevant enough to include. Les révolutions d'Olympe: Roman lesbien historique is authored by a writers’ collective that goes by the pen name of Le Jardin de Sappho. If you’re interested in lesbian historical fiction in French, it looks like they have a couple other titles out. Unlike the previous time I had a non-English title, I won’t attempt to give the original version of the cover copy, but you can find it in the transcript.

1789. Olympe est une fille du peuple, ébéniste, indifférente à l’amour. Adélaïde est une jeune aristocrate fortunée, oisive et lesbienne assumée et inconditionnelle. Les hasards de la vie vont les faire se rencontrer. Entre amour, doutes, peurs et le tourbillon violent de la révolution, leur histoire sera loin d’être simple. Une belle histoire d'amour avec un soupçon d'érotisme sans voiles…

1789. Olympe is a daughter of the people, a cabinetmaker, indifferent to love. Adelaide is an idle rich young aristocrat, known unconditionally as a lesbian. The chance of fate will bring them together. Between love, doubts, fears, and the violent whirlwind of the revolution, their story will be far from simple. A beautiful story of love with a hint of unveiled eroticism.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes a whole bunch of books will come out with similar themes, not inspired by some pop culture property, but just by coincidence? While I was putting together this list, I came across three separate titles that have the premise “Robin Hood, but a lesbian.” The last July book is one of those: Outlaw: A Lesbian Retelling of Robyn Hood self-published by Niamh Murphy

PRIDE. AMBITION. BLOOD. With a single shot, a legend is born.  Robyn Fitzwarren, daughter to the Baron of Loxley, only wants to support her mother while her father is off on Crusade. But when she enters an archery tournament in disguise, she incurs the wrath of the Sheriff of Nottingham's arrogant nephew, Theo. Now, not only is her own life threatened but the lives of her family as well. Will she flee from danger?  Or fulfill her destiny, stand up to injustice, and become the fabled outlaw of legend: Robyn Hood?

There’s only one additional August book to add this month. Prairie Hearts by JB Marsden from Sapphire Books.

In the 1820s, Kentuckian Carrie Fletcher migrates with her brother and his family to central Illinois where she intends to continue to grow medicinal herbs and be a healer. Carrie loves being the spinster aunt to her nieces and nephews, taking care of her herbs, making calls on sick pioneers, and farming with her brother. But, shunning marriage and motherhood and donning her unique style of “mannish” dress for farm work rouse some who question her womanhood. When they arrive, the unending labor of cabin-building and clearing the prairie grasses for crops require they trade assistance with other pioneers. One of the first neighbors to call on them is Emma Reynolds, another herbalist, healer, and midwife. She and Carrie share herbs, seeds, and healing knowledge. Shortly after, Emma’s father, her sole relation, dies from lung fever, leaving a gap in her life that Carrie’s friendship fills. Together the two pioneer women deal with the harsh realities of pioneering. One man calls their healing potions evil and harasses them violently. The two strengthen their bonds and develop deeper feelings as they fight for their lives and the lives of the neighbors they care for. Can their newfound love endure the hardscrabble life of never-ending toil, sickness, injury, hunger, and death on the prairie?

The first two September books are also set in the 19th century.

Bloomsbury's Late Rose: A Novel by Pen Pearson from Chickadee Prince Books

A poet in Edwardian London. A woman struggling to let her voice be heard. In 1894, sisters Charlotte and Anne Mew take a solemn vow never to marry, and never to pass on the family curse: insanity. The spinster Mew sisters descend into genteel poverty, their mother on an invalid's sofa, Anne, the painter, in a menial job. But Charlotte, the poet, will find immortality, and unexpected love. Her path will require that she keep secrets and make sacrifices that may be too much even for Charlotte's determined spirit.

For something entirely different, we have the graphic novel Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman from Graphic Universe.

In this rollicking queer western adventure, acclaimed cartoonist Melanie Gillman (Stonewall Award Honor Book As the Crow Flies) puts readers in the saddle alongside Flor and Grace, a Latinx outlaw and a trans runaway, as they team up to thwart a Confederate plot in the New Mexico Territory. When Flor--also known as the notorious Ghost Hawk--robs the stagecoach that Grace has used to escape her Georgia home, the first thing on her mind is ransom. But when the two get to talking about Flor's plan to crash a Confederate gala and steal some crucial documents, Grace convinces Flor to let her join the heist.

