Kirill came up with the idea of the Metro of the Dead on his own.
Some buildings in town that did not seem remarkable—an abandoned house, a transformer box, a grass-covered mound of a bomb shelter—gave him inexplicable shivers. He thought they were entrances to the other world, connected by dark underground tunnels.
He must have heard rumors about the secret Metro lines that led from the Kremlin to Stalin’s dacha, Blizhnyaya; heard whispers of the military bunkers beneath Moscow.
Those rumors turned into the image of a different, upside-down Moscow that could be reached through the Lenin Mausoleum or other inconspicuous stations—a Moscow in which corpses rode eternally in ghostly trains along ghostly rails, penetrating stone, and the trains were very old, with cushioned seats and yellow paneling, the ones that were living out their days on the old lines.
Who the dead were and why they were doomed to travel underground, unlike his great-grandmother who slept honestly in her grave, Kirill did not know. He rarely thought about the Metro of the Dead: only when he saw an old building that might serve as an entrance, or one of the Stalinist high-rises near Krasnye Vorota, where there was an ordinary Metro exit on the first floor—and he imagined the same pyramid-shaped high-rises, inverted and mirroring the ones above ground, where the people who had once lived upstairs, now existed below; buildings with stores where they sold dead waxen food, with windows open to the bowels of the earth.
Kirill thought the crematorium at Donskoy to be the second main entrance, after the Lenin Mausoleum, to the Metro of the Dead. People milled about, and a large yellow bus, not a special one from the morgue but an ordinary passenger one, which some relative had managed to “borrow,” was backing away. The crowd was made up primarily of men, in clumsy suits that sat heavily on their bodies, graying, balding, grim and flustered, not knowing where to stand or how to behave, as if there were no instruction manuals for such occasions and they felt lost.
Swallowing their curses, six men with black armbands pulled a coffin through the passenger doors: a scarlet woven ribbon caught on the door and fell off. A worker in blue overalls unlocked the doors of the auditorium.
The mourners straggled in, and with them Grandmother Lina. She slipped into the line and laid the bouquet of carnations at the foot of the coffin. Kirill did not understand what was happening, but her hand pressed his shoulder: stand and watch. Their bouquet along with the other flowers was covered, and the coffin rode down small, toylike tracks, bouncing on the bumps, into the crematorium, past all the doors, past the steel curtain, into the oven, into death.
Later they strolled along the cemetery paths. Kirill, who was accustomed to his grandmother being always a grandmother, soft and velvety, the velvet cushion for her needles, the glittering knitting needles making a gentle wool scarf, the flannel cloth with sewn edges to clean her tortoiseshell glasses, suddenly realized that her habitual elderliness was in part for show, that there was another person inside her, an old person he did not know, as hard as ivory, with the elderliness of stubborn things that had survived wars, evacuations, and deprivation not because people took care of them, saved them, carried them away in suitcases and bundles, but because they were inherently able to survive whatever their owners did; they had the ability to resist dispersion and not get lost in resistance.
Grandmother walked along the paths as if in conversation with the cemetery, all the graves, trees, falling leaves, the walls of the columbarium, the church, the houses beyond the cemetery fence, the monastery towers, the noisy roads, aloof and leading out of town to the thinning autumn forests where winter’s deadly dream is born, the rivers growing quieter and shallower.
Kirill sensed that her words were seeking someone whose ghost might flitter here in the cemetery—and in a hundred other places; he strode silently, setting aside all his questions, trying to guess who had been given the carnations, already burned and adding nothing to the smoke rising above the crematorium.
Great-Grandfather Arseny. The one who wasn’t in a grave at the German Cemetery. It would have made sense for him to be there, but he was not; Kirill knew only that he had been a military doctor and had died at the front. His grave was lost in the desperate chaos of retreat, and then, when three years later the Red Army, attacking the West, reached those areas, there was no one to remember who was buried where; all the soldiers and officers of the early drafts were killed outright; they were all in the ground.
