Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  The midwife handed my sheepskin and bundle to the young one. The silent peasant drove off. “This is my daughter,” the midwife said. The young one’s braid was blond, while the midwife’s was gray, and her cheeks were as round as peaches. Other than that, they were the same woman. I was seeing across time, from youth to age. There is no time, the Ionians said. It’s just your place on the spiral.

  They led me, not to the izba but down a path overgrown with grass and starred with flowers, to a pond covered in duckweed. In a clearing stood a bathhouse. The baba, the woods, the bathhouse. I’d been brought through time to a Russia that existed before it even bore the name. I vomited into the grass, though I had little in my stomach, a sour thread.

  At the threshold, another young woman waited, identical to the first, but wearing a red sarafan with a plain white blouse, her braid the same blond, her face the same moon. The bathhouse was crude and dark and I was afraid. I balked, fighting weakly, but the midwife and her daughters shoved me inside. A small wooden hut, the three of them tall and broad shouldered and buxom. Where would there be room for me? Candles lit the darkness, and the floor was strewn with straw and fragrant herbs—such a strong scent after the fresh air, very green, both bitter and sweet, artemisia and chamomile and mint, and it made me feel oddly less sick—a surprise. I hadn’t imagined myself feeling better even for a moment.

  In the red corner, a lamp glowed before an icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos in her black robe, the Child nuzzling her cheek, her face steeped in pity. I glanced back at the daylight as they closed the door. Goodbye! The next time I saw the sun, I’d have a child in my arms…if I ever saw it again. So this would be my arena, my gladiator’s pit—this bench, this stool, this straw…I wondered how many women had come here for their children’s birth. How many had lived? How many had died? Had it been scrubbed since the last time?

  They laid my sheepskin on the simple bench. The midwife bowed, crossed herself, and knelt in the herbs, as did the daughters. They pulled me down between them. Together we prayed for intercession, a swift delivery. I noticed a second icon next to the Vladimirskaya, a Theotokos I’d never seen—veilless in a red cloak, long red hair flowing freely over her shoulders. I’d never seen a redheaded Virgin. That had to be a good sign. My lips moved along in silent prayer, my teeth chattering with fever. O my All-Gracious Queen Theotokos, my hope who befriends orphans and intercedes for strangers, joy of those who sorrow…

  Suddenly the pain returned, and I was falling. They grabbed me beneath my arms and hauled me to the bench, where I shivered and whined through a contraction like a sick dog, I was so tired, shaking. How could it be this cold in July? “My coat,” I whispered through my cracked lips. The blue daughter covered me with the sheepskin. Her kindness made me cry. For Mercy has a human heart / Pity, a human face…The hard bench was good to press my back upon. The midwife and the red daughter continued their prayers as the blue one pulled off her kerchief and took down her braid, and then her sister’s, and her mother’s. She unbuttoned my dress, checked me all over, chanting, “Untie, unloose the knots and chains, take your golden keys, O Theotokos, take your keys and unlock the fleshy gates, may the child come easily.” She took a rope with knots in it and held it over me, untied them one by one.

  My own high-pitched moans appalled me, but I couldn’t hold them back. I’d always thought of myself as a bold girl, but I’d just been naive. Another lost child in need of salvation. Now the two daughters pulled me up, the blue and the red, and walked me around the stool like a man in a prison yard, like a horse on a water wheel. I couldn’t imagine hurting this much. Not even Chekists could have invented such a torture. And women lived through this every day. Holy Theotokos, make it stop! I wanted to lie down so badly, just for a little while, but they wouldn’t let me. The midwife left me with these twin dolls, her younger selves. “Please don’t go,” I sobbed.

  “I’ll be back for the birth.” She laughed and the door opened…Ah, light! Then it closed again, sealing me into the dark like the lid of a coffin.

  Time slipped its track. The hut was a portal into the deep past. All my ideas, all my cleverness, my so-called personality made no difference here. The thing I was, a woman, a body, no more profound than a cow, a mare in foal, a bitch whelping under a porch. Whimpering, shivering. No thoughts, no mind. What good was all our revolutionary dumb show, pamphlets, agitki like so many children’s skits performed for parents and doting relatives? No manifesto was going to help me now. Holy Mother of God, surely the baby was coming soon, surely this couldn’t go on…“When is this going to stop?”

