Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Get them!” the schoolboys called out. “Kill them! Get the Whites!”

  As the Red Army men advanced, Kolchak and his generals scrambled away, until, at the decisive moment, Kolchak slipped and fell on the scattered money, and knocked himself out on the floor. Great howls of laughter from the crowd. The generals went running, one of them smart enough to bend over and retrieve the champagne.

  The few remaining White officers, also marked by giant epaulettes, attempted to protect their leader, but our Red soldiers easily overpowered them and ran them through. Finally, the Red Army men stood center stage, one with a foot planted on the pile of dead Whites, and broke into “The Red Army Is Strongest of All,” and now we knew the words. I wondered if Korsakova was here, if she could see Liza singing along. A different world’s being born, Raisa Filipovna. Her daughter would be part of it, and my son as well.

  And then I saw him again, the boy in my dream, the brave little boy with whom I had run in the streets of Petrograd in the rain, hand in hand. His sensitive spirit, his courage. I felt him take my hand. There might be a future, for me, for him. And where was my courage, where had it vanished to?

  The next agit-play illustrated the dangers of speculation and hoarding grain. Aptly chosen, as the town was a real hub for it. The set quickly converted into a factory, a few boxes and uprights nailed together, an old wheel, a shelf out of a wide board. Actors hammered on the bottom of a washtub and a big can to symbolize metalwork. Our brave workers in the city, weak with hunger. One hungry worker collapsed at the bench, while the others gathered around, pulled him up again.

  I must produce this engine fine

  So the trains will run, and the peasants down the line

  Will get their scythes, their hammers and harrows.

  But so little food, the rations get smaller all the time.

  Another, holding a hammer with a hand that honestly looked like it had never held so much as a can opener:

  I don’t know why the worker must starve.

  We’re the ones who unseated the tsar.

  We braved the bullets in ’17.

  We gave them the revolution.

  But all we have is a heel of bread.

  Who is it starving the nation?

  In the next scene, we saw who. A fat peasant family, their clothes stuffed with straw, ate away at a huge loaf of bread, bags of flour piled in the corner. The kulaks. I hated this black-and-white simplification. Of course the peasants were hoarding. It was inevitable. When people didn’t know what the future had in store, naturally they held back. When the detachments paid nothing, when the peasants couldn’t buy anything they needed, who could blame them for hoarding? But on the other hand, the workers were starving—that was true as well. Scarcity, setting city against country. How were they going to solve that with caricatures and antics?

  A knock on the izba door—the speculator. Boos from the audience as he bought a huge bag of flour, and the conspirators drank a glass of vodka all around.

  A second knock on the door. The Committee of Poor Peasants, in their rags. “Go away!” the fat peasant called out, as the family scrambled to hide the grain under the tablecloth. The committee threw their shoulders against the door as the peasants on the other side resisted them. Finally, they knocked the paper door down, as well as the wooden doorframe it hung from. All around me, people laughed and cheered.

  A big peasant from the committee pushed to the fore. Beard or no beard, I would know him anywhere.

  All around me, the crowd yelled to the big man, “It’s under the table!” “They’re hoarding, the kulaks!” “They sold it to the bagman!” “They had plenty enough for that rascal, didn’t they?”

  How well my husband looked. Well fed and strong, grown up—so much less unformed than he’d been on another platform, before another train, when he’d fled to Moscow with that little mink Zina Ostrovskaya.

  “Who gave you the land?” he boomed. “Who got rid of your master?”

  I couldn’t believe he was here, just a few yards away, wearing that ridiculous beard. Planting himself across the stage like a tree. The kulak wife simpered, tried to distract him, arching her back, twirling her braid. She reminded me of Faina.

  His rich voice rolled like a train.

  In the year ’17,

  It was us, not God, who gave you this land.

  The poor, the worker, the soldier.

  Now your brother workers are dropping from hunger

  On the front, your brothers are fighting for you,

  Keeping Kolchak from your hut and your wife.

  Do your part, peasants!

  Be part of the new world!

  “Watch him!” the crowd yelled. “Watch him, now!”

