Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  As the sledge scraped along toward the station, I couldn’t help but read the signs and portents. I hadn’t spent months at Ionia, trapping and hunting, without learning to read the news in sticks and hairs and tracks in snow. All the signs were bad. I saw it in the lean, blue-tinged faces of the arrivals struggling up from the station. Two sallow, soot-eyed women in black coats and too-thin shoes dragged a heavy suitcase between them, loaded no doubt with silverware and bric-a-brac to trade with the peasants for food. He who trades on the free market trades on the freedom of the people. A grim-jawed, silent group of workers following them had to be a food-requisitioning brigade. They neither spoke nor joked—they knew their assignment: to relieve peasants of their grain without recompense so they could feed their own starving brothers. I could see them pulling into themselves, hardening for the job ahead. A number of workers traveling alone walked up the main road, collars raised, a self-provisioning holiday. Their faces told me everything. No food in the city, no help, no end in sight.

  Behold, the station. The old man helped me down from my throne of logs, the horse snorted its clouds into the white air. The days of hard travel had taken their toll on my body, I moved like a woman of eighty. Pine pitch and splinters stuck to my sheepskin and squirrelskin gloves. I held on to my snowshoes and game bag, unable to adjust to the assault of so many people. Travelers pushed past me as if I were a turnstile.

  I gazed up at the arches. Here was where I went wrong. Here was my chance to begin again.

  I shoved my way through the station and out onto the platform, where a train stood steaming, stinking, its wheels terrifyingly outsized. After the timeless introversion of the countryside, the noise scoured my ears, the child’s jerking alarm took my breath, and I clutched my snowshoes to my breast. First- and second-class passengers paced the platform, stretching their legs and doing furtive business with the peasant women selling piroshky and roasted sunflower seeds, while third-class travelers huddled in the barn doors of the boxcars, not daring to leave the train, their wooden bunks rayed behind them like shelves in a poor shop. Everyone heading east, east, east, away from Petrograd, into the snowy countryside, toward the Urals, escaping the turmoil and starvation in the capital of Once-Had-Been. My determination wavered. It slipped, shattering against the train’s iron wheels.

  Perhaps the boy I’d been—Misha, that cheeky lad—would have chanced it. He had his way of staying afloat, but I couldn’t conjure him now, not with the child on the way, my face gone round, my breasts past binding. I was a woman in full and there was no escaping it.

  Wisdom does not consist of making the best choice among many. Wisdom is understanding when there is no choice and taking the step that must be taken, without complaints or sighs. Hoisting my small bag higher over my shoulder, I walked to the platform’s end and climbed down, strapped myself into my snowshoes, and followed the rails through the fog.

  A switchman’s shack emerged from the milky white. I knocked at the poorly made door, the pearly gates of this sooty heaven, and swung it open without waiting for an invitation.

  Inside, a blackened stove warmed the small hut—no better than a wooden crate—where four men seated on boxes played cards. The kettle boiled. Steam coated the one greasy window. But which was the switchman, the one in charge? Him, I decided—the bald one in spectacles, pencil behind ear. The other three, railwaymen: a pensioner—a little bantam cock—and two burly men, one missing an arm, his coat sleeve pinned up neatly. Firemen or mechanics, I thought, the one-armed man wounded in the line of duty, and still drawing rations. Oh, to be the boy Misha again! Misha would know how to talk to them. He would swear, tell a dirty joke. Eh, brothers! But trapped in this irrevocable female form, I had to appeal to mercy, if I could find it. I hated negotiating from weakness, but I could do it if I had to.

  “Comrades. Forgive me.” I spoke quickly, holding my hands in the universal language of wheedling. “I don’t want to trouble you, but I don’t know where else to turn. My brother was a Vikzhel man, an assistant engineer. He said if I ever needed help, to turn to the railwaymen.” I rummaged in the sack and pulled out Misha’s papers, presented them to the switchman. “I lost my position, a cook in a boarding house. The woman’s daughter came home from Petrograd and took my place.”

  The bald man peered at Misha’s documents. “Assistant engineer? It says he was fifteen years old.” He tried to hand them back to me but I shrank away. My fictional brother was Vikzhel, a union man. They took care of their own.