  “What, you thought it just pops out like a pea from a pod?” My pretty keeper laughed. “You haven’t even started.”

  I wept, sagged in their arms. I couldn’t go through with this. It was a mistake. I should have gone back to Petrograd, to the modern mothers’ home on Kamenny Island. I remembered how clean it was, the nurses, the revolutionary babies…“I can’t do this.”

  “Well, who’s going to? We can’t do it for you,” said the woman in blue. Were they twins? Twin sorceresses in their sarafany and loosened hair and secret smiles? “You have to work if you want the baby to come.”

  “I can’t. I’m too weak…”

  “City girl,” the red one said. “You should have thought of that.”

  “She’s sick. Mama’s gone to get you something,” said Mercy in blue.

  “I have to lie down.” I saw flames shooting up over their heads. For Mercy has a human heart, Pity, a human face…Unlock, untie…They couldn’t hold me up forever, and finally laid me back on the wide, splintery bench. Hot and dark. I needed air. The scent of herbs was overwhelming—I’d smell it until my dying day, which could be soon…“I can’t breathe. Please, open the door.”

  “It’s not done,” said the blue sister. Her cheeks were pink. Sweat dripped from her skin. “It’s not safe.”

  “Just for a bit?” I begged. “I’ll walk, I promise.”

  They opened the door. Blue sky! Cornflower blue, and a little breeze nodding the boughs. The trees peered in like shy children. The sisters took up handfuls of herbs from the floor and made vigorous crosses in the doorway, protecting me from some sort of devil, while I drank in fresh air in huge gulps. In a moment the red one slammed the door shut again, as if there were wild beasts that would smell my labor and come marauding. Was that it?

  The only light came from the icon lamp and the candles and stray beams from between chinks in the log walls. But true to my word, I walked and walked, like some blind donkey. “Where’s the old woman?” Suddenly it was of vital importance that old woman was back in the room. “Where did she go?”

  “She has other things to do,” the red daughter snapped, while her sister wiped my face. “She’ll be back. Don’t you trust us?” She cackled. Oh, she was a devil!

  “Don’t scare her,” said the blue one. “She’s getting you some milk. For strength. So you can push.”

  I tried to remember when I last ate. I’d been sick since Izhevsk…those cabbage pies…Though I recalled Genya trying to feed me. Bread, a bit of fish. Nothing stayed down. The next grip of pain doubled me over. One sister held me while the other put a knee in my back. They certainly knew their business, these storybook women.

  After a year or two, the midwife returned in a flash of light and a gulp of blessed air before plunging us back into the thick, fuggy dark. She held a bowl to my lips, milk still warm from the cow…Were there still cows? I took a sip but it turned my stomach.

  “Drink,” she urged me. “You heard him, that devil. Said he’d burn down the village.”

  “He wouldn’t really,” I said between sips. Yes, I could feel strength passing into my body.

  “Oh, you don’t think so?” the old woman said.

  But maybe he would. I thought of how he had once crushed the poor Virgin of Tikhvin. He wouldn’t understand anything about this hut in the woods, the spells, the knots, the witch and her daughters blue and red. Outside, the su
n must still be shining, the birds warbling their summer songs…for all the good it did me. Why wasn’t it night already? If I could just hang on until nightfall, I’d have made it through this terrible day and the baby would come. Theotokos, look upon my troubles…

  The old woman shook me, holding the bowl. “More. You have to try.”

  I drank a few more swallows before she let me sink onto the bench.

  I dozed between pains. A terrible rustling came from the rafters. Angels, hundreds of them, hung from the ceiling above my head, upside down, with wings like leather. I could hear them rustling, trying to get closer. They stared down with big squidlike eyes, blinking, dumb, neither male nor female. No physical bodies, no sex, no idea what we humans suffered. All they could do was gape, trying to get a good view of my misery. I got on my hands and knees, forehead cradled on my arms, my tightening belly resting on my thighs, and endured like a cow. No mind, no self, my name was Woman, my name was Pain. The red daughter pressed my spine with her giant hands.