  The short, tubby kulak husband began sneaking out with a bag of grain over his shoulder. Genya seized him under one arm and lifted him off the ground as his legs ran in the air. The crowd roared with laughter. The Red Army soldiers came in, and Genya and his peasants handed over the kulak and the grain, and then everyone sang “The Internationale,” arms resting on one another’s shoulders.

  All the things this man meant to me. I took off my scarf. I was not afraid for him to see me—huge, cornered, having made every bad decision. I wasn’t the girl he’d met at the Cirque Moderne, but he wasn’t that boy either. Where was my art, my beauty, my love? I’d taken my choices all the way, and this is what it had come to—a barefoot bride about to have a baby in a railway town.

  “Comrades,” Genya spoke to the crowd. “The revolution is in your hands. The army needs to be fed if they’re to protect you from the Whites. The workers can’t make guns, they can’t repair trains, if they’re starving. Everybody must pay his share. There’s no yours or mine now, only ours. Long live the Soviet Socialist Republic!”

  The roar of the people. “Up with the Soviet!”

  “Down with speculation! Food for the workers!”

  Yes, people needed to be reminded that the land was only theirs by virtue of the revolution, and it could be lost as well as gained. If this agit-train couldn’t do it, I didn’t know what could.

  Now people moved down the platform toward the doors of the People’s Kinotheater. I watched Genya edge his way up toward a car painted with a rising sun. I began to push my way toward it. But now I saw Styopa, scanning the crowd for me. Quickly, I tied my kerchief back on—peasant style, under the chin, hiding my face—and traced a half-circle around him, my eyes on the car into which the actors had retreated. Keeping my head down, I marched up to one of the carriage doors where three soldier-actors lounged, smoking. Or were they real soldiers?

  Oh yes, I recognized that air of threat, the joking potential for violence.

  “I have to see Gennady Yurievich,” I said, gripping the handhold, but a soldier pushed into my path, blocking my way.

  “I bet you do, little mother. All the ladies want to meet him. He’s a regular Chaliapin.” His ugly face close to mine, leering.

  “Tell him Marina is here.” My spine straightened, I had not made it this far to be wiped off like mud on one’s boots. But the soldier made no move, just leaned against the car like a man outside a tavern. “Go tell him! He’ll want to know.”

  “Which Marina?” the soldier drawled. “Camp-follower Marina? Maybe that’s a bomb under there.” He tried to lift my skirt with his rifle. The others laughed as I slapped it down.

  “Kuriakina,” I said sharply. “Quick! I don’t have much time.” My heart thudded like a perch in a bucket, my breath tight with what room the baby had left for my lungs. My heartburn flamed. Oh, hurry, Comrade Son of a Bitch! I glanced around for Styopa. Finally, the soldier with his knobby forehead retreated into the depths of the car. The others watched curiously.

  A moment later, down the platform, Genya burst from the last door of the car like a man hurtled by an explosion. He shoved his way through the people who wanted him to stop and talk to them, fighting his way through to me, and then his arms were around me, lifting me into the air
. He was crushing the baby.

  “Stop, Genya!”

  That’s when he realized something had grown between us. He put me down, backed away from me, and now he could see how it was. My belly, my ragged clothes, my bare feet, my hollow cheeks, the wear of sleepless nights.

  He came back and embraced me tenderly, his head on top of mine. He remembered me. I was saved.

  “Whose is it?” he whispered.

  Oh God, not that. I was sick to death of lying. What did I do every day from sunup to bedtime? It made my very bones hurt. “It’s mine,” I said defiantly. “Please don’t ask me anything more.”

  We gazed at one another. God, please give me another chance, I prayed. Could he see my desperation? I needed him. Help get me out of this place. I glanced behind me, searching for my benevolent dictator, my relentless Tikhvin husband. “Can we go inside?”

  He hesitated just a moment, unsure, knowing from experience that I wasn’t to be trusted, and yet longing for me just the same. That hadn’t stopped. He led me by the hand into the carriage, past the skeptical soldiers, who now stepped back, tipping up the brims of their caps the better to see and wonder. Inside the car, actors changed clothes in the compartments, and soldiers loitered in the corridor. It smelled like powder and sweat and old boots. The tall blond woman who’d played the kulak wife sat in a compartment knitting. She stared at the way Genya was holding my hand.

