Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  People were watching me. It was important how we conducted ourselves. Women needed to learn how to be in this new world. They needed our example. I had thought that bigheaded at the time, when Sergeevna had said it, but here I noticed women eyeing me with frank curiosity. This mere girl, part of the Red October! And pregnant too. Anybody can certainly do anything now, can’t they? I had to straighten up, though the June heat was terrific. Strike the correct pose, neither humble nor arrogant, friendly, brave, efficient, compassionate, but tough-minded enough for war. Like the heroic woman on the side of the train, posed before the factories with her firm steady face. As though I expected someone to come paint me.

  9 Izhevsk

  We passed through great cities and little nowhere villages with their primitive stations and level crossings, women selling bread and milk as we moved up behind the lines. Now we were getting close to the battle, and saw the burned-out hamlets. Sometimes we could hear guns. We took on more and more soldiers heading back to their units. The summer raced on, the last few weeks of my pregnancy. Surely I could not get any bigger. All my bravery was gone. I was weary, feverish, irritable. No longer did I help out in the kino car, let alone yearn to ride on the roof of the carriage with the soldiers. It was as much as I could bear to simply lie in our compartment, sweating, lulled by the ta-tick-a-TICK, ta-tick-a-TICK, and the swaying of the car, listening to the actors in the next compartment arguing and playing cards. I nodded off, dreaming that the car was burning, everyone locked inside.

  Genya came in from one of his meetings and sat down with me on my narrow bunk, wrung out a cloth in warmish water and put it on my head. He lay down beside me, squeezing me to the wall. He was too hot, and I was too big, we both were. “The 25th Rifle Division is closing in. Kolchak’s on the run,” he said, tucking a strand of my sweaty hair behind my ear. “They’re saying Trotsky’s going to start transferring troops toward Denikin if they succeed. Look, we’ve got a new poster!” He picked something off the floor, sat up, thank God, unrolled a sheet of paper. A single Red Army soldier in a giant red circle on the left, White officers hiding behind the Urals as if behind a theater curtain on the right. It was good, but I was too listless to join in his excitement and I had to pee again. When I returned from the WC, I crawled back into the bunk and fell asleep as he was telling me about the 25th Rifles. Ta-tick-a-TICK.

  Our next stop was Izhevsk, a big armaments town, liberated from the Whites just three weeks previously. Representatives from their soviet met us at the station, as well as a good crowd of local Tatars and Udmurts, the latter a people I’d never seen before—so many redheads! I felt strangely at home, stylishly dressed in a new pair of bast shoes I’d bought from a peasant woman back in—what was it? Uva? Kilmezh? I could no longer fit my feet into my boots. Swollen, they looked like monstrous potatoes, my legs like peeled birch trunks. There was no difference between my ankle and my calf. Yet it was important to Genya that I join the others, to stand around endlessly in the summer sun, meeting the representatives of the various factory committees, listening to their speeches and our own. We staged our skits, showed our film—I no longer took responsibility for packing the car or reading the speech but instead found a scrap of shade to huddle into, after which we were hosted by the town soviet for tea and the little pastries made by the local women.

  It was marvelous to be inside a building slightly cooler than the train. And we sat down—in chairs! I loved these people. They even treated us to a concert of women’s singing. The harmonies were angelic, all traditional songs and not, for once, “The Red Army Is Strongest of All.” And they made much of me, pregnant and redheaded. On the Red October they ignored me if not regarding me as an unnecessary payload, an embarrassment. But here I was the object of interest and attention. Shameful to say, I lapped it up. Most of all, I was grateful for those savory pies and chilled juices. They withheld nothing from us, they who had been so recently under the brutal White thumb.

  After the refreshments, once more we traipsed into the sun as an old Bolshevik from their committee, his face still swollen and bruised from a beating, gave us the tour of the town. He made sure we heard about every moment of the occupation.