The September books finish up with some later 20th century titles that teeter on the edge of what I’d consider historical fiction in terms of era.

The first is Somewhere Along the Way by Kathleen Knowles from Bold Strokes Books.

In the summer of 1980, Maxine Cooper moves from the Midwest to San Francisco with her gay best friend, Chris, where she hopes to find love and community. But gay life in a big city is much more complicated than either of them ever expected. Life becomes a constant party, and Max slides deep into alcohol and drugs. She and Chris become estranged, and when he contracts AIDS, Max doesn’t know how to bridge the gap between them.  Shattered by Chris’s death, Max must decide how she is going to live her life. Can she forgive herself for abandoning him, or will her guilt lead her down a path that guarantees destruction?

And our last book for this month’s list is from a mainstream publisher: Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis from Knopf.

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped, and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena--five cantoras, women who "sing"--somehow, miraculously, find on another and then, together, discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next thirty-five years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home, as they return, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, with lovers in tow, or alone. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested--by their families, lovers, society, and one another--as they fight to live authentic lives. A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.

What Am I Reading?

Given how busy my month was, you might expect that there isn’t much on my personal reading list. I finished Penny Mickelbury’s Two Wings to Fly Away and have binge-watched the entire first season of Gentleman Jack, as noted above. I’m currently in the middle of Claire O’Dell’s near-future thriller The Hound of Justice, the sequel to A Study in Honor, both of them re-envisioning Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as queer black women.

Sappho’s Soapbox

Although I’ve suspended the Ask Sappho segment as a regular feature, I may revive it from time to time as Sappho’s Soapbox for brief editorial items. And this month I’d like to borrow her soapbox to talk about the myth that mainstream readers aren’t interested in stories about queer women. Or at least, that it’s a myth in the genre I’m most familiar with: science fiction and fantasy.

Earlier this month in The Guardian there was a book column on the highly specialized subgenre of time-travel stories about lesbians. In the past 12 months we gotten The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas, The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz, Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides by Kate Heartfield, and of course the column is a sneaky way for its author, Amal El-Mohtar to mention the new release she wrote with Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War.

Mainstream historical fantasies featuring queer women that I’ve enjoyed in the last year or so include Theodora Goss’s European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, Zen Cho’s The True Queen, Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper, K Arsenault Rivera’s trilogy starting with The Tiger’s Daughter, Ellen Klages’ Passing Strange, Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, Katharine Duckett’s Miranda in Milan, and no doubt others that have gotten lost in my reading lists.

I’m focusing on mainstream books not to make any distinction of quality, but to point out that there is an eager market out there for stories with queer women. A market that is sufficient to induce major publishers to make an investment in them.

If you are writing stories like this, there are readers out there hungry for the sort of thing you’re writing. But here’s the catch: the books that will compete for those eyeballs set an ambitious standard. The writing is top-notch. The plots are tight and intricate. And the casts include an expansive range of identities that go beyond the simple category of lesbian fiction. Books that reach out to embrace a universe of readers, all of whom want to be recognized as existing in the world of the books they read, even when they aren’t the protagonists.

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s no mainstream market for stories that feature lesbians. But that market is looking for stories that reach beyond stock tropes and safely familiar plotlines. The brass ring will go to those who reach for it.

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Show Notes

Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.

In this episode we talk about:

• My trip to Ireland and Worldcon
• Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
  • Articles from The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation
  • Classics in the field of the history of gender and sexuality (specific titles TBD)
• Announcing this month’s author guest, Olivia Waite
• New and forthcoming fiction
  • Under the Microscope by Kim Finney (Cygneture Books)
  • Worlds Apart by Stein Willard
  • Beggar’s Flip by Benny Lawrence (Bedazzled Ink)
  • Les révolutions d'Olympe by Le Jardin de Sappho
  • Outlaw: A Lesbian Retelling of Robyn Hood by Niamh Murphy
  • Prairie Hearts by JB Marsden (Sapphire Books)
  • Bloomsbury’s Late Rose: A Novel by Pen Pearson (Chickadee Prince Books)
  • Stage Dreams by Melanie Gilman (Graphic Universe)
  • Somewhere Along the Way by Kathleen Knowles (Bold Strokes Books)
  • Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis (Knopf)
• Sappho’s Soapbox: Mainstream historic fantasy featuring queer women
  • “Why are There So Many Books about Time-Traveling Lesbians?” by Amal El-Mohtar
• Call for submissions for the 2020 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
• Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
• RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
• Twitter: @LesbianMotif
• Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
• The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon

