Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “She’ll be okay,” he said, reaching over me for a cup of tea on the floor, drinking, the liquid spilling down his chin. “You’re my wife. My very pregnant wife.” He tickled my belly with light fingers and the child writhed under his hand. Our child.

  I snuggled back against him. Hot, but oh, such a pleasure. My body remembered him. Mine. “Whatever happened to Zina? Why isn’t she here? Did you finally kill her off?”

  “You never liked her,” he said. “I couldn’t understand it. Too much alike, maybe.”

  My turn to laugh. That jealous, spiteful little ferret? Was he even serious? “Idiot.” I tried his forearm with my teeth, it was salty and hard, like a gnarled tree root.

  We could hear the actors in the next compartment, arguing about playing Sorin in The Seagull.

  “Was it another woman who finally drove her off?”

  He buried his nose in my neck. “Woman? Woman? How could I have replaced you with a single woman? I needed boatloads of women. Whole cities of them. Sometimes the flat looked like Nikolaevsky station.”

  I wrapped his arms tighter around me. Finally, I was content. Though I still suffered from heartburn whenever I lay down, it was bliss to be here with a man who knew me, remembered me, loved me—my husband. To be together again, doing something purposeful, something exciting, with our future on the way in several dimensions. “How about Marfa Yermilova?” I teased him. “I sense something there.”

  Our political commissar, with her drooping mouth and unimpressed eyes, her black cigarette holder. I stayed out of her way as much as I could. When I first came onto the train, she and Genya had argued. I heard them in the corridor. There’s no room here for fellow-travelers.

  She’s not, she’s my wife. She’s reliable. I vouch for her.

  But what if you have to choose? One day you may have to put the Red October into harm’s way. Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife?

  I’m a Bolshevik. I know my duty, he responded. Don’t worry about me.

  I hoped it would never come to a choice. In any case, the front was still far away, and we were here in each other’s arms in the half-light of a northern June midnight, growing together again, the baby dancing under his hand.

  Jolting along in the hot afternoon in the train’s canteen car, the baby lay still, as he always did when something was going on. I could feel him in there, listening. He had finally dropped, lessening the pressure on my lungs but making me clumsy. I swayed like a sailor when I walked. I could no longer navigate the ladder to the roof of the train, the sailors wouldn’t help me anymore. They said Genya didn’t like it, and for once, I didn’t argue. I made myself useful, mostly by staying out of the way. Usually I ended up camped out in the canteen car where the journalists gathered to bang out their stories on typewriters or scribble their impressions in notebooks to be wired back to their respective newspapers. They came from Moscow and Petrograd, as far as Kiev and Warsaw. That day, the young reporter from Kiev was especially glum. He hunched over his typewriter, his head caged in his hands as if birds trapped inside his skull were trying to peck their way out.

  The others ignored him, but I sat down next to him. “Matvei, you okay?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s a pogrom,” said another journalist, Kostya, from Petrograd Pravda. “The Ukraine’s breaking out like smallpox.”

  Pogrom. The random community violence against the Jews. And he was a Jew, Matvei Grossman. He must be worried about his family back home.

  “Kiev’s a White shithole,” said Grigory something, a sharp-tongued man from Krasnaya Gazeta. He rolled a makhorka and lit it, preparing to fumigate us in the hot car. “What a sty.”

  Matvei groaned, sighed. “It’s not just Kiev. It’s the whole Ukraine. Kiev, Kishinev, down to the smallest village. They’re throwing us to the wolves.” He drank from the battered metal cup at his elbow.

  The train swayed, the tea swayed, the hot wind blew through the open windows but cooled nothing. Gradually the typing began again. A group from the propaganda car came in, not Genya but three of his writers, plus Marfa Yermilova and her deputy, Antyushin. Originally from a peasant family, the commissar exuded confidence and capacity. I knew she excelled at persuading peasants to support the Red cause. She was about forty, a brisk walker, a fast talker, authoritative, and brooked no resistance. “We just had an excellent meeting,” she announced, pouring herself tea from the samovar—no shortage of hot water on the Red October. “The local peasants seem solid.”