  “He was a good boy.” I had no problem staining my face with tears. Poor Misha! “He gave me his pay. It kept us going. But he died, four weeks ago. Now I have nothing.”

  The switchman held the papers awkwardly, he didn’t know what to do with them if I wouldn’t take them back. “So what do you want from us, little comrade? We can’t put you on as a fireman.”

  The others chuckled. Oh, so funny. How I hated men who thought what a woman did was ridiculous, what a woman needed. I wished I could pull the gun from my pocket, show him who was ridiculous. But I had to bite my tongue. “I can shovel snow, keep the tracks clean,” I said, pushing on. “Cook, wash. Read. Look, I’m not asking for charity.” I drew myself up to my full height, trying to appear healthy and robust, not like a pregnant girl who’d been breathing her last calories through her metaphysical skin. “I can water trains. Clean the station.” That made them laugh—you were more likely to see a pig fly than a clean vokzal in Russia.

  They exchanged glances as if they were passing cards. The old man pulled something from his pocket. “Here’s some chocolate, devushka. Take it. Don’t be shy.”

  Now I felt bad that I’d wanted to shoot him. I took the chocolate and let it melt on my tongue like a consecration—dark and sweet, like a drug. Over the switchman’s shoulder, a calendar hung next to train schedules posted on nails. Its pages were roughly torn back to 28 Fevrail 1919. I counted the months on the roof of my mouth. March, April, May, June…The months had never felt so urgent. The burly man with one arm leaned back, hooked his cigarette in his mouth, and with the same hand, threw a card onto the little box that was their gaming table. “Maybe Raisa Filipovna could use her.”

  The old fellow puffed out his cheeks, his eyes full of news. “That girl was already halfway out the door. Yulia. Bun in the oven, you ask me.” He cackled, oblivious of the insult he was offering.

  The bald man flushed. Had he noticed my condition? “Pardon him, he’s our village idiot.”

  “Who’s the idiot, you apparatchik.” The old fellow held up a bony fist. “Burzhui bastard.”

  The two-armed man threw a one-eyed jack. “You playing or what?”

  Bun in the oven. I wished now I had a ring. Still, I could legitimately present myself as a married woman. Between the chocolate and the chance at work, I was already feeling hopeful. I licked the last of the sweet from my lips. “Where can I find this Raisa Filipovna?”

  “A big wooden house on Orlovsky Street,” said the one-armed man. “Number 8. Korsakova’s her name. Tell her about your brother. She has the heart of a kitten. Tell her Styopa sent you.”

  “I knew the husband,” said the old man. “A shame. Tomasovich.”

  Styopa threw a card. I admired the dexterity with which he used his single hand. “A good man. Eternal memory.”

  The bald man glanced up at his calendar, and tore the last page off to reveal 1 Mart 1919, opened the stove door and threw February into the fire.

  I set out for Korsakova’s. I didn’t know Tikhvin well, only the station and the monastery, and the one inn where we used to stay on our way to Maryino. Where we’d stayed the summer of 1917, between the revolutions, when my father had sent us into the country, and Seryozha to the cadets. I asked directions of a woman who walked with the assured step of one who knew where she was going and was in no hurry to get there, and following her instructions, I passed Sovietskaya Street, Karl Marx Street, Svobodnaya Square—Freedom Square—a snow-clotted commons. The revolution had cert
ainly brought its passion for renaming to Tikhvin, best known for its icon of the Virgin, and as the birthplace of the composer Rimsky-Korsakov, whose house my artistic mother liked to point out as our carriage jounced through the dusty streets on the way out of town. Korsakova—I wondered if the woman was some relation.

  I found her house on a snow-filled lane—sagging but not the worst on the street, a big two-story wooden structure with a long balcony looking out upon other houses across the street, equally run-down but not so large. I rang the bell, tested the door. It was locked. It had started to snow again, but if I could spend a night in a blizzard in a forest halfway between nowhere and never, I guess I could wait in the doorway of a Tikhvin boarding house until the landlady came home.

  Removing my snowshoes and tipping them up against the dark shingles, I took out Genya’s little book and reread his poems, hearing his voice, that concatenation of basso and boyishness:

  I know what it’s like

  to be fed paper

  when what one needs is

  Bread, wine

  love.