Links to Heather Online

• Website: http://alpennia.com
• Email: Heather Rose Jones
• Twitter: @heatherosejones
• Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)

Once again, this article takes women’s lives and makes them all about the men. It feels like there are entirely too many articles in this collection that fall in that category. The genre of “widow portraits” in early modern England are a testament to men’s anxiety that maybe--just-maybe--their wives aren’t quite as in love with them as they seem.

The character trope of the "personal assistant" -- the person in a subordinate position whose job consists of providing support and devalued labor for a character with more pubic agency -- is tricky to portray. Particularly in an intensely class-stratified culture when that role is not typically freely chosen from among other options. Given her family's background and her work history, Roz sees the position of lady's maid as a desirable goal, but that isn't meant to erase the ways in which being a household servant are exploitative, exhausting, and often degrading.

And yet...in fiction, there's an undeniable appeal to the special bond and experience that comes when your job is to go all out to make someone else's life easy and beautiful and enjoyable, to be the invisible hands that turn out someone else's life as a work of art. There have been occasions in my life when--on a temporary and limited basis--I had roles like that, whether in supporting a manager on a project, or within historic re-enactment events play-acting the role of servant in a context where I was also providing real, logistical support to my fictive employer. I've felt that appeal--with the knowledge that it was within a limited scope and the person I was "doing for" had no power over my life as a whole.

Further, one can be in a subordinate, supportive role and have the agency to perform that role as a piece of artistry, or begrudgingly as a chore to be endured.

Roz is torn between aspiring to perfect the skills of a real lady's maid--to become an artist with her maisetra's life as the medium of her art--and the more concrete and enduring art of the dressmaker. Neither of them is a certain path. Both are skill sets she has yet to master in full. But in this scene I've tried to show some of the appeal of the former.

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Tiporsel House was still all upside down when Maisetra Iulien’s father arrived. I’d almost forgotten about that. Futures seemed so far away. I know it doesn’t belong to me to say so, but he was a sour-looking man, all puffed up with his own importance. I didn’t like the way he talked to the maisetra, like she was a child. I could tell Maisetra Iulien loved him the same as I loved my father, but I could tell why she might have wanted a look at the wider world, without him standing over her.

Dressing became a chore every morning and evening. It wasn’t that Maisetra Iulien had so many gowns to choose from, but she’d try them all on and toss them on the bed and try again until I was ready to send her down to breakfast in her chemise.

“This one makes me look too young! He’ll think I’m a child who shouldn’t be allowed out of the house. That one makes me look too sophisticated. Look at the décolletage. It’s not my fault my bosom has grown this year.”

“Then wear it with your fichu,” I suggested. “And you should put the ear-bobs away until evening. I know girls wear them for everyday in the city, but Mefro Dominique says it isn’t done in the country, and that’s what your father will expect.”

I’d been asking Mefro Dominique a lot of questions about what was and wasn’t done since Maistir Fulpi had come. I could have asked Maitelen, but she was so worn down from looking after the baroness. Maisetra Iulien was in such a dither, I needed somebody’s word that weighed more than mine to keep her from wearing anything foolish.

Maisetra Iulien looked up and said, “What would I do without you, Roz?”

“I’m sure you’d do well enough,” I replied as I put the earrings back in her jewelry box. “Now let me do up your hair. You’ll feel better once this business is settled.”

I’d learned more hairdressing and was proud of how I turned her out, but it was a very long week.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 121 (previously 37e) - “The Black Handkerchief” by Gwen C. Katz - transcript

(Originally aired 2019/08/31 - listen here)

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One thing I look for when choosing stories for the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast’s fiction series is stories where the fact of women loving each other is taken for granted and situated among all the other conflicts, joys, and adventures of life. Such stories can involve drama, tragedy, and danger without those things being focused around the characters’ sexuality.

Gwen C. Katz has given us a story of those dangers set in Russia on the cusp of revolution. She describes herself as “a writer, artist, and Nazi-puncher who lives in Altadena, CA with her husband and a revolving door of transient animals.” Her first novel, Among the Red Stars, was a 2017 Junior Library Guild Selection. She’s on Twitter as @gwenckatz and her website is gwenckatz.com.

