Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Need some air, Comrade,” I shouted up to him. “You can’t hoard the view, it belongs to everybody.”

  “Don’t fall, then. We’re about to leave. Steady.” Strong arms and cheerful faces handed me along, across to the rooftop platform on which they sat, and they cleared a place for me.

  As I took my place among our sailor escorts and the hitchhiking soldiers, I felt as I had when I’d climbed into the boat on the Rostral Column, that soar of spirits I never expected to feel again. The train jolted, and I shrieked and clutched Slava’s arm. The train was moving. “Hang on, little mother!” He grinned.

  The smoke made me choke until we picked up good speed, then it thinned out, chased away by the wind pounding my face, howling in my ears. I quickly retied my scarf under my chin as the sailor held on to me. It was glorious, terrifying. The sound—the speed! I’d wanted to ride up here since I’d first seen them, and now I was on top of the world, clinging madly to the striped-shirted sailor. Ah, the rush, the sweep of the horizon, this enormous country headed into its future! I felt like I was riding time itself, the sun on my face, the freshness of the fields, the great green expanse of Russia in the blue bowl of her heavens.

  And my husband down below, hard at work in the old dining car, writing, discussing a pamphlet with the printers, making plans with Marfa Yermilova, our grim-faced political officer, the oldest of them all and senior in command. But he might as easily have been writing a speech or rehearsing a new sketch with the Communal Theater of the Future. I knew I should be down there with him, helping in some way, proving I wasn’t just a drain on resources, Genya’s barefoot bride. But I craved the wind and the open air the way some craved wine or a lover’s touch.

  Suddenly we were slowing—the hollow grinding of wheels, the pitch dropping, the shockingly loud whistle crying out into the blue day, smoke back in our faces. I held tight to Slava, a sailor far from the sea.

  “Hurry up, brothers!” Slava called out to peasants, running toward us across their plowed fields, their green wheat, stumbling and scrambling to get word of the war, of the outside world. We were their newspaper, their telegraph, their harbinger of spring, dressed in the bright plumage of their wildest dreams. What a visitation we seemed to them, what an apparition. “Greetings from the revolution!” I shouted into the wind. We slowed but did not stop, while from the open doors of the press wagon two cars ahead, pamphlets flew out like birds escaping from fallen cages. “Down with Kolchak!” we shouted, shaking our fists. “We’ll win it yet! Good harvest!” And they waved back, clutching the white sheets in their hands. They grew smaller and smaller. One boy ran after the train, then stopped, watching us leave. I knew that heartache, watching the future leaving without you.

  Now Genya’s head poked up at the top of the ladder—his tawny hair close-cropped under his cap, face dark with worry. Spotting me, big belly in my lap, sitting happily among the soldiers and sailors, his anxious expression fell away, replaced by a quick grin, heavy-boned, handsome face alight, and then the clouds returned. “What do you think you’re doing up here?” he shouted as he crawled up onto the roof. The sailors and soldiers shouted when they saw him, helping pull him along. They all wanted to touch him, thump him, steady him—a man just like them, and yet, possessed of this song, a bargeman-Keats, giving voice to things they had dreamed but never expressed. They treated him as they would a popular sergeant, and he could have been one, if you didn’t know him better. For all his talk about smashing this and beating that, I knew he couldn’t even kill a spider, let alone the bourgeoisie, Whites, or the kulaks whose blood he was clamoring for. His tenderness was our secret. “Are you crazy?” he shouted to me. “Don’t you have one atom of sense in your head?”

  My father used to say the same thing. But Genya was the one climbing along the top of the train while it was still in motion. He cautiously settled next to me, steadied by the sailors, who moved over to make room for him.

  “Would you let your woman ride on top of a train?” he accused Slava.

  Slava shrugged. Generally, the civil war attitude was every man for himself. “You should be proud. A woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow. It’ll be good for the kid.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” Genya was still upset. “I couldn’t find you. I thought we’d left you behind,” he shouted into the wind. “Olga said she’d seen you come up here.”