  “They killed a thousand people, right here.” He pointed to gibbets still standing in the square, the poles at angles, cut ropes still attached. “They started with the committee, workers, Bolsheviks, but they got all the way down to students, even schoolkids.” The journalists took notes and asked questions, our photographer documented the massacre. I could feel the rope around my own neck, the prickly hemp, my hands tied behind my back. The baby lay like twenty pounds of cement in the bowl of my aching hips. “Then they decided it was taking too long to hang them all. Come,” he indicated, “I’ll show you.”

  We set off for a long march through the town, following the old man and his comrades. It was a good-sized city, and it was so hot. Although the man limped from some kind of wound, he covered ground fast. A lake glittered green and blue, tantalizing, but we never got close to it. I found myself lagging farther and farther behind the main party. I could keep only Genya in view, a full head taller than the next tallest man. He glanced back every so often, smiled, shrugged, What can I do? Matvei Grossman dropped back to walk with me. We followed them to the great Izhevsk arms plant, the place still humming, unlike the bulk of the factories we’d seen in our travels. No labor desertion here.

  Outside the munitions plant, the old Bolshevik pointed to a stone wall. “There. There are the workers of Izhevsk.” It was pocked with bullet holes, smeared with brown stains in the blistering sun. No one had to encourage the workers here to beat out rifles and machine guns, stuff shells with gunpowder. They worked double shifts, triple. Their committee, what was left of it, said they were producing five hundred rifles a day, whatever it would take to smash the Whites. Our soldiers were all offered ammunition as souvenirs, the nicest present of the day.

  I felt worse as we headed back to the train, something about the food and the heat and the bloodstains, the gibbets. My legs would just not keep up. I had ferocious heartburn, my back and hips ached, and all I wanted to do was lie down. The bast shoes rubbed. I took them off and went barefoot on the hot stones. Now I felt the front—just three weeks ago, they had been right here. The wall, the bullet holes. How foolish I was to think that the Red October would be a means of escape.

  I fought tears. I wouldn’t let them see me, hard-bitten Bolsheviks with a job to do. There would be no sympathy for Genya’s fellow-traveling wife. We were both so foolish, I saw it now. He should have refused me, but his defiant optimism had prevailed. He was no more practical than I. Sure they would all love me, sure I would fit in—believing in the image of himself, the giant in seven-league boots, heading for the Future as if into the rising sun. Loping ahead with politicals and the Izhevsk Committee, he had no idea whether I was still with them or had fallen into a ditch or been kidnapped by bandits.

  Matvei and I brought up the rear. Aksakov, the train’s brakeman, gave me a hand up into the dining car. “The 25th Rifles have just taken Ufa,” he told us.

  Ufa, the last major White center before the Urals. Now there was only Perm. The tide had turned. Admiral Kolchak was in retreat, back to his Siberian stronghold. The Red Heart of Russia had held. Saved by Chapaev and the 25th Rifles, that division was all anyone talked about these days. “But,” Aksakov added, “there’s fighting at Glazov. Gaida’s leading a counterattack.”

  In the dining car, the others had already gathered at the map permanently affixed to the wall. A white tack at Glazov, to our northwest, and a red one, the 25th Rifles, at Ufa in the southeast. “The Whites’ll have to come back this way if they don’t want to be cut off,” Matvei said.

  And here was our train, a piece of cardboard with a drawing of the locomotive, at Izhevsk, right between them. We were sandwiched between the two forces.

  Genya and Marfa Yermilova, Antyushin, the sailors and soldiers, propagandists and journalists, smoked, argued, rubbed
their faces, trying to anticipate the next step. Marfa Yermilova in her wooden-jawed voice, declared, “They’ve taken Ufa, that’s the main thing. It’s not the first time we’ve faced this.”

  “But which way will the Whites head?” asked one of the propagandists. “Will they try to retake Izhevsk?”

  We stared at the map as if it were a crystal ball.

  “We should go straight to Glazov,” said Grigory from Krasnaya Gazeta. “See what’s happening.” Obviously he wanted to get as close to the action as he could, and damn the fate of the agit-train.

  “Maybe we’ll send you ahead to reconnoiter.” The sailor, Slava, settled down in a chair turned backward, took out his cigarette makings. “I’ve got to think of all these duffers.” He waved at the rest of us. “This train’d be a catch for Gaida. Imagine those headlines back in Omsk. That’d be some agitprop.”

