Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Late one hot day, a cloud of dust made the midwife and her daughters stop in mid-swing. All the women fell silent. I didn’t know what was happening, but several women dropped their tools and ran for the forest. “Grab the baby,” Praskovia shouted, and then she too ran off toward her hut in the woods. I picked Iskra up from under the wagon, and the next thing I knew, a unit of Red cavalry was among us—seven hard, dirty men on small, dirty horses, faces lined with grime and sweat, squinting against the light, here to search for grain, for hoarding, for kulakism and possible antigovernment sympathies.

  The women were pale with fear as the izbas and barns were searched. The enemy had been here, had taken their husbands and helped themselves to the grain—it could be construed as supporting the White cause. I stood absolutely still, Iskra in my arms, with Praskovia’s daughters, Lilina and Masha and Roza, watching Red soldiers rip through their izbas. “You have guns, baba? Guns? Gold?” and I thought of my gun, hidden at Praskovia’s, under the steps. Would they find it? Would they consider her a White partisan?

  Soldiers emerged from sheds with bags of grain on their shoulders. I saw exactly how the revolution must seem from the peasant’s point of view. It was the hardest work anywhere, except maybe rowing a slave galley, just to grow these bags of precious oats and rye—no help from the government, no help from the city—and now grim, brutal soldiers appeared from nowhere, demanding their livelihood and offering nothing at all in return, except the possibility of not being shot. We kept our eyes on those rifles with the long bayonets. I knew they would stab us before they shot us, to save ammunition.

  The commander demanded to see the headman. An old muzhik with a beard halfway down his chest came forward, hat in hand. “You already came through here once,” he squeaked. “We need to eat too. We need seed for next year’s crop!”

  “I have men who need to eat tonight, Grandpa,” said the commander through tight lips. He was a tall man, around thirty, with flat blue eyes like pieces of broken china. “Everything’s for the army. Didn’t you hear the order?”

  Meanwhile, we watched as soldiers moved in and out of the houses. A woman shrieked when she saw her black-and-white cow being led away. “No! Please don’t take her!” She ran to the soldier, clutching at him, begging. He shoved her down into the dirt.

  “She has four children,” broad-shouldered Lilina shouted out to the field commander. “They need the milk!”

  But he barked at us to be quiet. She’d get a receipt, there was nothing we could do. Did we want our soldier-brothers to go hungry? Tears streamed down the woman’s face seeing the bony rump of her cow behind the soldier, the sway of her udder. I knew the other women were thinking of their own cows, hidden in the forest, wondering when they would lose them. It was a terrible loss. The woman’s children pressed close around her like scared chickens as the soldiers loaded the bags over the pommels of their saddles, their short, nervous horses sidestepping. Eight, nine, ten poods—the village’s lifeblood.

  Suddenly we heard a scream from one of the izbas. A woman’s howl—and this had nothing to do with requisitioning in the strict sense of the word. More painful than the grain or the cow. This was one of our women—Galya, pretty, round-faced, the mother of a two-year-old. “Stop him!” I shouted to the commander, Iskra on my hip. “Is this how you represent the Soviet Republic to a Red village? This is your idea of agitprop?”

  The hot, irritated commander swiped the sweat from his forehead and squinted at me over his requisitioning book. Those dead eyes. “Who the devil are you?”

  “Marina Kuriakina. From the agit-train Red October.” I held Iskra tighter. I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. “With the Propaganda Section—here to educate these people about the revolution.” The woman’s screams filled the hot, insect-laden air.

  He gazed at me closely, baby wound in cloth on my hip, wondering, I was sure, who this tanned freckled peasant woman was, lecturing him about the revolution. I lifted my chin and gazed back, imagining Varvara. Imagining Yermilova. “Where is your commissar, Comrade?”

  It was a step too far. He unholstered his Mauser and pointed it at my forehead. “Right here,” he said. “You and the kid want an introduction?”