  “Everyone!” he shouted, his arm around me, holding me against his side like a newly emerged Eve. “This is my wife, Marina Dmitrievna Kuriakina. She’s coming with us!” Playing to the house. Same old Genya. He looked to me. “Right? You’re coming?”

  My heart popped in my chest like a thin-skinned grape. Yes. Yes yes yes. “Give me fifteen minutes. I have to get a few things.” I’d worked too hard to get those papers. I would not leave them in that hot little room—my clothes, my gun.

  “I’m coming,” he said. His face, familiar yet different. No longer any traces of boyishness. The broken nose, the hazel eyes. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not to sleep, not to take a shit. I’m going to be there for it all now.”

  Together, we climbed the rickety stairs to the little room I shared with Styopa. I thought the staircase would collapse under our weight. Genya’s presence shrank the room to the size of a mousehole. Had I really diminished myself so much that I could even exist in such a place? This bed, these blankets, that cupboard, this table.

  He peered at the serigraph above the table. “Nice,” he said. “Is it an early Kandinsky?”

  “Malevich,” I said. I threw my few things into my old game bag, my labor book, my journals, fished out the gun from behind a loose board in the wall. I took my sheepskin and my boots and my fox-fur hat.

  I stopped to press my head against Genya’s, forehead to bony forehead. “Tell me I’m not dreaming.”

  He pulled me into him, his two big arms, his two hands. Crushing me, kissing me. He still smelled of himself, leaves and moss, and hay. “Just don’t wake up.”

  I was shoving my swollen feet into my boots when the door banged back, and Styopa stood in the doorway. No, we weren’t dreaming, because Styopa wouldn’t be in it. Oh God. I had hoped to leave a note and be a hundred miles away before he found it. But here he was, big as life, looking like he’d walked into a wall. I felt myself shriveling like a snail you’d just poured salt on. I didn’t want to hurt him. He’d built up all his plans, his dreams, around me and my child. How cruel were the gods. The terrible bewilderment on his face. “I was just coming to get you.”

  I knew how this would look—like I was running off with the first handsome Bolshevik who’d passed through town. But would the truth be worse? Would it make sense?

  “Styopa, this is my husband. Gennady Kuriakin.”

  He turned his gaze to Genya, and the bewilderment began to smolder. “The one who left you for Moscow? The one who abandoned you?”

  “Wait just a minute, pal—” Genya said.

  Before either of us could see what was coming, Styopa stepped in and punched Genya in the gut. He might only have one fist, but my God, it was an iron one. Genya doubled over, and as he came down, Styopa kneed him in the face. When he dropped, Styopa kicked him brutally.

  “Stop it!” I threw myself between him and poor bleeding Genya before he could kick him again. God, what a mess. “He’s my husband. Please, try to understand.”

  “You whore! She said you were a whore. She told me to watch out for you!”

  Genya was still writhing on the ground, trying to catch his breath. “You told him…I abandoned you?” he wheezed.

  “We’re going to get married!” Styopa wept, a grown man. It was the most painful thing I ever saw. “Raise the kid, it’s all going to work out. And then this scum shows up and nothing ever happened? You big dumb shit. Why don’t you go back to Sovnarkom or wherever you came from and steal somebody else’s wife.” He got in another kick before I could stop it.

  “Styopa.” I tried to pull him away from my wheezing husband. “We’re not getting married. It’s over.” Ah, how horrible, but how liberating, to tell the truth. I could hardly bear to see his face, still full of fury but now crumpling like an old paper bag. He had finally heard me. He stood with his one arm pressed to his eyes, shaking. I thought he might have a seizure. “I’m sorry. Please, try to understand—I never thought I’d see him again.”

  “You filthy whore!” He was sobbing unabashedly now, his moustache sagging, his lashes dark with tears. Then he threw himself on me, kneeling, and clutched at my dress. “Don’t leave me. I’ll kill myself if you leave me.”