Kirill thought that his grandmother was burning an offering to her missing father with the carnations, as if part of his soul was still in the air and could sense the bitter smoke. What amazed him later, as an adult, was that he had not seen anything strange in her action. His life had prepared him to invent unlikely but still viable explanations, connected to reality, for the strange behavior of adults, their inexplicable rituals, their omissions about the past.
Year after year Kirill went to the German Cemetery with his grandmother, year after year—until he was a teenager—he felt the allure of the stone book on the stone altar.
Grandmother Lina was aging and losing energy. Now he watered the flowers, raked up the leaves, while she sat on the small cast-iron bench, made just for one person to sit and grieve for a beloved. Sometimes his grandmother asked him to clean both limestone monuments—when spiders spread their webs on them or when melting snow left dirty smears.
Kirill came, on his grandmother’s instructions, to tend the orphaned monuments that had lost their living people. And Grandmother stayed home more and more and he went to the cemetery alone.
Sometimes Kirill didn’t even go to the family plots, he simply roamed around, peering into the faces of statues, laughing at vainglorious epitaphs, stern photos in oval frames—they were equally suited for honor roll plaques and for gravestones. The residents here no longer had the habits of Soviet people, they had left the Party, did not participate in parades on May Day and November 7, did not read the reports on harvests in Pravda, did not listen to the speeches of the Secretary General—and Kirill relaxed with them, as if with pleasant and easygoing neighbors.
The German Cemetery became part of his inner landscape: he recalled its trees, avenues, monuments when he looked for images of contemplation on destiny, history, generational connections, love, family, alienation, and loneliness.
Kirill studied the cemetery’s history—written and unwritten. One of the vaults had a mosaic: Charon rowing a soul to a steep island covered with cypresses. The cemetery seemed to be such an island, which even the Soviet regime could do nothing about. After the putsch, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he unconsciously waited for something like a return, a resurrection of the dead—for it was the end of the afterlife reign of the pharaoh who lay in the granite pyramid in Red Square.
One day that fall Grandmother Lina told Kirill that they had to go to the cemetery the next day to clear leaves. The trees were not completely bare yet, but Kirill paid no attention to that detail: she had been feeling poorly, and if she suggested going that meant she was getting better.
In the morning they took their usual route, but at the entrance, Grandmother led him to the flower store, which shared a space with the granite workshop. Kirill’s family never brought flowers to graves, even on memorial days. They occasionally brought flowers from the dacha, a bouquet of meadow flowers, daisies, buttercups, bellflowers, and salvia wrapped in a wet rag. This homely bouquet stressed that our dead needed nothing, that they were modest in their requests to the living, they did not expect roses, hyacinths, or chrysanthemums—just the insignificant flowers of the fields where they had liked to walk, just the meek, scrawny blooms that had not known care or love, who faded just as they had grown, without individual value and beauty.
Kirill and his grandmother went into the store. Carnations, tulips, and roses of several varieties. One kind stood out, deep red, large and fresh, with large hooked thorns on the stems, as if they had not come from a garden in paradise, where plants live in concord, but from a hellish one
, where flowers compete with one another, rip other flowers’ leaves with their thorns, sink a sharp thorn into the heart of an unborn bud.
To his amazement, she chose those roses, and she bought the entire bouquet, thirty or forty stems. She didn’t like roses, and if someone brought them for her, she put the vase far away on the windowsill. She loved violet irises, she embroidered them on pillow cases, transporting them from a long-ago happy summer of memory.
The seller tied the roses with string. They moved through the German gates, their pointed towers covered in silver scales, the simple, foreign cross, lacking the lower crossbeam of the Orthodox cross, the grim gates of red brick.
There had been a storm the night before. The cemetery, a center of tranquility, was transformed. Gaps showed in the crowns of trees, broken trunks lay among the graves—the wind was so fierce it did not topple trees gradually by swaying them but broke them in one blow. The marker railings were bent, metallic contorted grimaces, and gravestones were knocked down by heavy branches. The cemetery workers were sawing an overturned old poplar; its roots had pulled out a rotted coffin and the bones of the dead.