 

Our narrator today is Lara Zielinsky. Lara is a published author of lesbian and bisexual women’s fiction. An avid reader, she devours anything related to words, women, and love. She’s on Twitter as @lczielinsky and on facebook as AuthorLaraZielinsky.

 

This recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License. You may share it in the full original form but you may not sell it, you may not transcribe it, and you may not adapt it.

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The Black Handkerchief

by

Gwen C. Katz

St. Petersburg, 1881

I’m standing on Nevsky Prospekt, holding a black handkerchief.

The passersby give me a respectful distance. They think I’m in mourning. In a sense, they’re not far off. But I was wearing black long before today.

Natalya didn’t understand it. She wore gowns of pink or yellow, airy with lace. Fairylike.

Fairylike was how she had appeared when I first met her. I was just eight and much intimidated by the old housekeeper who opened the door of that fine city house. She frowned at the letter I handed her as though she’d never heard anything about a poor relation coming to live with them, and I feared I’d be sent back to toil and starvation and birchbark shoes.

Then Natalya appeared on the stairs. When she saw me, she put both hands on her cheeks and squealed.

“Lera!” she cried, rushing forward and taking me by the hands. “You’re finally here! We’ll have such fun together!”

And just like that, we were best friends. I never had any say in the matter.

One of Natalya’s many books was about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole. That was how I felt at Natalya’s house. The rooms seemed endless, each one filled with new curiosities. On the parlor wall there hung an ink drawing of a crane perched on a branch. It was all drawn with a few quick strokes, yet there was incredible life in the bird’s figure. Natalya’s father had brought the picture from Japan, along with two heavy wooden chests, which I imagined were full of treasures until I discovered, to my disappointment, that they contained spare bedspreads. Natalya had her own room and a whole closet filled with dresses. Instead of sleeping on a stove, she had a big four-poster draped with damask curtains.

The rules of society people were strange and inscrutable. We might walk in the garden, but it was unseemly to run. Our pinafores had to remain spotless. Maintain good posture and be seen and not heard when adults were present. At mealtimes there were strict table manners. If my elbow strayed onto the table or I reached for my fork before the adults did, I was in for a rap on the knuckles. We saw Natalya’s parents only at mealtimes. If we had a splinter or a skinned knee, the old housekeeper was the one we ran to.

I would have been lost without Natalya. For years we did everything together. She taught me my letters out of her books of fairy tales. We drank tea out of little round cups with dragonflies painted on them; there were no tea glasses at the Tanaka house. And at night, we slept side by side in the four-poster bed.

There was always another party, Maslenitsa and New Year’s and Natalya’s birthday blending together in a swirl of colors. It was before one of these occasions that Natalya’s father called us into the parlor and laid out for her a rainbow of bolts of imported cloth: yellow with flowers, green with branches, blue with little birds.

“Pick one,” he told Natalya.

Natalya made a great show of deliberating before settling on a bolt of peach-colored silk. Then she said, “You pick one too, Lera.”

She caught me by surprise. Mindful of my lesser position and unable to picture myself in any of those lavish colors, I picked a bolt of plain black wool.

Natalya frowned. “You don’t understand. You can pick any of them.”

“I pick this one,” I said.

At the party, Natalya was radiant in her dress. I was invisible in mine. I decided I preferred it that way. I’ve been wearing black ever since.

Everything was simple in those years. We studied together, played tricks on the old housekeeper, begged Natalya’s father for new hats and gloves. Our futures were clear. She would marry a fine young gentleman, and she would see to it that her father gave me a modest dowry and set me up with a respectable clerk or shopkeeper. And we would be best friends forever.

What happened?

Was it the night of the storm?

Natalya pretended to be afraid of things because it got her the sort of attention she liked. Boys gallantly trapped spiders for her and climbed ladders to fetch things off high shelves and she looked up at them through her lashes and smiled and everyone thought she was a darling and a dear. In reality she wasn’t afraid of anything.

Which was how I knew, when I woke up and found her curled up and shaking, that it wasn’t the lightning.

It was the night of her fourteenth birthday and the weather had been wretched all day. There had been a party, of course, and a crowd of family friends told Natalya how grown up she looked in her new blue gown. Her father was not among them. He was away finishing a business deal. He’d sent a telegram saying that he would be back in time for her birthday. The day came. He did not.