  “It’s glorious!” I leaned against him, my face to the wind. “What are you doing up here? Don’t you have speeches to write?”

  “I had to find you. I couldn’t wait.” He pulled off my scarf and let my hair blow wild, whipping his eyes. “Had to see that flag flying.”

  I snatched my scarf back and with some difficulty got my hair back under it.

  “You are the craziest woman I’ve ever met.” He crammed his cap tighter on his head, touched my cheek with his enormous hand, the other circling my round belly, as I sat back against him. “There’s nobody as crazy as you. Other people listen to me now, in case you haven’t noticed. But you still treat me like that kid back on Grivtsova Alley.”

  And they did listen to him, asked him questions: Comrade, how should we word this? Comrade, news from the front. He was the one with the propusk from Lunacharsky himself, putting him in charge of the train’s theatrical-propaganda mission. The very idea that people thought him wise, that they turned to him, that they asked him things, not knowing who this was, made me laugh. A futurist poet, running a train during a civil war? It took some getting used to. But I thought of Varvara at Smolny, when I’d visited her to get help for my mother, how they’d pestered her for decisions, a nineteen-year-old girl. The revolution sped people along.

  “You need to grow up,” he yelled. “And stop pulling stunts like this. I have to concentrate—I’ve got other things to do besides worry about you.” He pulled me against him, kissing me, his shaven face rough against my neck and cheek. “You’ve got to start thinking like a mother, and not some wild girl.”

  I couldn’t believe what was coming out of his revolutionary mouth.

  “What if you slipped? What if you fell?”

  “Yes, Avdokia.” How boring. It was the worst thing about carrying a child, people were always telling me what to do. The merest stranger imagined he had the right to tell me how to live and when to breathe. As if I had become less adult for being a woman, a mother-to-be. “You’re more likely to fall than I am. Buivol!” Buffalo. “You’re an unstable character.”

  We rode along, enjoying the sun and the wind and the roar, happy to be together again, as we always should have been. Then the wind shifted and gave us a face full of smoke and cinders, everyone covered their noses and mouths, coughing, eyes stinging, before it cleared out again. Ah, the song of it all, the train, the fields green, the tiny villages nestled against the forest way out in the distance. The engineer pulled the whistle, and though it deafened you, the villagers would hear the train, and see us, bright on the horizon, and know they hadn’t been left out here all alone, that the revolution hadn’t forgotten them. They too were part of the Future. That was our task, to move behind the front and remind the peasants they had to keep the Red Army fed, to support what was being done for them, and not turn on our troops, not weaken us from the rear.

  I wondered when we would get to the front. Hard to know. We should have already been there, but we’d been sidelined again and again in favor of troop trains, or else our destination revised overnight due to a sabotaged bridge or track. In the end, what did it matter where we were or when we got there? “The villages are more important than the towns,” our commissar, Marfa Yermilova, inevitably reminded us. “The workers already know which side they’re on. Kolchak’s troops check the palms of prisoners, and hang the ones with calluses. It’s as good as a party card. But the villagers can go either way.”

  At the moment, Kolchak and his general, Gaida, were being pushed back to the Urals. The revolution had them on the run, but the war moved like the waves
, fronts were fluid, anything could happen on any day—the fleetness of cavalry, the surprise of local partisans. And you could never put aside the potential for pure peasant revolt against whoever’s troops were most recently marching through. A far cry from the trenches of the last war.

  And now we were riding into the thick of it, as full of fire as the locomotive pulling us eastward. My heart crashed in perfect time with the heartbeat of the Red October. Me and Genya, together again, heading toward the battle zone, his chest supporting my back, which didn’t even ache anymore, not at the moment, the shaking of the train loosened all the knots.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” he was saying in my ear. “And in that shithole. I hate those towns. They make me feel like I’m suffocating, just the look of them.”

