Chimes of a Lost Cathedral
Page 7
“Please.” Wetting her hands with my tears. Everything was going against me. I was a gambler on a two-year losing streak. How in the world would I survive? Mother, Don’t Abandon Your Baby! Women everywhere making the same desperate choice.
She pulled her hands away from me. “I run a respectable house. I know that means nothing to you. Nothing means anything anymore. But it does to me.” Talking to her daughter as much as to me. Respectable. That relic. But everyone needed a line they would not cross.
“I promise. I won’t do anything to upset you.” I clutched her hem in my hands, twisting it, crumpling her gown. “You’ve been so good to me. I’m sorry I disappointed you. Your trust.”
“I have to think of my own family.” She rose, breaking my hold. Now she met my gaze. And I could see in her eyes, I was already becoming a stranger. She, next to whom I’d beaten rugs and ground grain, she who had told me the child would be a boy, was already tearing the thousands of silken threads that connected us. The second Fate, who bore the scissors, cut.
6 The Barefoot Bride
She’d given me a week. I had to think of something. I got up in the morning to stand in the bread queue, heavy-eyed, still not quite believing my time at Korsakova’s was over. What was I going to do? I could no longer work as a porter. Anything I did, my pregnancy would make me look like a whore. Who would hire me now but soldiers? When I got to the head of the queue, I asked if there was any work at the bakery, and they looked at me as if I were speaking Japanese. I returned to the boarding house, silently served breakfast, not being able to look anyone in the eye—especially Styopa. My God, Styopa’s barefoot bride. I blushed whenever I thought of it. I cleaned up, but would not talk to Korsakova, though she eyed me pleadingly. Understand. Well, I understood, but I didn’t have to like it.
After dinner, I asked Styopa to take a walk with me, down by the river. The late sun glazed the water, its polished surface erasing the monastery’s reflection, its cupolas and walls. I told him what had taken place in the night with the widow, that they all knew about us, what she had said to me. I had to look for a new position, but work was rarer than beefsteak. “All I can think of is joining the party and letting them ship me off somewhere.”
“Don’t cry,” he said, wiping at my cheek with his thumb. He took my hand in his, drew it to his lips and kissed it. “Let’s move in together. Find a little place. Hell, I should have thought of it sooner.” His eyes were shining. “I get good rations. You wouldn’t be the servant anymore, you’d be mistress of your own house. Put your feet up when you like it. You’d be a queen! What do you say? I’ve had it with the bachelor life. We’d get along fine.”
I wasn’t sure. It was true, we got along well. He was easygoing and kind. Lovable, even. It would be a safe haven. I could see no better option, no other options at all.
We found a place close to the station. A flat above what was once a tavern, abandoned now. And just as he said they would be, things were immediately easier. My chores were light—cleaning and cooking just for the two of us, making our single bed. I queued for bread, brought him his lunch down to the station in a bucket. I sat when I wanted, put my feet up. Like a queen, just as he’d said. And the privacy was truly glorious. I could sit for hours just watching the May clouds lick the blue sky. How delighted he was to come home in the evening simply to find me there, the place clean and orderly, clothes hanging on the line, a bath waiting in a tin tub, dinner scenting the air. I’d wash his hair and pour water over him as he told me what was going on in the war, where the troops were, what went on at the station that day. It didn’t take much to please him. I could make a life here with my railwayman. Styopa’s barefoot bride.
“You should divorce him,” he said, looking at me over the rim of the tub. “Divorce him and marry me. The kid’ll have my name. We could have other ones. I like kids.”
The doves cooed through the open window in the warm evening. He wanted me to really do this. Marry him, have his children, spend the rest of my life here in this railway town. I could. I was one false step away from losing my life here. I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “Let’s see how you like this one first,” I joked, stroking my belly. I was playing house with Styopa now, but marry? He really thought I would divorce Genya and marry him. That would be the natural course of events, settle down with him in Tikhvin and become Marina Radulovich. I cared for Styopa, he was dear, but I did not love him. I rolled him a cigarette with shaking hands, tore the paper, took another one and managed to get it rolled, and stuck it in his mouth below the thick moustache, lit it for him as he steadied my hand with his wet one.