And now Natalya was awake and crying.

“Natalya,” I whispered, touching her shoulder. “What is it?”

“He said he’d be here,” she said, her voice wavering. “He promised!”

I wanted to say so many things. I wanted to tell her how my parents had cut me out of their lives like I was nothing but an inconvenience. But everything I could think to say seemed wrong. Instead I wrapped my skinny arms around her. She snuggled close against me. Something stirred in me that I’d never felt before.

My hands strayed. So did hers. And the night went in an entirely unexpected direction.

From then on, scarcely would we turn off the gaslight at night before we rushed into each other’s arms. We were half nervous, half afraid of being caught, yet we couldn’t hold back our desire. In the mornings we emerged flushed and bright-eyed, certain her parents would notice. But to them, we were still little girls.

No, that wasn’t the moment everything changed. I remember now. It was the article.

The Tanakas were fashionable people, and at the time the fashionable thing was to subscribe to all the newspapers and know the latest developments in all the political debates. Natalya and I implicitly knew these papers were not for us—girls had far too many concerns of their own to worry about something so frivolous as politics—but the newspapers were always lying around. On one endless winter night, I began flipping through one and my eye fell on an article titled “The Workers and the Sphinx.”

I began to read, thinking it had something to do with mythology. What I encountered was something altogether different.

“The Council of Action declares that, so long as the working masses are plunged in the misery of economic servitude, all so-called reforms and even so-called political revolutions of a seeming proletarian character, will avail them nothing,” I read to Natalya. “They are condemned to live in a forced ignorance and to accept a slave status by the economic Organization of wage-slave society.”

Natalya laughed. “What a load of nonsense! This isn’t the Dark Ages. We have all kinds of reforms. The Tsar abolished serfdom. Workers and peasants have everything now.”

“I don’t have everything,” I said indignantly, remembering how my feet had cracked and bled on cold nights.

“You do now,” said Natalya lightly, poking her embroidery needle through the piece of silk she was working on.

I closed the paper. But I didn’t forget the words.

Natalya was sixteen then, and beginning to attract gentlemen callers. None were interested in the poor relation who wore black dresses. So, while our nights were occupied with each other, I found more and more time to myself during the day. I read the newspapers. I began to grasp the ins and outs of the different political arguments. One day, there was a notice about a meeting. I made up an excuse about going to buy ribbons and went out.

The meeting was in a dingy apartment over a cobbler’s shop. Journalists and university students and other intelligentsia in shabby winter coats stuffed the small room, the ears of their hats pulled down low, for it was November and the apartment had only a small oil-drum stove in the corner. There was a name for these sorts; I’d learned it from the newspapers. Narodniks. The people’s people. They styled themselves reformists, but they were far from respectable.

I slid into the corner and tried to make myself as small as possible.

A young man with a wild, spiky hair and the beginnings of a peach-fuzz beard stepped up to the front of the room. His eyes were like live coals. At the sight of him, the hubbub of voices died down.

“Brothers,” said the young Narodnik, “We are all here because we recognize the dangers of the state. The state means nothing but domination and exploitation.”

Murmurs of approval from the crowd.

“Some say that the ruling class deserves to rule,” he continued. “They say that the Tsar is divinely ordained because he is the wisest, most benevolent, and most suited to rule. This is nonsense. Power corrupts. Nothing is more dangerous for man’s private morality than the habit of command. Even the best man, the most intelligent, disinterested, generous, pure, will infallibly and always be spoiled at this trade. They will inevitably come to believe in their own superiority and despise the masses. No man can be trusted to rule—least of all the one who believes God has chosen him.”

I left with my heart pounding. Politics was supposed to be a game to entertain idle noblemen. But the look in the young Narodnik’s eyes convinced me that this wasn’t a theoretical discussion.

Back at the house, Natalya sat in the window, tossing her hair as she watched a departing cab. “What a ridiculous fop! You should have seen him. All he cared about was the cut of his jacket. Where were you, by the way? The housekeeper said something about buying ribbons.”

I realized I had returned empty-handed.

“They didn’t have anything,” I said. She didn’t enquire further.