  Everyone was waiting to see what Marfa Yermilova would say, but she hadn’t moved, she just kept looking at the map, weighing the possibilities.

  Grigory said something about taking Slava up on his offer—though it was sheer braggadocio. They settled into the various chairs and benches, gazing up at the map as if the situation might change if they looked at it long enough, and began to discuss a course of action. Marfa Yermilova was right, it wasn’t the first time we had no idea where we were going. A bridge blown, a band of saboteurs, a town already in ruins. Sometimes we lost the telegraph completely.

  “Ufa maybe?” said Kostya, more as a question. “We’d be right on the heels of the 25th.” The journalists were dying to see Chapaev in action, their heroic leader—there were already songs about him.

  “We could,” Genya said, sitting on the table, one foot propped on the bench. “Do some agitprop, make sure the locals will feed the soldiers when the 5th Army gets there.” Another red tack.

  “Perm was our destination,” said Antyushin. “Then across to Ekaterinburg if the 2nd gets that far.”

  Behind the Urals. It frightened me, the point of no return. I waited as long as I could, but it didn’t look like they were going to reach an agreement anytime soon. My guess was that we’d end up sleeping on a siding here in Izhevsk. Whether it was Ufa or Glazov or Perm, I hoped Marfa Yermilova and Genya decided to stay away from the worst of it, that we would just go on bringing the Soviet message to peasants behind the lines and avoid being attacked by them. They looked on all of us, Red or White, as invaders. And I prayed that we wouldn’t cross the Urals.

  Which will you protect, the revolution or your pregnant wife? I remembered Marfa Yermilova asking Genya.

  Overcome with fatigue and the heat and my immensity, my roiling guts, I staggered down to our compartment, peed in a chamber pot, and lay down on the bottom bunk. I tried propping myself up, tried lying on my side. I wished I could have gone up to the top bunk, more air, but I could no more have climbed there than fly.

  There was not a single position in which I could lie in comfort. A peasant woman in one of those towns had told me the heartburn meant the baby would be born with a full head of hair. A boy, she predicted, as had Korsakova. Iskra. It meant Spark. A revolutionary name for a child of the revolution. How Genya loved to talk to him, lying with his head in my lap and his ear pressed to my giant belly. He looked like a boy himself, making up poems, telling him how he would march through Moscow on his daddy’s shoulders. They would be so tall the domes would look like toadstools, so high that Iskra would have to duck so he wouldn’t bump his head on the clouds.

  This was the way I liked Genya best—silly, tender Genya with all those sounds in his head. I wished he’d decide whether it was Ufa or Perm and come back here—though to do what? I didn’t know. I wished I had a woman friend on the train, but everyone was busy, and aside from Matvei, and Slava, I’d made no friends here. I knew I didn’t belong, try as I might to be useful. I was just dead weight—not journalist, or soldier, or actor, just an awkward body to step around. My loneliness and irritation blended together with the terrible buzz of the cicadas outside through the lowered window, so loud I could hear nothing else. Though I knew if I could hear, I wouldn’t want to. I knew what I was missing, actors in the next compartment arguing over Meyerhold or Ibsen, playing poker, squabbling over missing belongings, fast fornications, drunken arguments when someone got hold of a bit of local samogon, all the topics they pursued when out of earshot of the soldiers and the sober propagandists. That and the heat and my head and the heartburn all combined into one huge ball of misery.

  I wadded my sheepskin together with Genya’s coat into a bolster and propped myself into a seated position that was halfway comfortable. I’d just begun to nod off when I woke, urgently sick, and vomited into the chamber pot. How sorry I felt for those little cabbage pies, they had been so good! Blubbering like an infant. Why hadn’t I realized how hard this was going to get? Normally I didn’t allow myself the indulgence of self-pity, but with no one around to notice that I wasn’t the stoic I pretended to be, I didn’t bother to stop myself. Damn Genya! Damn the Red October! I wished I’d never seen either one of them. Why didn’t I have more sense? Surely Genya must have known it was no place for a woman about to bear a child. Everyone hated me on this train, no one wanted me here. Couldn’t he have known it would be like this? How jealous everyone would be of him? Why couldn’t he have had a scrap of sense?