  “I don’t want it anymore,” I whispered.

  “Too late,” said the red sister.

  It won’t live, my mother had said.

  If the child was doomed, why even try? It would die and so would I, and we’d be buried in a field in Udmurtia and no one would ever find me. I doubted Genya would even return to the village, let alone burn it. I crouched there, on hands and knees, weeping. Couldn’t I just die? Did they have to make me live through it all the way?

  “That’s enough,” said the midwife. “Get her up.”

  They lifted me to my feet, tried to make me walk. “She can’t, Mama,” said the blue daughter, blue-eyed, with arms like a blacksmith’s. “It’s the fever. She’s burning up. She can’t stand.”

  The old woman came to me, grabbed my chin. “You’re not getting away from me,” she said. Her eyes were very blue. Her upper lip was long, her nose was short, her gray hair fell like a waterfall. “Hear me?” She slapped me. “Wake up!” Her eyes burned into me. “You’re going to have this baby, Bolshevik. Now walk!” They hauled me and shoved me, shouted, praised, threatened. The old woman muttered prayers, incantations, made signs and symbols in the air. However much I begged them to leave me to die, they held me and pressed me, sponged me, and walked me round and round the birthing stool. “Take me outside. Just let me breathe. I can’t breathe!”

  Finally, the old woman opened the door, making violent crosses with handfuls of herbs, as the daughters walked me as far as the threshold, where I gulped fresh air like cold, sweet spring water, as much as I could get until the witch slammed the door again. “Satisfied? There are dangers you can’t begin to understand. Spirits who would love to kill you and your child.” Pointing at me with her bony finger like a prosecutor. “You have to trust me. I’ve been through this a few times. I have six daughters, all born in this very bathhouse. All living.”

  “I have a daughter too,” said the blue sister.

  “And I have two,” said the red one.

  The witch had daughters who had daughters who had daughters…all the daughters in the world, stretching before us like the mirrored hall at Versailles. It was nauseating. I sank to my knees in the herbs and straw, rocking my hard belly back and forth like a bell. We shall not hear those bells…No, we would not. Not those saintly chimes, only mournful gongs and the blatting of car horns. Or worse. The screams and cries of the damned.

  The midwife stood, her hands on her broad knees. Oh no, was she giving up on me? I was really going to die. I clutched at her leg. “Don’t go! I’ll be good. I’ll walk. Please.”

  “You’ll be fine. Give her the rest of that milk,” she told the red one. “And you drink it.” Pointing at my nose. She left me sobbing there on the dirt floor, in the straw. Like a beast in a stall.

  “I have to go too,” said the blue one, patting my shoulder. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “No! You can’t…” They were abandoning me!

  “Send Sonya,” the red one called over my collapsed form.

  I lay curled in the straw, weeping and mumbling childhood prayers. O Holy Theotokos, save us for we have no other help than you. So this was what it was like to die. You begged for it. I went from sweating to shivering as the angels goggled overhead. I swore at them while the red sister helped me onto the bench, covered me with the sheepskin. I lay trembling so violently I had to hold on to the rough wood not to fall. I faded into sleep. And dreamed of the bathhouse spirit, Bannik, a disagreeable dwarf with a huge nose and chin, sniffing the air. Where is that baby…But it wasn’t here yet. He would have to wait.

  I dozed between contractions, lay on the broad bench watching beads of light through the chinks in the door—a constellation of glowing, elongated ovals projected onto the straw, where they took on a life of their own. I knew they were visitors from other dimensions. If only I could speak to them. Their presence reminded me of Ionia, and all the training I’d had there. I remembered Natalya—breathe in chaos, breathe out light. I breathed and thought of her, attacked by soldiers…Did anyone escape this curse of the body? The body, the body…I counted the small lozenges of light like a rosary.

  Sometime later—hours, days?—the door opened again. Not the midwife, but another daughter, younger still, her hair braided, wearing a rose sarafan with a white apron, carrying a pail. I was shaking so violently I thought my teeth would break. The woman in red spoke to the girl, took her braids down, untied what knots she could find on her, then left us alone, gone before I could gather the breath to beg her to stay. The rose girl could not have been more than sixteen. Oh God. She sponged my forehead nervously. I pushed her away, her clumsy touch. I wanted the midwife and her great-armed dolls, blue and red.