  “They’ll turn on you without blinking,” said the reporter from Kiev.

  “That’s why we’re here,” she said. “To make sure they don’t.”

  Antyushin smirked. “Worried, Motka?”

  “Have you seen a pogrom, Antyushka?” Matvei said, his defiant chin quivering. “I was in Kishinev in ’03, during the Easter pogrom. Our neighbors came still damp from the bishop’s blessing. There was one woman, Sara Iosifovna, they drove nails into her eyes, and watched her run around screaming. And when they got tired of that, they killed her by nailing them in the rest of the way.” In ’03, he was probably five. I wished I could hold him, but it was not done on the Red October. “They broke into our houses and threw us out the windows. They cut the glazier’s balls off—he was trying to protect some girls.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Marfa Yermilova, interrupting him. “They’re violent and unpredictable. But they’ll feed us if they think it’s in their interests.”

  “Moskovitz,” he said, looking down at his typewriter. “The glazier. They castrated him, then they trampled him to death.”

  “Do you believe in what we’re doing, Comrade Grossman?” the commissar snapped.

  “It’s our only hope,” he said.

  “Remember that.”

  I remembered the mob in Haymarket Square, the violence of the bread riot. Varvara scolding the woman in line over that hideous pamphlet—They’re dragging the Jews in front of you like a bullfighter’s cape. And now it was happening again—not just in one village but in hundreds of villages, even in big cities. We had to win this war—the thought of what losing would mean was too hideous to contemplate.

  “Denikin’s whipping them up,” said Marfa Yermilova, perched on the corner of the table with her tin cup, holster strapped across her breast. “That’s how desperate he is, trying to catalyze peasant support by serving up rape and murder. It’s an ancient recipe.”

  “So much for your noble Cossack,” said Antyushin.

  “Swans,” said the man from Krasnaya Gazeta. “So poetic.”

  I thought of Volodya in the Denikin army. Would he be part of a pogrom? I hoped he had deserted and joined the Red cause, or just slipped away across the border. Though I suspected he had not. I imagined he, like Father, had made some strange peace with his conscience. All for the noble cause. Like a frog in a pot of water, simmering slowly—it didn’t have a moment where it decided This is too hot. One adjusted and adjusted, bearing each new disgusting compromise until it was too late. I felt suddenly ill, but didn’t have the energy to get up. I wished someone would make me a cup of tea. I moved closer to the window, hot wind in my face.

  “Wait till the Siberians come,” said Grigory. “They make Denikin’s atamans look like schoolchildren. When they took Omsk, they flogged people with iron rods until the flesh tore right from their bodies.”

  The heat, this talk…and we were heading right for them, not to Denikin but to Kolchak and the Siberians. Suddenly I pictured my belly ripped open, the baby flung out onto the tracks. I had not really considered what would happen if the agit-train were taken. Would I be raped before I died, my head cut off? I felt a dark wave of nausea rise up, and then I was falling backward.

  Matvei caught me. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have started. Could someone get her a cup of tea?”

  Kostya brought me a cup, sweet with saccharine. But the talk of horrors continued: how Ataman Semyonov in the Transbaikal decorated the perimeter of h
is barbaric capital with hanged men and women like banners at a country fair. Freight cars of people were machine-gunned along the railway, buried in mass graves or not even buried, just left for the ravens. “Not even Bolsheviks,” said one of Genya’s sloganeers, Tudovkin. “Just peasants, anybody who gets in the way.”

  Matvei was holding my hands. “Should I get Kuriakin?” he asked softly.

  I shook my head, leaning against the half-open window, sipping sweet tea with its bitter undertone. There was a metaphor.

  “They’ll live to regret it.” Marfa Yermilova’s sure voice rang out. “When they’ve got peasant revolt behind the lines, and us in front of them, they’ll understand that they dug their own graves.”

  “Unless they get to us first,” Matvei said under his breath.