  I wondered if he still felt the same way. If I hadn’t left with my delightful man that night, if I’d met Genya after his avant-garde play, I might be in Moscow right now, surrounded by poets, instead of starving, pregnant, and looking for work in Tikhvin. It was too depressing to consider. I closed the book, ate the sausage in my satchel, a bit of bread. The doorway arched over my head. I touched the rough shingles. Would I have my baby here? Would Korsakova take me in? And if she didn’t, then what? Death was no conjecture these days, no distant rumor. It was all around, just waiting for me to make a false step. I thought of the romantic idiot who had once strolled among the graves at Petersburg’s noble Alexander Nevsky Monastery, imagining my own beautiful, famous corpse. My funeral procession, the inconsolable thousands who would carry me, the great poet, on their shoulders to my final resting place.

  But death wasn’t at all like that. It was my brother Seryozha, cut down halfway to manhood. It was the student shot dead before me by government troops at Znamenskaya Square. It was a boy-thief beaten to death by the mob, dying in Genya’s arms in his grubby apartment. And the astronomer’s son, in the cholera epidemic, shitting out his life in the grass. I thought of all my dead—Solomon Katzev, Andrei Krestovsky, Andrei Petrovin…Death was no velvet shadow. He was a worker in a cold brick factory, short on materials, churning out a tatty product—typhus, cholera, civil war. A robber, waiting in alleys and stairwells, a sign painter even now painting the blue faces of the Formers in the Tikhvin station and hovering around the reeking invalids of war. He was circling the rooftops at Maryino, where the Ionians were still inflowing in the back parlor with their shining doomed eyes.

  Would this damned widow ever return? I clapped my hands together, stamped my feet as I watched more amateur speculators propelling their suitcases up the badly cleared street. How desperately we clung to life, each one of us. Where did we find the energy to carry on? I used to think the dead were hopeful for the living, like benevolent old ladies watching young people at a ball. Now I thought they just pitied us.

  Two crocuses once bloomed

  Between the rails

  Of a tram.

  The wrong time.

  The wrong place.

  Once I imagined

  A great death.

  Plumes and garlands.

  But it’s all death, my brother.

  We vanish just the same.

  At last, a tall woman dressed in black turned up the unshoveled walk, a basket in her arms, already watching me with suspicion.

  “Raisa Filipovna?” I called out. She raised skeptical eyebrows. “You don’t know me, but Styopa from the switching house sent me over.” Who should I be? Makarova? Shurova? “Kuriakina. Marina Dmitrievna.”

  Korsakova hooked the basket over her arm, fished a key from her pocket, and unlocked the front door. “And how do you know Stepan Radulovich?”

  “I don’t.” I vowed I would tell the truth when I could. “I went to the station this morning, looking for work. He told me to come up here.” She opened the door. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to follow her, or if she would slam it in my face. “They said you might need someone. That you lost your girl.”

  She turned back to me then, a firm-faced, dark-haired woman about forty. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

  Inside, her house was warm, simple, and clean. Hooks by the door, wood walls, a little cabinet, a braided rug on the floor of the sitting room so old you couldn’t see what color it had been. Clean, wide-planked pine floors, solid, worn furniture smelling of men—a bit sweet, a bit acrid, the strong scent of tobacco. A workingman’s boarding house. Badly printed woodcuts, peasant lubok style, a couple of silhouettes. She hung up her coat and hat, removed her boots, and slid her feet into felt slippers. I was careful to keep my coat folded in, so the gun would not reveal itself as I hung my coat and my fox hat and took off my boots. She gestured to a pair of worn felt slippers and I put them on.

  A long, rough table dominated the dining hall, a table that had never seen a cloth in any era. There we sat on long benches and I told her my tale, as much as made sense. She gazed at me with keen, dark eyes while I spoke, as if judging the weight of a goose under its feathers. “When is the child due?” she asked bluntly.

  Seeing she’d lost a girl to a sexual escapade, I was careful to explain about my husband, the poet Gennady Kuriakin, who had moved to Moscow last autumn.