  Time refused to move. Another wave—an enormous hand, crushing me, cracking my spine. The angels came closer but I snarled at them and cursed. “Stop looking at me!”

  “Who?”

  I kicked off the sheepskin. Who was this, lying in someone’s shift on the bare bones of a bench, in a stink of sweat, her skin on fire? “Is it night yet?” I asked. “Just tell me that much.”

  “It’s July,” the girl said. “It won’t be night for hours.”

  Night. Such a beautiful word. A big darkness, not this musty closed-in armpit, everything cool and quiet under the indifferent stars. The richness of night’s satin robes, not this straw-filled abattoir. Between the pains, I breathed and whispered the names of the stars in the Moving Group, Alioth, Mizar, Merak, Phad, Megrez, Alcor, as the girl stared at me and crossed herself. Did she think it was a spell? The stars, born together, moving together through great time and space. The birth of stars was something to hang on to as my tenders came and left. I could smell food on them, smoke…A world was taking place out there as I was dying. This was life’s bitter secret. While someone was being torn apart, dying of fever, flayed alive, the world continued. Icarus fell from the sky and the peasant went on plowing. Not even his ox looked up.

  They always left one behind to watch me. One skeined wool, another tooled a bit of leather. The red one came back from dinner, stinking of garlic. Sometimes there were two and they marched me around, gossiping about village happenings. In between pains they asked me where I came from, how I’d gotten so far from home. I couldn’t remember. My saviors, my tormentors. While overhead, the angels gawked and rustled their leather wings.

  My labor was becoming permanent. I had stopped trying, stopped crying. Every few minutes the pain woke me, pain going nowhere, doing nothing but killing me. Then I fell back into feverish sleep. I dreamed of horrible, pointless things, like pulling hair from the ground, hand over hand. Finding a rusted metal doll left behind in a fire. This was no child, it was a monster. It wasn’t even a birth, it was a sentence, like being tied to four horses and pulled to pieces. The angels rustled overhead, like theater patrons with their programs.

  At last, the red woman opened the door and I saw darkness. Cool air. She said a prayer to the evening star. It was my last night on ea
rth. This is how death came. Your child wouldn’t be born, you were too weak, it was the wrong time, the wrong place. If only I hadn’t caught this fever. If only I’d gone back to Petrograd where I belonged. She sponged me with water, poured the milk into me a thimbleful at a time.

  No more light beads to count now, only the flicker of the candle. Pain spread out like a stain. I collected it in my mind, forced it back small. Not a country but a pool, not a pool but a puddle, not a puddle but a bowl, a teacup. But just when I’d gotten it small, it flooded out again, a stain, a tide, and my city drowned. The pain erased all that was not me. And then it erased me as well, so only Pain itself was left. And Time. Time my rope, my line across the flood. But these women had no clocks. And the sun once up would never set. I would not outlive this contest. Death was coming.

  Kolya, think of me! Could he feel the end of what he’d started? If we were as connected as he’d always professed, could he feel this? Oh, he’d think he’d overeaten, tossing in his bed.

  As my minder dozed, I sensed something in the corner opposite the red one. Not the angels. This was a new figure, a somber woman dressed in a black cloak, with sorrowful Byzantine eyes like the Vladimirskaya Theotokos. So gentle, so dear. No Child at her cheek, and her skin was made of gold. Have you come for me, sorrowful Mother? Have you come to take me, wrap me in your arms? Is it time? Pity me, for I am so tired. You, who birthed a child knowing it would die, you who labored, help me now.

  She didn’t speak, but we stared for centuries. There was no time in hell.

  I don’t ask for life, I prayed to the dark Virgin. Only for an end to this pointless ordeal. Gentle Virgin of Death, come. Give birth to my end, stop this unholy siege. I surrender. She was coming near, the gold of her hands and of her face. At long and dear last, the Virgin of Death approached to gather up her weak daughter, with eyes of sorrow, preparing to deliver her final blessing. Take me, Holy Mother, and give me rest…