  I had not been taking this seriously enough. It was up to us to make sure the Soviet Republic survived. Everyone, man, woman, child, sack of grain, scrap of fuel, and Soviet bullet, had to go into this. It was our job to reignite revolutionary hope in the hearts of workers and peasants, soldiers who could so easily desert if the war went badly. As I gazed out at the wide green land spread out under the blameless sky, lines of trees in the distance, the green of June, it was hard to imagine how badly the war might be going. How much misery this beautiful land had already absorbed, how much blood. Mongol and Slav, peasant and soldier. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pogroms—what cynicism, to buy the allegiance of peasants with the coin of unbridled violence, as if it were a tasty treat! Indulging hatreds as if it were a glorious and righteous thing. Did they really think it was? Or did they know it was evil in their hearts, and rejoice in being encouraged to evil? Still damp from the bishop’s blessing. There was certainly something perverse in human nature—and dangerous to believe it was not there.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Rech’, the Kadet newspaper, and my father and his friends, who were rationally deciding to use pogroms as an organizing tool. What happened to your English sense of fair play, Papa? Your John Stuart Mill? I knew what he would say. It’s terrible, but what else can we do? Once we’ve stopped the Bolshevik madness, we’ll find a way to put things to rights.

  But you could not reclaim your soul once you’d sold it to the devil.

  What was it in human beings that delighted in viciousness? Those crowds in the Ukraine that Easter, gripped by the miracle, their dazzled eyes falling on those who resisted salvation. Foreigners for hundreds of years, never accepted. Falling on them like wolves. Served up to distract from the master’s true ends. Don’t look at our failures! Look over there, those are the ones. The weak, the unprotected, the different.

  But our side was capable of the same. I’d seen the Podharzhevskys digging in the snow. I’d been in the cells of the Cheka. Go ahead, we’ll look the other way. No, we’ll applaud you! Something inside us gloried in cruelty. Dostoyevsky would say this is why we needed Christ. But religion was its birthing place, and belief the rails it ran upon. What we needed was more pity and less belief. Wasn’t it Kolya who said that idealists were the most dangerous ones? Yes, but also dangerous were the ones who believed in nothing. I’d once believed human beings were intrinsically good. But now I knew, decency and goodness were things you had to fight for, cultivate and protect, precious crops you had to water and guard and feed and nourish, to absorb the soulless viciousness that also lay dormant within the human breast.

  Genya and I stared out the window in the corridor at the thousands gathered on the platforms at Nizhny Novgorod, his arm around my neck. I had not yet visited such a big city with the Red October. I was aware of how we looked together, the strapping Soviet hero and me, the Red Madonna in my kerchief, our determined profiles. Like figures painted on a train. And how he loved this, waving from the window. And why shouldn’t they cheer? Nizhny was a Soviet citadel. The workingmen of this Volga metropolis knew very well what awaited them if they lost. Even as they cheered the Red October, I suspected there would be those here who could just as easily turn into a mob, become a pogrom. But we were here for a specific job, to solidify the populace for the revolution, not to fight a cosmic war against the forces of unreason.

  There were cheers, but I felt their fear underneath, their desperation. An edge of panic, though the front was still far away. Could we reassure them? No, but that was not our purpose here. It was to steel them, anodize their fear into a reckless courage.

  And then came the practiced readying of the train for the literary-theatrical agitprop show.

  I stood in the crowd, watching Genya take center stage in the boxcar that was the Theater of the Future.

  “Comrades!” he shouted.

  Who’s the shadow on the wall?

  The one who crawls

  Under the bed. Behind the shed?

  The one they said

  Except for him, or him,

  or her—

  He pointed at members of the crowd.

  We might have saved it all.

  People glanced nervously around themselves, as if to say, Not me. I’m here.

  When your grandkids ask

  Where were you

  when Kolchak came to call?

  You want to be the one to say

  “I hid in the cellar, mal’chik.

  I saved my skin but not my soul.”

  “No!” they began to shout. “For shame!” Was it the crowd or our actors, wandering among them, stirring them up?

  Now he opened his arms, as if to embrace them.

  Without you, there’s nothing.