I kept going to the meetings. The Narodniks lent me books and pamphlets. Herzen. Chernyshevsky. Marx. I found myself tumbling down a whole new rabbit hole. Across the river, the Peter and Paul fortress stood stark and gray, a symbol of what became of dissenters. Yet the more the Tsar’s secret police cracked down, the faster the ideas spread.

This newfound knowledge led to my first fight with Natalya.

Like every young lady of quality, Natalya did charity work. I went with her on one visit to bring food to a family of poor peasants sick with typhus. Natalya sat by the stove and spooned soup into the youngest child’s mouth, her green silk dress spread out on the dirt floor.

“I’m so worried about her,” she said on the drive back. “She’s as thin as a twig. We’ll bring more food on Sunday. Every week until they’re all well.”

The earnestness in her black eyes was real. But all of a sudden, the whole enterprise seemed too frivolous and self-indulgent.

“They’re only sick because they live in that filthy izba!” I said. “It’s in a swamp filled with bugs and vermin. Of course the children got sick. But I don’t see you doing anything about that.”

“Well, maybe the Ladies’ Charitable Society will see to that next,” said Natalya.

“It’s one building. One family. What difference does it make? There are millions of families like this in Russia!”

“I’m just one person. I can’t help everyone,” said Natalya, a twinge of annoyance in her voice.

“They shouldn’t need your help. They own nothing—not the house they live in, not the land they work. If they didn’t have to pay half their harvest to their landlord in rent, maybe they’d be able to feed their own children instead of relying on charity baskets!”

Natalya gave me a broad smile. “Lera,” she said, “The peasants are simple people. They enjoy a simple life. All that responsibility would be too much for them.”

“Is that what you think of me?” I demanded.

That would have been a great moment to storm out of the cab, but we weren’t home yet, so I had to sit there across from her, fixing her with a stern glare to let her know that I was very cross. This was hard to keep up. Eventually Natalya’s mouth twitched and she burst into laughter at my comical expression, and then she pointed out something funny that was happening on the other side of the street, and the fight blew over like a cloud in the summer sky.

But I didn’t forget what she said about the peasants. The memory nibbled at the back of my mind during the next meeting. The young Narodnik was speaking again.

“They break their backs in the fields, and where does the money go? To the gentry so their wives can have gold brooches and silk ribbons on their hats. There is no creature in the world as silly and vapid as a woman of fine birth. All they know how to do is spend money they never lifted a finger to earn.”

I was terrified of drawing attention to myself, but his words needled me until I couldn’t stand it. I put my hand up and, before I knew what I was doing, I called out, “What do you expect them to do, go out and get jobs in the civil service?”

Instant uproar. Many people laughed at the idea of women in the civil service, while several pointed out that they could hardly do a worse job.

The young Narodnik tried to quiet the room. “Women would be ill equipped to serve in the civil service, and anyway, they wouldn’t want to. They have no education.”

“And how is that our fault?” I demanded. “If women are silly and vapid, it’s because society made us that way. We have hardly any schools and they only teach dancing and drawing. We aren’t allowed in the universities. Why are we to blame for the opportunities we’ve been denied?”
     “Don’t blame society because your sex has a different temperament,” said the young Narodnik.

“That’s the same thing the nobility says about the peasants!”

Half the crowd jumped to their feet and was accosted by the other half. There was no hope of calling the room to order.

Afterwards, as I elbowed my way out through the press of coats, the young Narodnik sidled up to me.

“You’re a sharp one,” he said. “You have clever ideas. Wrong, as it happens, but clever.”

“‘My apologies, my words were unforgivably rude and ignorant’ is more what I was hoping you’d say,” I replied, raising my chin and doing my best imitation of Natalya dealing with an unwanted suitor.

He shrugged. “Rude is a social construct. The words are either true or they’re false. If you want to claim they’re false, prove it.”

I shouldn’t have let him goad me, but I couldn’t bear to let him throw my own inaction back in my face. So I asked, “What do you want?”

“Deliver this,” he said, slipping a thin sealed letter into my hand. “Leave it at the green house on Gorsky Street across from the tea shop.”

“So I’m your delivery girl now,” I said.

“No,” said the young Narodnik. “You might become our delivery girl if we decide we trust you.”

I glared at him, but took the letter.

Fears flitted in my mind as I slipped the letter under the door of the green house. I half expected the Tsar’s secret police to spring out of the bushes and arrest me. But nothing happened. When I reported back to the young Narodnik, he didn’t thank me. He gave me another letter.