  She grimaced, as if she’d just bitten into something sour. “He left you in this condition?”

  For some reason, I wanted to defend Genya, even in the course of this elaborate fabrication. “It wasn’t his fault. Really, he didn’t know. I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to make him stay if he didn’t want to. He’s a very ethical person.”

  She cocked one of her mobile eyebrows and shook her head wearily, as you would if someone told you they’d just bought a handful of magic beans. “Styopa said you might have a job.” I brought the subject around again. “Said your girl left. I’m a hard worker, and…the condition, well, it’ll be months before it’s a problem. I don’t need much. Just give me a chance.”

  “The girl was my eldest daughter,” she said wearily. “Yulia. Well, you can’t keep them young. Eventually the wheat will spring from the earth.” Her gaze fell upon my weathered hands. “Why don’t you wear a ring?”

  My ragged hands, the broken nails. I hadn’t had to cut them since I left Furshtatskaya Street, they just tore off. “We married at the district soviet,” I said. “When the Germans were attacking Petrograd. He was leaving in the morning. There was no time for rings.” Our Red wedding. I could only remember Oksana’s geraniums, the petals shedding like little drops of blood.

  “Romantics…” The widow Korsakova smiled, and pushed a loose strand of hair back into the black topknot. “I’m glad that’s not dead.” She surprised me. I’d have thought the landlady of a place like this would be a hard-nosed kopek pincher, counting the linens. “Well, all right. I’ll give you a try. But remember, I run a quiet, respectable house. I hear the least breath of scandal, that you’re drinking, running around, you’re out in the street. Baby or no baby. Ponimaesh?”

  I was in! It was all I could do not to leap and twirl down the hall as she led me to my room. Only her extreme sobriety discouraged it. We climbed the stairs, walked down a long creaking hall wallpapered in a pattern of tiny flowers the color of old teeth, then up a second, crooked back staircase to a small third floor. She showed me a room with two narrow beds. Cheerful half-curtains of printed calico softened the windows. “That was Yulia’s,” she said, pointing to the bed under the window. “And this is my younger one’s, Lizaveta. She’s at school now.”

  After the disorder of the last years, the lunacy of Ionia, I wanted to kiss the hem of her skirt. Such peace. The good order of family life. Thank God for this plain, sensible Russian woman who was making a home for her daughters. Perhaps I would be like this in a
few years, streaks of gray in my hair, calm and competent, able to keep other people alive.

  She stood in the doorway in her black dress. There was something Akhmatovian about her, her height, her hair, her somber countenance. My savior, my saint. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she said. “We have to cling to each other very tightly these days.”

  And so I took up residence at Raisa Filipovna Korsakova’s. After my duties in former lives—as the servant Marusya at Pulkovo Observatory, as Marina Ionian these last months—I well knew how to make myself useful, and oh, three lovely meals a day! The widow and I worked side by side as she instructed me on the niceties of the domestic arts. It didn’t bother me that she was on the taciturn side unless actively illustrating some task. I had learned to appreciate silence.

  Eight railwaymen lived in the house, including one-armed Styopa, who watched me tenderly as I carried pots and passed food, even helped me clear the table. He whispered to me, “Come to me when the lights go out. Fourth door on the right.” I smiled, neither refusing nor accepting. But it made me happy. He was a kind soul, robust and not unattractive, his hair and moustache had some gray. His gray eyes accepted his fate with the simple courage I’d seen in the military hospitals in Petrograd. God knew it had been a long time since I’d had a man. But I would not push my good luck at finding this position. He watched me as I sewed buttons onto trousers and darned socks on a wooden egg.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, I rarely had a spare moment. Korsakova ran the place like a German. Monday was laundry, Tuesday the floors, Wednesday the windows, Thursday the stairs, and so on. When I wasn’t scrubbing pine floors with lye soap or boiling acres of laundry, hanging hectares of heavy corduroys in the kitchen, making beds or roasting kasha or grinding oats or peeling potatoes, I was standing in miles of queues for bread and flour and fuel and matches, and Liza’s milk ration. Was I complaining? Not I. Our tenants’ Vikzhel rations were generous, first category. They even got fabric and galoshes—theoretically. I ate like a queen—at least a Soviet one.