  He understood. He came from a town smaller than Tikhvin. People thought it was safe in little burgs like that, that they could escape the chaos of the cities, but it was so stifling, without any of the city’s expansive joy. Lock the doors and the windows, then peek out from the curtains…Korsakova, Sergeevna, all of them. I still couldn’t believe I’d escaped.

  “The look on that guy’s face.” Genya laughed, nestling his cheek against my kerchief. “Don’t leave me, you whore!”

  Poor Styopa. What a nightmare. I couldn’t bring myself to laugh at his misery. “He wanted me to divorce you,” I said over my shoulder. “He was quite a catch around there. Category 1 rations.” Marrying someone for his rations, what a world. How near I’d been to giving up. That was the real world, Genya, a match like that more common than love. This was the dream.

  “You wouldn’t really have married him, would you?” Insecurity creeping into his voice.

  So many choices I’d never thought I’d have to make in this life. “I was hoping something else would come along.”

  “You wouldn’t have, though. Not in a million years.”

  As if he really knew me, knew what I was capable of doing with my back against the wall. Who ever knew another person so well? Not even we ourselves. I’d been a half-dozen different people since the day he crushed that silver-framed icon on the floor of the Poverty Artel.

  “Honestly, I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  “You’re Marina Makarova,” he said, kissing my cheek. “The girl I met at Wolf’s in the green coat with a white fur hat, dogged by her disapproving English governess.”

  I blushed, hoping the sailor hadn’t heard. My labor book said proletarian. That day at Wolf’s bookstore with Miss Haddon-Finch…If anyone had told me on that day that in five years I would be pregnant and riding on the roof of the agit-train Red October, wedged between my poet husband and a Kronstadt sailor…You’re an adventurer, Arkady had once said. Was it true? That brave, thoughtless girl? It was a long way from that girl to this one, a long, winding road. And a long way to go.

  All around us the soldiers were lounging, smoking, lying on their small packs, their guns tucked under their arms. They didn’t talk much, they sang or watched the horizon or slept on their rolled sheepskins. At night they made a fire away from the train, and I could hear their songs and laughter. Sometimes they went into a village for food and women. I hoped they paid for it, or at least didn’t attack anyone. But there was always that possibility. Even to us they always seemed a little dangerous, like a dog who was good when its master was around but you could never wholly trust on its own. Their faces were too similar to those I’d seen in the villages, to the ones who had taken Maryino, their cruelty as ready as their generosity.

  Genya shouted in my ear over the roar of the wind. “I should never have abandoned you, that day at the station. I’ve had plenty of time to regret it.”

  “I wish I’d gone with you.” With all my heart. I wanted to tell him something true, my big tender boy-man, something real. “I saw you after that. At the Miniature Theater. During First Anniversary.”

  His hands clutched me and I found myself looking up into his wild face, his deep hazel-green eyes searching mine like a man studying an icon’s fabled tears, trying to decide if they were real. “You were there? Why didn’t you stay? I came to Petrograd to find you!”

  Of course I couldn’t tell him why. “I got lost.” That was the truth.

  “What do you mean lost? How far was it to the stage?”

  “Farther than you can imagine,” I said. I hated being interrogated, hated it with the fury of someone without an alibi.

  “Why are you being so mysterious? I hate mysteries!” He shook me like a man shaking sand from his boots. “Have you been planted on this earth to torment me?”

  “Easy, brother,” said the sailor.

  Would he hit me? Would he throw me from the train? “God, I hate mysteries!” he shouted again, and let me go.

  The sailor glanced over, his pale blue eyes grinning. “Then you better forget about women, brother.” The other hitchhikers laughed. “Might as well give in and enjoy ’er, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

  Genya’s fit of temper seeped away. He was like that, his rages flared and subsided, but the ruddy tone of his face had drained to ashes. Well, perhaps that was what I was on earth for, to be the chaos in other people’s lives. Who can know what Fate has in store, the effect we’ll have on the lives of others, even the ones we love most dearly? Especially them. I took his great hand, pressed it to my cheek. It smelled of graphite and printer’s ink. “Look, for some reason we’ve found each other again. Let’s not quarrel.”