In time, he entrusted me with more. Bribing the gendarmes. Typesetting newspapers. I began to see the contours of the Narodnik movement.

One of Natalya’s lesson books had a cut-away drawing of the earth. From the surface of the earth, the stone crust was all you could see. But when you sliced it open, you found that the crust was only a thin layer. Underneath it was the mantle and, beneath that, the core, where the heat was so great that iron was a liquid.

Russian society was like that. The gentry rose above all like lofty mountains, seeing and being seen. Their wealth and leisure was built on Russia’s scant, threadbare middleclass—poor clerks, teachers, and secretaries, shopkeepers and lesser bureaucrats. And below them were the endless millions of peasants. They toiled away, scarcely seen, but if pressure built, they could explode like magma pouring from the earth.

I tried to talk to Natalya about these things, but it was like catching a butterfly in my bare hands. She would agree with everything, yet at the end, when I proposed a reform, she would laugh and tell me not to be ridiculous. Education for the peasants? How would those poor children tramp miles through the countryside to go to school, and who would do their chores in the meantime? Communal land ownership? You can call it communal, but someone has to administer it, and aren’t the gentry best suited for that? A parliament, like the one in Britain? Who on Earth could think it was a good idea to put the empire’s affairs into the hands of a room full of bickering Russian politicians?

Years passed. Natalya’s debutante ball came in a swirl of colors and music. Pigtails and high-collared girls’ dresses gave way to bare shoulders and updos. But I kept wearing my black dresses. And I kept attending the Narodnik meetings.

And then one day, chaos. The young Narodnik was giving a speech about capital when the door burst open and gendarmes began pouring in. The crowd became a herd of panicked animals. A burly man knocked me to the ground as he pushed past. Someone stepped on my hand. I struggled to regain my footing before I was trampled.

Gendarmes were everywhere, seizing people, pushing them to the ground, against walls, hitting them with batons. Men or women, ringleaders or bystanders, it made no difference. I saw the young worker with his hands pinned behind his back. A gendarme looked straight at me, but collared the man next to me. And then the chief of police was shouting, “All right, show’s over! Everyone go home!”

I stumbled back to Natalya’s house, unsure how I had escaped.

When the newspaper arrived the next morning and Natalya read the headline, her eyes immediately flicked onto me.

“‘193 Anti-State Agitators Arrested. Propagandists Spread Unrest, Foment Rebellion Among the Peasants.’ Is this what you've been up to?” she demanded.

“It was just talking,” I said. “No one should get thrown in prison for just talking.”

“Lera,” said Natalya quietly, “What you’re doing…it’s dangerous. You think I don’t understand because I only care about dresses and dances and young men. But revolutions…they don’t help people. The peasants, the workers, everyone you say you care about: When the Tsar sends out the Cossacks, they’re the ones who get hurt.”

“Would you rather let the common people suffer?” I asked.

“They always suffer, Lera. No matter who’s in charge. That’s just how it is.”

I had no intention of accepting things just as they were.

I joined the throng as they crowded the snowy square in front of the courthouse for the trial of the one hundred ninety three. Their breath made clouds in the air. The gendarmes shoved people aside and clubbed them with rifles to clear a path for the prisoners. The young Narodnik was thin and ragged, but defiance still shone in his eyes as they led him forward.

I was too far back to hear anything, but I felt the anger and unrest that swept through the crowd when the sentences were read out. Eventually the news trickled back to me: Five years’ hard labor in Siberia. For one speech.

The crowd roiled like a kettle. Someone threw a handful of icy mud at a gendarme. It splattered across his brass buttons. I found a rock in my hand. I threw it, unplanned and unaimed, at the nearest gendarme. It flew past his head. Now more rocks were in the air. So many voices were shouting that their words were unintelligible.

Hoofbeats. The Cossacks burst into the square in their sashes and black hats, sabers flashing in the winter sun. The crowd fled in all directions.

We regrouped a week later, a ragtag and restless group. Nearly everyone had scrapes and bruises, and a few wore bandages on their saber cuts. I was stunned when someone turned to me and asked, “Well, Lera, what do we do now?”
     I looked around, expecting someone else to jump in with the answer, but there was no one but me. Somehow I had become the leader of the Narodniks.