  My whole body went cold with shock. But I kept staring back. Now that I’d started this, I had to keep going—you had to meet a dangerous man eye to eye. Would he really shoot us right in front of the whole village? Oh God, those china-blue eyes said he would do it and never think of it again. That moment probably lasted a second, but I would remember it the rest of my life—the breeze in Iskra’s hair, the color of his eyes, the absolute silence of the other women. Another shriek from the izba. The unwashed commander lifted and fired his gun into the air. All the soldiers ran out of the huts, their rifles in hand, including the one trying to pull up his pants.

  “Ride out,” he said. He got onto his horse. He stared right into my eyes, touched the brim of his cap with the Mauser. “Send my greetings to the Red October.” They swirled away like devils in the dust.

  August, September. The oats and the golden rye had been cut and stacked. The sun set earlier each day. It was high time I was on my way. I sewed pockets into my skirts, into my sheepskin, pockets inside and out, I had to leave my hands free for the scramble onto the trains. The women from the village stuffed my pockets with food for the trip, carefully chosen food that I could carry myself. They cut cheese into pieces and wrapped them in waxed cloth, gave me dried apricots and cherries, boiled eggs, sausage, dried fish, and bread. I wept to see what they were sacrificing for me. The best they had. I knew I wouldn’t see food like this again for a long time. If I’d been alone, I might have carried a pood of grain or potatoes, self-provisioning. But the baby would make it physically impossible. Ironic—half of Russia was self-provisioning, and I, coming from fat Udmurtia, could bring nothing at all. Roza gave me a long cloth she’d woven herself from their own flax, and I tied it into a sling for Iskra, experimenting with different wrappings to keep her secure, even nurse her in it. I could smell the chill of autumn in the air, the grain drying. Soon they would be able to replace what had been taken. It was time to head home.

  I was a peasant now, my arms as hard as wood, and Iskra no longer had that compressed newborn face. She was quick and lively, full of ideas and comments, if only I could understand. How the women petted and clucked over us, giving me food and diaper cloths and wagonloads of advice, worrying that I was about to leave the small known world to venture impossibly far. To them, Petrograd was like saying America.

  The sturdy midwife and her daughters Lilina and Masha traveled in the wagon with me, driven by the same silent peasant, back to Kambarka, where I’d left the train. Praskovia had saved my gun during the search, hid it in the bathhouse with the icons. I decided the safest place for it was under my skirt near my hip—I could hardly wear my sheepskin in weather so hot. I carefully slit the skirt on the seam so I could reach in if I had to, beneath my apron. She’d risked a great deal hiding it for me. Her cousin was a fisherman on the Kama River, I would go halfway by boat, then cross in a wagon. Sad as parting was, I yearned to be off. I was ready. I would fight my way onto those lice-ridden trains. We kissed many times as they put me on the boat.

  The Kama was a beautiful broad river, in places as wide as the Neva, and if I stayed ahead of the smokestack, the air was bright and scented river green. I sat on a box with Iskra in my lap as they spent the day fishing around Sarapul, grilled up a midday meal. The fresh fish melted in my mouth. We reached a small townlet at just about dusk, where the cousins of the fisherman took me in and fed me, and I boiled water and washed Iskra’s diapers as well as I could, spreading them out on the line, hoping they’d be dry by morning.

  The fisherman’s wife insulted the baby as much as she could, protecting her from the Evil Eye, extra servings of abuse because she was so beautiful, so extraordinary, like a splash of sunshine in a cave. I was used to it by now. She said things like “She sure is a puny thing.” “Hard
ly worth the milk.” She talked about her own little son that way too, a round-eyed, well-behaved child. “Him? That idiot? Who’d want a miserable child like that?” Looking around, as if someone was listening. Layers of superstition, you couldn’t turn around without bumping into some rustic devil.