“You think I’m not serious?” he said.
“I know you are.” I washed him with a sliver of soap. My heart squeezing itself into a walnut shell.
He came home a few days later with a serigraph of a mother and child. She was tying its shoelaces, and both their cheeks glowed a burnished red. He hung it over our bed. How he loved to look at it when he sat at the table drinking a glass of the samogon his friends brewed down at the machine shop. That picture! I could hardly bear to look at it, that awful poshlost, that treacle. A promise I never made to him. How it rebuked me. Now he wanted to know about my family, my past. I hated to lie to him, just begged him not to ask so many questions. A person had to have something of her own. We talked about his childhood, he talked about our future. What a good mother I would be, how smart my children would be, how handsome. Even minus an arm, he was the luckiest man in the world.
“I’m not that good a bet, Styopa,” I tried to tell him. But I couldn’t tell him why. That I was just biding my time, waiting to have the baby. That I really did care for him but would never love him as a man should be loved. Couldn’t we just go on as it was? It was sweet between us that spring, and I didn’t want to interrupt his delight in everything that had befallen him. He embraced what had been a relationship of convenience with the zeal of the believer. A new sun was rising on a new land, a new breeze blew through the greening trees.
In the evening, when the mosquitoes came out and the frogs chirped like a chorus of creaking doors, we walked up to the ponds to fish. We parked ourselves on boxes under the grieving boughs of the willow trees, and he baited his hook with his rod braced between his feet and knees. While he fished, I watched the reflection of the monastery hanging upside down in the green water. I kept waiting to hear the bells—but nothing ever broke the silence except the occasional splash of water, birdsong, sometimes the whistle of a train—people arriving or departing, their satchels heavy, bulging with foodstuffs, pockets tender with eggs and cheese. Tickets in hand, ready to brave the return to Petrograd with all its inherent dangers—confiscation, arrest.
I envied them. Just the sound of it: return to Petrograd.
What irony. Though I was living with a railroad man, I was the last person in Tikhvin who would ever climb onto a departing train now. Styopa would never help me leave, and he would thrash any of his friends if they so much as thought of helping me. Petrograd! I could taste it, the sea air, the big wide rush of the Neva, the sound of the gulls. Its wide paved streets, its three hundred bridges, I could feel their iron railings warm under my hands. The trees in the Summer Garden would be in leaf now, the statues unboxed. People who had read a book, who could talk about poetry, who cared about art. I craved it like a mineral missing from my diet.
“You should get that divorce,” he said on his box. “Before the baby comes.”
A splash, out on the pond. “Plenty of time,” I said, brushing a mosquito from my forehead. “It’s not due until July.”
He reeled in his line, cast again. “Don’t you want to?”
No, Styopa, I did not want to. I didn’t want to look at that picture for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to talk about the babies we would have together after this one. “It all seems pretty unreal,” I said. “I feel like I’m in a dream. The baby. Everything.”
He smiled. “It’ll be real soon enough, little fox. Soo
n enough.”
I lay in bed next to him, unearthly light flooding into the room through the uncurtained window. He snored next to me, low and regular. I tried to find a better position. Heartburn was eating me alive. I was sleepy during the day, but when I lay down for the night, no position would give me a second’s respite. The baby had taken my body hostage and now it was in control, pressing up on my heart and lungs, down on my bladder, crowding me physically as my railwayman was crowding me with his hot, solid body, the arm he liked to throw over me as he slept.