  “I came to Petrograd to find you,” he said again. “And you were there, and you just left?”

  I kissed his palm. I had to find something to distract him, like a mother substituting a toy for the sharp object in her child’s careless hands. “I saw you at the kino too. I went with Mina. You were a regular Fairbanks!” I knew I shouldn’t laugh, but I couldn’t help it. “Our Charlie.”

  There it was, his bashful grin. “It was shit. A stupid stunt.”

  “I was proud of you.”

  He sighed. “But did you dream of me, Marina? Did you lie awake at night, groaning with thoughts of how you tormented me? I haven’t gone a day without thinking of you.” He crushed me to his breast, speaking fast in my ear. “I’ll love you forever, you know. No matter what. Kick me like a dog, I’ll come crawling back.”

  I could see the sailor, his beret set back on his head, gazing up to heaven, as if praying God would come down and knock some sense into this poet.

  “This is the girl,” Genya announced, “I’ve been waiting for all my life.” He struggled to stand in a sudden rush of passion. We grabbed on to him, men bracing his legs, another holding on to his belt as he sang out to the sun:

  You! Redhead!

  You

  who laughed when the others

  bolted like chickens

  before the rumble of

  my iron wheels

  the roar of the furnace in my belly.

  They scattered

  Like horses

  before the black diabolical breath

  of my smokestacks.

  “Urah!” the soldiers shouted, the ones who could hear and the ones who couldn’t.

  You!

  without a whip or chair

  marched into my bearish den

  Unarmed,

  and clapped your little flower-hands

  ordering me to

  Dance, Bear!

  Dance!

  For you alone I dance

  in my cloddish way

  Baring my yellow teeth

  roaring

  my threadbare pelt

  rich with fleas,

  though I wanted to appear to you

  magnificent!

  He threw his arms wide and the men struggled to keep their grip.

  You clapped out a mazurka

  a waltz

  then stepped in for—

  a

  tango.

  “You’re not afraid?”

  The young girls trembled.

  “You’re not appalled?”<
br />
  The old maids hissed.

  But I was the one

  This bear in your arms

  Who loved

  and feared you the most.

  Only Genya could love like this, only he had enough heart for it. We held him there as he rode the rushing train, a Colossus reciting into the wind, superhuman, forgetting everything but his love, his greatest madness.

  Finally, he lowered himself back down to the roof, flushed with triumph. “Now tell me you didn’t dream of me.”

  I held him close, printing his rough woven Russian blouse and its button into my cheek. “Yes, you and all of this.”

  “This?” He pressed my hand to his chest, I could feel the bones, the muscles through his shirt. He grinned—his thick, strong brow, his big jaw. “It’s not a dream.” He shook Slava’s shoulder. “Or else we’re all dreaming it. The whole world is dreaming us now.”

  We lay on the lower bunk of our compartment after the train had stopped for the night. I missed the wind, the swaying of the train. We slept with the window down, batting at mosquitos that longed for our blood, our naked bodies fragrant from making love. At first, he’d been afraid of hurting the baby, but the baby liked it just fine. “Let me guess. You and Apollonia.” The blond actress.

  “Why not?” he said. “I didn’t know that I’d ever see you again. Did you save yourself for me?”

  “Of course.” It made him laugh, that wonderful deep sound. His hand on my belly. “I assure you, the conception was immaculate. Your girlfriend’s taking it pretty well, I have to say. She’s only spilled hot tea on me three times.” Apollonia regularly bumped into me in the canteen or in the corridor, especially if I was carrying something hot. Well, I couldn’t blame her for it. I could deal with her false smiles far better than Zina Ostrovskaya’s sharp-toothed attacks in the days of the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.