  The next day, there was much argument about who would take me to Izhevsk—the honor finally went to a man with a debt he said was owed to him, a welder in the metalworks plant. We got into the cart and he brought a full load of potatoes and grain for sale to the self-provisioners at the station, to make a day of it. As we drove along, looking like a good peasant family—father, mother, redheaded child—I considered my options after Izhevsk. I could go back on the more major southern train line, through Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl, or Moscow—there was more traffic that way. But the chaos of the stations, the crowds—the roadblocks. Because of the self-provisioners, the trains would stop constantly for searches. On the other hand, there was the northern route, through Vyatka and Vologda, the line I’d taken with Kolya last fall. Cherepovets. Babayevo. Podborovye. Tikhvin.

  His dear face. How he’d wept at Cherepovets. On his knees, begging my forgiveness. It wasn’t an act. What a vain girl I’d been. I didn’t even know who that girl was now. I was a woman with a child, and life had become something far clearer, something more serious. You didn’t play little games of hard feelings just because your vanity was wounded. I saw now the price of sending love to the gallows, pulling the trapdoor. I wasn’t Genya. I was flesh and blood, and there was nothing as bloodless as an idea. I forgave Kolya his passion. At least it was passion—he was a flesh-and-blood man. He might make love to another woman, but he’d never give me up for an idea. He lived in this world, not the one of the spacemen. I would go back to Petrograd. It was where I belonged. I would show him his daughter, and let the cards fall where they may. Would he be cold? I knew that he could be hard as well. But whatever it was that fate held in store, I would find out.

  The peasant next to me in the wagon sniffed the hot air. “Izhevsk. Can’t you smell it?”

  I could—the rubbery stink of the factories, turning out Red rifles and bayonets that could point any which way. I only hoped they still remembered me there.

  They did remember. At the soviet, they beamed at the baby, laved praise on the Red October and on Genya in particular. The bustling redheaded president of the local soviet personally oversaw the drawing up of my propusk to return to Petrograd. I warmed to the respect in the apparatchik’s yellow-brown eyes when he heard the magic word—Petrograd. Whereas, to the women of Praskovia’s village, it was the land of fairy-tale tsars and paved streets, at the Izhevsk City Soviet, Petrograd meant something quite different. It was the cradle of revolution. It was the Aurora, the storming of the Winter Palace. Though Iskra was crying and had pooped her diaper, the clerk still afforded me a full measure of Bolshevik approval.

  Again I was brought to the munitions factory, where I met with their committee and gave an impromptu lecture on the further work of the Red October, and the situation in the villages—their bravery at bringing in a crop despite the absence of their men and so on—and was given an item that was more precious than rubies, a metal pail. Anything metal was highly prized, and with this pail, I might boil water, wash the baby’s clothes. I wanted to go straight to the train station, talk to the men and find out the situation on the rails, but one could not rush this kind of diplomacy. I ate with them in the factory canteen, and accepted a place for the night with the chairman of the committee, who spent the whole time talking about my husband, the Future of Russia, and read aloud to me at length from Genya’s second book of poems, Red Horses. Oh Great Rus.

  It was only on the third day that I was able to conduct myself to the Izhevsk station and present myself to the stationmaster, accompanied by two members of the committee. The tension between the Bolsheviks and the railroadmen was alive and well, even here—I saw it in the way they enjoyed instructing the stationmaster on what he should do with me, their interference doing more harm than good. The stationmaster bristled from the hair in his ears to his gray moustache in the small office decorated with the familiar calendars, timetables, and portrait of Lenin. My escorts urged me to go south to Kazan, and meet the comrades there in another factory, then to Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl…If it were up to them, I wouldn’t be home until New Year’s. And the train to Kazan was due to arrive soon, just a few minutes. What luck! I kept hoping they would leave me alone, but it looked like they were going to accompany me right onto the train.

  “What about Vyatka?” I said. “The Vologda line?”

  “The English are up there,” said the committee woman, in her skirt of rags and patches. “We heard they made it down as far as Velsk.”

  I continued to speak directly to the stationmaster. “What do you think, Comrade? What’s the word up there? I’d like to take the fastest route, the fewest stops.” I didn’t want to say the fewest roadblocks and searches—he might think me a speculator, with a pood of flour hidden in my skirt.