  No grain in the sack

  No bullets in the guns

  No trains on the tracks.

  Without you, the sun won’t rise in the sky!

  Without you, the moon won’t glow!

  Who is walking with us?

  Who will fight by our side?

  The roll of thunder shook the ground. People waved their caps, held up their babies as if to be blessed. How brave they were, with the front still five hundred miles to the east.

  I made my way to the kino car, to prepare it for the screenings. Inside, the projectionist was readying himself for the rush after the speeches with his usual deep knee bends and great exhales, shaking out his legs as if he were about to run a race. He checked his films, while two soldiers and I straightened out benches, opened the windows, and pulled down the shades. I settled the first of the gramophone disks onto the turntable and went forward to use the privy in the next car one last time. Since the baby dropped, I was peeing a hundred times a day.

  When we heard them sing “The Internationale,” we knew it was our turn. We opened the doors of the darkened carriage, signaling we were open for business. The soldiers got the people lined up and I helped them into the car—children and mothers, working girls and machinists, prostitutes and soldiers and peasants who might never have seen a kino before, packing them onto the benches. A woman had chickens in a basket. Should I make her leave them outside? No, she would just set them in the front with me. “There’s room for a few more,” I shouted. “Squeeze in a little there.” Just as Misha had done in a far different life, packing sitters onto benches for Mina’s camera, but without this enormous belly—it grounded me, it gave me a certain authority. Finally, we were at capacity. “No smoking, Comrades. Film can burn in a glass of water.” Amazing how many bodies we could squeeze into the train car, knee to rump all the way to the back. The lowered shades on the windows glowed golden as we shut the doors. I prayed no one would panic. Soon the air grew pungent with the stink of hot, unwashed people.

  As the film flickered through the gate, I stayed close to the door, cranking the gramophone to accompany the showing of Day One of the Revolution. The first time I saw it, I’d been startled to find they’d used Solomon Katzev’s photographs of the Pavlovsky regiment marching behind their band in Palace Square, and the red flag flying over the Winter Palace. Near the end, a shot from the first anniversary left me speechless—a spectacular though somewhat blurry night shot of a hydroplane flying low
over the lighted ships on the Neva. It never failed to give me a shock. My photograph had made it all the way from the prow on the Rostral Column to this steaming kino in Nizhny Novgorod.

  Sweat dripped down between my shoulders and pooled into the waistband of my skirt, soaking my blouse. The air was as thick as felt. Yet I never got tired of seeing the people’s faces as they watched the films. Some watched dumbly, fascinated by the flickering display. But with others, you could see the cells of their brains putting connections together, realizing they were a part of this. They were watching their own story, major players in the drama that unfolded not only in front of them on our little screen but outside the doors of this railway car. It was they who were propelling history. Not the senseless violence of pogroms acted out of their own frustration and rage but forward movement, toward a better world. Just as Lunacharsky had hoped from his Revolutionary Carnival. Entertainment and enlightenment together could work to defuse mob rule and transform it into a citizenry. I found my script and read to them an excerpt from Lenin’s speech at the dedication of the Marx Memorial last October, and then we showed one last newsreel about the battle to preserve Soviet Russia—and had to open the doors. It took about seven minutes in all. No one fainted, no one burned to death. Only six more hours to go.

  Outside on the platform, our sailors made speeches to local soldiers and played recordings of Trotsky and Bukharin on gramophones. Listening to that cacophony, I couldn’t help wondering whose gramophones those were. In what rooms had they sat, what waltzes and tangos had they played? What had become of Kolya’s gramophone, to which we’d danced the tango? Ah little feet, where are you now? It was probably performing hard service on a train platform just like this, the RCA dog with the cocked head…His Master’s Voice. How funny to think of his perplexity at hearing Trotsky’s rousing voice coming through His Master’s bell. All that was a century ago—no more tangos, only speeches and choruses of “The Red Army Is Strongest of All.” I felt tears upwelling, and shook myself. I was an agitator on the Red October, how dare I be nostalgic for such things. Only I’d gotten so sentimental lately. It must be the pregnancy.