Now I was the one giving instructions to fresh-faced young revolutionaries with more passion than understanding. Count how many gendarmes are on Nevsky Prospekt. Watch the palace and note when the Tsar comes and goes. Go to this construction site and pick up a suitcase full of dynamite from a sympathetic foreman. I had a map of the palace with a red X marking the Tsar’s private dining room the day I found Natalya going through my purse.

“What are you doing?” I screamed, too instinctively angry to think about how guilty my reaction made me sound. “Those are my things!”

“Lera,” asked Natalya, “What’s this?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I snapped.

“What happened to you, Lera? When did you become like this?”

“The world made me like this. Nothing will ever change until we take matters into our own hands. But you don’t care, because you don’t care about what the people are going through!”

“Maybe I care about the people in that room!” said Natalya, her cheeks coloring. “I don’t think you care about the peasants at all. You just want to blow something up!”

I started back as though she had slapped me.

For a long moment, we stared at each other.

“Lera,” said Natalya quietly, “Lera, I’m sorry. I know you care. You’ve always cared. About everything. But this…I just don’t understand.”

She slipped her arms around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. I shivered at her touch.

“I wish I could explain,” I said. “I don’t want this to come between us. But it’s something I have to do.”

“I know,” she said.

I turned and raised my face to hers. Her lips were like a warm fire in the winter snow. We sought each other with furtive urgency, clinging to the familiarity of each other’s embrace.

Natalya’s door banged open. Her father’s shadow fell over us. We sprang apart, struggling to reassemble our tangle of frocks and chemises.

He didn’t speak, just strode forward and grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me out of the room. I stumbled along, trying to cover myself with my unbuttoned dress. Behind me, Natalya cried, “Father, wait! Where are you taking her?”

He threw me into the street. I landed in the mud.

I never set foot in the Tanaka house again.

I stand now on Nevsky Prospekt, scarcely two blocks away from the Tanaka house, yet I might as well be in a different universe.

I flick my eyes from one side of the street to the other. A young man in a gray coat meets my eyes, black powder on his fingers. A student with glasses looks up from his paper. There are four men altogether, waiting for my signal. The dining room plan failed. The bomb went off too soon. But this plan will not fail.

I wondered if I would be afraid when this day came, but I’m calm. The hand holding the handkerchief does not tremble.

A flash of pink flits through the street like a tropical bird. Natalya. The feathers on her hat flutter in the wind. My heart catches at the sight of her. She still has the same effect on me as when we were young.

She turns and sees me. Our eyes meet. At a glance, she knows everything. She could have the gendarmes on us in an instant.

She raises a hand in a white lace glove and gestures to the left. The Tsar is going down a different street.

When I opened my apartment door a month ago and found Natalya there, I just stood there and stared at her foolishly, half convinced it was a dream. Only when she rushed into my arms did her familiar warmth convince me that this was really happening. Delicately, as though I feared she might vanish, I returned her embrace.

“How did you find me?” I managed to stammer.

“I looked everywhere. I was sure something terrible had happened to you. My father throwing you out just like that…I had no idea he would do something so cruel. I searched the tenements, the alleys. And everywhere I went, every miserable creature I saw, I imagined it was you.” She drew away from me and looked me in the eye. “All these years I could look past the suffering because it was abstract, even when it was right in front of me. But when I thought it was happening to someone I cared about, that changed everything. I was wrong, Lera. I’m ready to act.”

I clutched her to me, letting my tears stain her hair.

Quietly we slip from Nevsky Prospekt onto the side street. The four young men find their spots. Together Natalya and I take our place at a vantage point at the end of the street where we can see everything, side by side.

We might not survive the aftermath. None of us. If we succeed, the hammer will fall. We’ll be hunted. And yet I’m filled with a sense of calm and clarity. We’re doing what no one else would do. We’re giving Russia a future.

A procession of brightly dressed riders emerge around the corner at the north end of the street, their plumes nodding proudly. Behind them comes a gilt carriage decorated with a two-headed eagle. The man in that carriage has never suffered a day in his life. He’s about to learn that being chosen by God can’t protect him from the people.

There’s an imperceptible motion on the street as the four men reach for the bombs in their pockets. As the carriage approaches, I look at Natalya. She nods.

I drop the handkerchief.

---

Show Notes

The third story in our 2019 fiction series.

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