What had I done to myself? I could feel the ground eroding from beneath me, like a riverbank collapsing. I had nowhere to run to. I needed Styopa to keep a roof over my head, a place to have this child. I liked him, and that would be enough for most women. I would think of something. If I left him, he’d be all right. There were so many women alone right now, and so few men, one-armed or not, he would have no trouble replacing me. But what of the child? That idea sank away, leaving me with the reality that I had no better option than this. Sooner or later, I would divorce Genya, and become Marina Radulovich, and raise my little son here in Tikhvin. I had to give up on the idea of flight. He would fish with his father, he would catch frogs. Forget the books I wanted to read to him, the things I could teach him about dreaming. He would become a simple provincial boy, no better or worse than any other. It would be the end of the Makarovs and all our culture and pretensions.
And what of me? How many little Raduloviches would I bear before I had enough? Before I forgot who I was and where I came from? Would I end up in the river, a bloated provincial Ophelia?
Styopa threw his arm over me, drew me close to him. I fought him off, it was too hot, and I could hardly breathe as it was. This tenant, crowding me out of the collective apartment of my own body. Kolya’s precious child.
Much as I wanted to murder that man, what I would not give for a half hour with him. We wouldn’t even have to take off our clothes. If only Styopa would stop talking to me! His favorite topics could be listed on ten fingers. One, fishing. Two, ice-fishing. Three, fishing from a boat. Four, the legendary pike he had caught twice but never landed. Five, his sainted mother. Six, the war. Seven, drunken antics with his friends. Eight, the one time he went to Petrograd. Nine, his little brother Toma, who died of scarlet fever. Ten, our family to come. How much better it had been when we had talked only about sex and troop movements.
I got up and used the chamber pot, pulled a chair up to the window and sat with my shawl around me, gazing into the beautiful, weary, light-filled night. In the bed, Styopa stirred, then settled. Even his snoring fell into a pattern. To think that once I’d sworn off rooms. And here I was again. In truth, life was nothing but rooms. I had not been back to the Women’s Club since I’d come to live here, but I was tempted to return, just for the variety of it. This room, this waiting, the growing thing under my ribs, the incessant urination, the endless heartburn.
The sentimental mother and child across the room glowed in the unearthly light, rebuking me. If I ever burned this room down, I’d start with that picture.
7 Agitprop
June. Heat, green. I could not stay awake. I fell asleep on my feet in the middle of chopping a cucumber, my head drooping at dinner. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. If only I could sleep, and never wake up. At night, I had bad dreams. I dreamed Styopa was rowing me and the baby on the ponds, rowing around in circles with a single oar. I dreamed I had the baby but it was a kitten, and then a doll as big as my hand, a crude doll made of burlap.
I sat staring out the window one day, when I noticed people hurrying down the street, running toward the station. No one ever ran in this town. Had there been an explosion? A fire? Not just barefoot boys but kerchiefed women, and children, men in caps and leather aprons from the foundry. I rose heavily and thudded down the splintery stairs, out onto the road, dirt under my bare feet. “What’s going on?” I shouted.
“Lenin!” a man shouted.
Lenin? I doubted it, but just to be sure, I hurried along with the others, jouncing as fast as my swollen body would allow.
A woman called over her shoulder to a tiny boy standing in the middle of the road, his finger in his mouth. “Davai, Fedya!”
The station swarmed with people, more people than I’d ever seen in this town. And here was the reason. A great train steamed at the platform on red-painted wheels—a train the likes of which had never been seen in this dusty backwater or anywhere else. Boldly painted, car after car, with modern constructivist designs—strong silhouettes of arched-necked horses bearing cavalrymen, figures in black and white facing off red obtuse triangles and black circles. It bore the lettering, LITERARY-INSTRUCTIONAL TRAIN RED OCTOBER.
The last time I’d seen anything like it was in Palace Square on the first anniversary of the revolution—the same bold ardor, the same visionary energy. Now it had come to us. For the first time in months, I felt awake. Futurist designs blazoned every car. What a spectacle! Abstracted armies, bold Red soldiers with machine guns, workers with banners, or were they flames? Factories with smokestacks that might be cannons. The Guest from the Future had arrived, shaking our falling-apart town to life. Children raced around like gulls, clamored to be lifted up. The revolution had come to Tikhvin.