  He was tearing my heart, I could feel it shredding, and yet, I could not stay. “You’re better off without me, and that’s the truth.” I wrested myself free from his grip, grabbed my sack and helped Genya, still retching from the blows, to his feet. Watching Styopa’s right hand clench and unclench. “I’ve got to go. Find another woman. You’ll regret it if I stay, you know you will. You’ll never forgive me.” Everyone regretted me sooner or later.

  He wiped his tears on the back of his one arm. If only there was something I could do to lessen his suffering, but I didn’t know how to save him and save myself too. “Beat it, before I kill you both. You bitch. I should throw you under that fancy painted train. Damn you and Lenin too.”

  And so we left him there, weeping in the steaming ruins of his life, another luckless soul dearly wishing his path had never crossed my own.

  8 On the Red October

  Ah! To be moving! The wind in my face, the rumble of ridden thunder, rocking me, shaking the dust from my feet. The speeches of the giant wheels declaiming the miles, fire and steel, hurtling me away from Tikhvin and all my compromises, Styopa’s heartbreak, floors and brooms and kitchens. I felt like all the clocks in the world had started again. At a time when any ratchety milk train creaking and screeching its way back to Petrograd would have been enough to fill my heart twelve times over, this was the Literary-Instructional Train Red October, a demon, a carnival, a smoke-belching volcano of the Modern. Soldiers from Tula and sailors from Kronstadt caught rides with us, heading for the front—the very sailors who had brought the Aurora up the Neva to train its guns on the palace, the vanguard of the revolution. We had hard-bitten Bolshevik politicals, we had actors and journalists. And everyone was enlivened with determination, even vision. Hope unfurled like a flag—now I remembered it. No longer was I sidelined in Tikhvin or Ionia or East Mudhole, Wretched Hut Oblast, I was back on the train of the revolution, from which I’d somehow fallen, hauled aboard by Genya’s strong hand. So many things had come between us, I thought as I slept tucked under his chin in his compartment, listening to the song of the rails, clickety-clack. Vera Borisovna, Kolya, my life’s nightmare turn, the months at Ionia, my tenure as the barefoot bride—yet somehow I had risen, again breathing the shocking air of the Future, like Persephone walking into the sunshine after her months in the underworld, blinking to find that color had returned to the earth.
Lupine and cornflowers surrounded us as we raced through the fields of June. Again, there were sounds! Train music and meadowlarks, accordion and guitars, Genya reciting his verse, actors with their thrilling voices, the new songs the soldiers sang, bawdy chastushki and rousing anthems. How muffled Tikhvin had been, wrapped in cotton, my ears packed with straw.

  Genya, my Genya, sweet. Pulling me aboard his life just as he had in 1917. And away we rode, hurtling across Russia toward the front, where the civil war raged. Was I afraid? I was more afraid of Styopa, of the Tikhvin Women’s Club, dirt of a stalled mediocrity filling my mouth, packing my nostrils, muddying my eyes, as I disappeared into the ground. Our sailors and soldiers gave me strength. Truthfully, we wouldn’t be the ones up against White bayonets unless the train itself was attacked. But a fight to the death would be a finer fate than moldering to the end of my days, eating my way in a circle around a peg in the ground. Racing across the green fields on the agit-train, I felt free. Like some crazy giantess, I could stand astride continents. I needn’t cut myself down to fit Styopa’s bedframe any longer.

  As we made our way through the countryside, I eyed the sailors and soldiers smoking on the roofs of the cars, taking in the sun like seals, the sound of their easy laughter—protecting the Red October clearly a plum job. How I envied them riding up there in the fresh air like kings. Though there was plenty of room inside the train, many of them preferred it on top, for the view and probably the freedom from the eternal speechifying of the politicals, their dead earnestness, not to mention the artists with their theories and the actors rehearsing and squabbling, talk they said made their heads ache.

  At one agit-stop, as the train prepared to leave, I could resist no longer. Making sure Genya wouldn’t see me—he’d grown so protective!—I grabbed the hot iron ladder and climbed, glad I was wearing my boots. Though bare feet would have given me a better grip, they would have burned. The baby unbalanced me, making even that little ascent a challenge. Where was Esmerelda the tightrope walker? One of the sailors, Slava, from the fortress island of Kronstadt, leaned over the edge and saw me. “What are you doing, little mother?”