Kirill had never worried that something could happen to the graves. The apartment could be flooded by the upstairs neighbors, the dacha might get struck by lightning. But the darkened marble gravestone, the limestone altar with the book—all events were in the past here, and there was only the eternal aging of stone. He felt that the tempest was only an echo of a posthumous storm; for a day, an hour, the cemetery had come to life.
They passed the chapel, covered in graffiti with superstitious promises of mutual love and requests for success on exams; past the chain-encircled grave of the prison doctor, a German named Haas, past the arrow that read NORMANDY-NEMAN, pointing to the mass grave of French pilots of a fighter squadron that battled the Luftwaffe, buried either by accident or with irony next to a stele surrounded by cannon barrels, the burial place for Napoleon’s soldiers who died in Moscow hospitals.
Someone must have been burning fallen branches nearby, but to Kirill it was the smoke of history, the smoke of Moscow burning in 1812, after which a new city was built, the city where people came in the nineteenth century to start a business or to work, the people who were buried in the cemetery: generals with stone medals on their chests; chocolate manufacturing kings buried under black diabase headstones; engineers, doctors, traders, and priests who served in churches of other denominations.
In his Soviet childhood he had seen the posthumous traces of their existence, the futile symbols of a distant past. Now he unexpectedly felt that the cemetery was alive. In the cursive fonts of German, French, English, and a dozen other languages, the dead were stating, they were born in a town that may no longer exist, or belongs to another country, and the house is gone, bombed by a Junker or a Boeing B-17, razed by a ship’s artillery, destroyed by howitzers or Katyusha rockets, the church archives with birth records burned down, and the last relatives emigrated across the ocean, died in Auschwitz, were deported to Siberia—the dead were hidden here, in a randomly saved cemetery, as in an ark, and now gave witness before God about themselves, their perished descendants, scattered around the world, deprived of tombstones, unable to join their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers in the family vault.
The orphaned dead. Kirill saw the astounding, outrageous orphanhood of the dead, realizing how many abandoned graves there were here, how many stones bore a date inscribed before the revolution—and then nothing, a break, an abyss ... He remembered the moss-covered gravestone on their plot belonging to no one—whose was it, whose name was carved on it?
Grandmother Lina walked slowly, leaning on his arm. He felt the weight of her body, the rustling sounds, the whoosh of her tired blood, the gasps of her lungs. Here it was, the burden of existence, though Kirill realized that his grandmother would be here at the cemetery forever. He was embarrassed by the thought, and he guessed from her look at him that she understood but was not offended; from her end of life the thought looked different than from his.
At the turn from the main allée lay a mound of broken maple branches. The leaves, which had been fresh yesterday, were drying, turning into parchment, their veins bending and hardening, like bird feet; the leaves had such a powerful fragrance that it seemed their green, light being was flying off with the scent.
She let Kirill go first at the turn—the path was too narrow for both of them. He went, remembering that she had always led him; was he in front now by accident?
Here on the path, as if in his courtyard, he recognized their neighbors. On the left, a lieutenant general, an honored artillery man, who in Soviet times had the unwritten right to a luxurious, individualized tombstone, a sharp-cornered slab of labradorite; on the right, the proprietor of the German pharmacy, Karl Gottlieb Shultz, and his children, who had shed the German name in the third generation; then the engineer Colonel Votyakin; an Englishwoman—governess, boardinghouse landlady—who died in the first year of the new, twentieth century. Her grave was opposite a nameless rusted cross, and then there was the Simpelson family, who always stood out in Kirill’s memory because their daughter Radochka died at just eleven months, in 1941; the peasant faces of the Semenovs, who names were engraved over the former German ones on the old obelisk; then another Brit, “Why did you leave your homeland Wales,” written as if it were a line from a song, and maybe it was; the weed-covered grave of the Pole Ludwikowski—who would have buried him in 1937 in the middle of the Great Terror, when even association with a Pole was dangerous?—and then the welcoming elderberry bush, the familiar wrought-iron border sunken into the ground with a small gate, little towers on the posts, and a heavy latch that needed lubricating with a little sewing-machine oil—they were there.