Ever more people crowded onto the platform to see the magical beast. They pushed and pulled like the sea. How had I forgotten this, the power, the vision, the possibilities of our time? Those endless dull meetings at the Women’s Club, the days sweeping out our tiny flat, cooking, cleaning. The revolution was not about the four categories of housework! This was the revolution—iron and thunder, the Future.
The doors flew open, and people in white blouses spilled out of the cars wearing thick belts like acrobats, men and women too. A man in a leather jacket stalked up and down the platform before the cars, examining our faces as if memorizing us. Soldiers sat on the rooftops of every car, their legs dangling, joking, calling down to the crowd. A man in a white blouse began walking on his hands. I wondered if someone would begin to juggle or eat fire. It was a circus—a Literary-Instructional circus on wheels. Exactly what Lunacharsky had meant when he talked about the Revolutionary Carnival. This elation, this moment of glorious non-Styopa! For a brief instant, I was free from guilt and expectations, that possessive arm, his eternal fish and plans for our matrimonial future.
I spotted Liza in the crowd of schoolgirls and boys, chattering excitedly, reading the slogans, admiring the figures on the sides of the cars—no way the widow could blame me for this. It struck me—these murals were the Soviet equivalent of the iconostasis. Instead of Christos, the oversized figure was a worker with his banner. The gathering forces representing the eternal fight between good and evil being conducted right now, raging between the Volga and the Urals.
A soldier with an accordion on the roof of a car struck up “Dubinushka,” Little Hammer, the old work song, and everybody knew the words: Ekh, dubinushka, ukh-nem! Ekh, zelyonaya sama poidyot. I joined in too—why not? I never felt myself more than simply a sojourner here, but as the strength of our voices grew, I felt proud to be among these people—citizens of Tikhvin. Russian citizens. Soviet people. We sang out to prove something to those soldiers on the carriage roofs. We too were the revolution. I even caught some of the railwaymen singing, despite how they felt about the Bolsheviks and their opposition to labor unions. I could imagine Styopa somewhere, singing under his breath. He too knew the feel of a hammer in his hand. The accident that kills the worker in the song, he had personally felt that blow.
The soldier on the roof didn’t waste any time but launched right into the next tune, “The Cliff on the Volga,” then some soldiers’ songs: “Ogonyok” and “Wait for Your Soldier.” And a new one most didn’t know, though the soldiers on the train and the soldiers in the crowd taught it to us:
Again they prepare for us the tsar’s throne.
But from the taiga to the British seas
The Red Army is strongest of all.
Down the platform, a painted canvas bearing the slogan EVERYTHING FOR THE FRONT! and SOVIET PEOPLE’S THEATER rolled up, revealing a boxcar converted to a simple stage. We moved down the platform. I stood on tiptoe to see the play unfold. In swaggered Admiral Kolchak, in his customary white uniform covered with a fat tricolored ribbon, a medal as big as an ash can lid, and gold epaulettes a foot long, a bottle of champagne tucked under one arm. He was followed by three fat men in dress jackets and top hats. Each hat bore a flag—France, England, the United States. A fat priest with a long beard swung a censer as the Entente pulled money out of bags and crammed it in handfuls down Kolchak’s coat and into his cap as fast as they could.
“That’s right,” the man next to me said. “He’d fall apart in two seconds without the English.”
“Down with Kolchak!” people shouted.
Kolchak mounted a tall-backed chair, transformed into a throne. The Entente and his own generals were about to invest him with a tsar’s crown and ermine.
“The Supreme Ruler of all the Russias,” the assembled actors called out, and began to lower the crown amid the crowd’s boos and hisses, when a group of Red Army soldiers burst in.
“Urah!” the crowd shouted. The old man next to me on his toes, yelling in my ear.
The Entente stole away, leaving Kolchak and his White officers to battle the Red Army—identified by their familiar pointed felt caps with the red star, their bayonets fixed.