  I always thought other people knew things, that was my weakness. Kolya, Genya, my father. And then I was brutally disappointed—over things I should have known myself.

  Things I did know, and pushed aside.

  I rinsed the chamber pot with water and threw the stinking contents out the window.

  It was not just the pregnancy but the flu. My misery was complete. I didn’t bother even coming out of the car now when we stopped to deliver our Soviet message, our revolutionary passion play. I felt sick and peevish. The only one I wanted near me was Genya. I wanted him to recite poems for me, and rub my back, and tell me he loved me—and not bring me up to date on the progress of Chapaev and the 5th Army, Ufa and Perm, the gift of a whole goat someone gave us. He brought some in for me, but the smell of it—I made him take it outside. Everything smelled awful, my dirty hair, my own body. At one stop he tenderly washed my hair in hot water from the boiler. I wished I could have just crawled into it.

  I lay in a thin nightdress in my bunk and dreamed one bad dream after another. I dreamed I was back at school—that the Whites were using it as a headquarters. They’d won the war, and now we would have to pay the price. They herded us all into the ballroom: Mina, and Lisa Podharzhevskaya, and Natalya Ionian, I didn’t know she’d gone there too. Magda Ionian was there, though not Varvara—strange. And they were searching all the girls. I knew it was me they were looking for. Magda had told them I was there, Magda the spy.

  Then a woman, an old woman with blue eyes, beckoned me silently to a wall between the windows, where she opened a door, a hidden door. How could there be a door on the outside wall? But she popped it open and helped me through, closing it after me. It was dark, but I found a metal door, and stairs going down, dripping and wet, a maze of corridors with pipes running overhead. I got lost. Which way to Bolshaya Morskaya? The Whites were overhead, they knew I was here somewhere. If I kept going down, eventually there must be a door, an exit…except that water lapped the bottom stairs. The basement had flooded. Rats swam in it, trying to get away.

  When I woke, the whole bench was wet, right down to the worn leather. My nightshirt soaked through, the sheet a soggy mess. I lay there for who knew how long, calling for help, but no one heard me. The train had stopped. They were probably out bringing the revolution to some village or visiting a site of outrage. I lay there weeping, sick, inert. No one was going to come. No Avdokia to change my wet nightie and remake my bed, wipe my face and arms with cold water.

  Unsteadily, I rose and pulled on my dress—backward, it proved—and with what seemed extraordinary effort, gathered the clammy sheet and wet gown to bundle out into the corridor.
Maybe I could wash or dry it somehow, or at least get it off my bunk. I don’t know who was doing the thinking. I had the idea I could go outside and hang them to dry—but I couldn’t exactly hang them from the line outside the kinotheater in the middle of a show. Yes, they were just starting, I could hear Genya declaiming. I stumbled toward the rear of the car, toward the toilets I hadn’t visited for days; I’d only gotten up to use the chamber pot and fallen back onto the berth. I focused on the door at the end of the corridor when suddenly I couldn’t see it anymore, I was falling, and the only thing I remembered thinking was At least I have the sheet.

  When consciousness returned, I could not force myself to get up from the floor of the corridor. Now I knew—it was the baby coming. Wouldn’t someone help me? I didn’t know anything about childbirth, the wet and mysterious roots of life. Get up. If I didn’t, I might give birth right here in the corridor, lying on a wet sheet. I was afraid to stand, but afraid not to. What if I blacked out again? I called out, “Please. Someone.” I could hardly bear to hear my own voice, how weak it was. I could die here in the corridor, and no one would know until they finished their bloody agitka. Oh God, please let it go fast. But the light didn’t change. I couldn’t tell if I lay there for a minute or an hour.

  Then voices. Matvei, leaning over me. And Genya was here, thank God. And Faina…no, Apollonia…They were still in their makeup. Genya apologized over and over. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t think—There’s always someone around.” He looked so terrified and guilty, I would have teased him except that the pain had returned, and shivers, and a flash of unbearable heat.