  He smoothed his moustache and then ruffled it up again. “The Vologda line’s faster. You might sit awhile in Vyatka, but up there you’d only have to worry about bandits. I wouldn’t worry about the English.” He shot a contemptuous look at the committee woman.

  “Our comrades in Nizhny could use a good speaker,” said the man from the committee in his worn leather cap. “An agitator from Petrograd? From the Red October! The wife of Gennady Kuriakin? It would be a great honor.”

  I nodded, pretending I was considering it, then sighed. “I have to get back. Orders.” Oh, how important I must be! “Another train’s being assembled. For the Denikin front.” Wherever that was these days. I hoisted the baby on my hip, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to lug an infant around the agitprop circuit in the middle of a civil war. “What time’s Vyatka?”

  I waited for the evening train north, nursed Iskra, and ate a little of the bread hidden in my skirt. I glanced up to discover a boy and a girl, no older than four or five, standing before me, dressed in ragged shirts and nothing else—no shoes, no trousers, their hair clotted with dirt and lice. They stood quietly, gazing not at me but at the baby at my breast. Saying nothing, not begging, just looking at her, tied to me in the flaxen cloth. The naked longing in their dirty, drawn faces was so far beyond hunger I couldn’t bear it. I offered them bread and one of our eggs. They snatched the food out of my hands and ran away to eat it like dogs. Mothers, Don’t Abandon Your Children! Where did they come from? Left behind while the families clambered onto trains? More likely orphaned. So many children everywhere in the Izhevsk station, begging, plying the crowd. People shooed them away like pigeons.

  What would become of Russia? I really wondered. It had been uplifting to ride the Red October, yet every day we passed through stations like this, full of hungry, lost children, solemn, awestruck. Children, despite their terrifying, scavenging lives, crowding into our kino car, wanting to see something miraculous—a visit from a dragon or sorcerer in the midst of their unspeakable misery. A group of urchins threaded its way through the crowd, magpie eyes watching for any unattended package, any crust of bread they could snatch from a hand. What would become of them all? Starvation. Typhus. Surely some would live, and what then? Criminals, bandits, prostitutes—if they hadn’t already passed that milepost. Soldiers, if they lived long enough.

  How dare I feel frightened about making this trip alone! I was privileged just to be an adult. To have an education, a story to tell, some wits about me. Even fatherless Iskra was enviable, my breast in her mouth.

  Finally, toward the end of the long northern day, the Vyatka-bound train jarred and shivered into the station. Iskra wailed with the noise, metal on metal—didn’t they have grease anymore? A mixed train of twelve cars, both passenger and freight, of varying decades, it was already packed, people sprawling on the roofs, hanging out the windows as more tried to push on, but the blessed stationmaster put me on the
train himself, shoehorning me into a tattered first-class compartment with curtains. My compartment-mates seemed resigned—some sort of intelligentsia by the looks of them, three men and a woman. They moved their belongings around to make room for one more. If they were looking for food, they were traveling the wrong way. There would be nothing to eat in the north but wood.

  A journey that should have taken two hours took nearly ten, despite my calculations. The train kept stopping, shunted and searched. I got to know my fellow passengers rather well. They were German Marxists, old-fashioned Social Democrats coming from Ufa. My German was not as good as my English, but it wasn’t so bad, and one of the men spoke passable Russian, so we talked about the fate of the German revolution, and the imminent proletarian revolution in the West. The Russian speaker, a long-nosed man in steel eyeglasses and shapeless jacket named Blau, said that the German socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been executed back in January. The Spartacist revolt had been crushed. “Ebert called on the Freikorps to do the dirty work. That so-called socialist.” Ebert, the president of the Weimar Republic. But who were the Freikorps?

  “Right-wing paramilitary,” he said.

  Working for a Social Democrat?

  “So-called. He was afraid of a Soviet replacing him. The Freikorps also crushed the Munich Soviet. Did you hear about that?”

  I shook my head, wiped tears from my eyes. I’d heard on the Red October that a Bavarian Soviet had been declared in April. And by September, it was gone.