He opened the gate—Grandmother had always done that. She sat down to rest on the small mourning bench, as she called it; Kirill took out the broom, as usual.
“Wait,” she said. “Not now.”
She took a new shiny piece of steel wool from her purse.
Grandmother stood up with determination, went over to the stranger’s monument, the limestone monolith framed with carvings along the edges that resembled an enlarged clock. Rain, dust, and mud made the stone wild, host to lichen and moss, covered with a greenish patina, and only with difficulty could you make out that something was written on it.
She approached it as if she had the right to do so, as if the monument had been waiting for her. She was no longer the familiar grandmother, mother of his father, but someone with a connection with the unknown, wife of someone lost in action, sister of nocturnal wastelands, daughter of the Civil War, granddaughter of the Tsushima catastrophe, great-granddaughter of emancipated serfs.
She rubbed the scrubber over the stone once, twice, three times; the dried lichen and fine limestone dust fell away. Beneath her hand clearing away the crust of time there appeared clear, firmly carved letters of the German alphabet: Ba; Baltha; Balthasar; Balthasar Sc; Balthasar Schwe; Balthasar Schwerdt; 1805–1; 1805–1883.
BALTHASAR SCHWERDT
1805–1883
Grandmother stepped aside, delicately, so as not to trample the ferns on the graves, looked at the monument, as if checking it against her memory, and then scrubbed beneath the first inscription, closer to the ground, where the moss and lichen were thicker and the dirt blacker; and once again, with the scrape of metal on the soft stone, deep, clear letters began to appear.
CLOTHILDE SCHWERDT
1818–1887
ANDREAS SCHWERDT
1856–1917
With her eyes, she told Kirill to come closer; she let him stand nearer to the grave, put her hands on his shoulders, turned him to face the monument, holding him tight, the way she had when she straightened his posture when he was a child, not noticing that she was hurting him, her fingers pressing with a strength that belied her age.
The enormous inner energy that had kept the knowledge of the names on the stone under lock and key was about to gus
h out in an instant—and Grandmother Lina did not know what to do with it, how to handle it, and so she kept squeezing Kirill’s shoulders, while he, as if reading Latin letters for the first time, tried to pronounce the shuffling SCHW sound.
“Shverdt,” she said. “Balthasar Schwerdt. One of the three wise men. Caspar, Balthasar, Melchior. Clothilde Schwerdt. Andreas SH-VER-DT,” she repeated, and Kirill imaged that the sounds were intoxicating her, bubbling like champagne in her alveoli. Schwerdt—and the rock blocking the cave entrance rolls away, and out comes the resurrected in his shroud, touched by corruption but unharmed.
Grandmother Lina whispered something in German, as if to fix the letters in place and keep them from disappearing again.
Kirill did not know she spoke German, and the shock was as if the stone had spoken; and the stone had spoken, in fact.
“This is your great-great-great-grandfather,” she said, apparently enjoying the repetition of great-great. “And your great-great-great-grandmother. And their son. Mr. and Mrs. Schwerdt,” she said with a German accent, and Kirill was impressed by her pronunciation.
It was only then he understood what she had said, how she had connected herself, him, and the monument.
BALTHASAR SCHWERDT
CLOTHILDE SCHWERDT
ANDREAS SCHWERDT
Forever, for his whole life, until death, which would occur here, beneath these trees, in this earth.
“Hand me the flowers, please,” said Grandmother Lina.
Now he understood why she had chosen the roses. Not irises from the summer garden of memory but conquering roses that signify not nostalgia but triumph, victory over oblivion.
The Goose Fritz Page 4