Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  The baby wailed. I came back inside the car, and stood panting, staring at what had to be blood on the floor. Was it on my hands? On the boys? They didn’t look too bad. They showed me their hands. We stood outside the stinking hole, listening, waiting to see if anyone would come. You really couldn’t see the blood, the floor was so dirty, no one would notice it. I had to bet on it.

  The moon leered through the window, a dangerous witness. I tried to soothe Iskra, but she would not be consoled. “What’s wrong with her?” one of the boys asked, a tall, tough-looking one with dark eyes.

  I sat down, took her from the cloth and had a good look. There was something wrong with her arm. Limp. It was lower than the other. The bastard! My head was on fire. I wanted to scream, to become hysterical, but there was no time. My innocent child. This was my fault. It was up to me, there was nobody else. The moon waited, the train shuddered and groaned.

  “He pulled the shoulder out,” the boy said. “You gotta pop it back in, mamenka.” He gestured, a fist into a cupped palm.

  “I don’t know how,” I said, fighting hysteria.

  “I do. Here, give ’er to me,” said the boy. He looked about fifteen, scabby and mangy. Though my life rested in his hands, I didn’t want to give my baby to him. There was no way to know when he’d last washed his hands, what diseases he might carry. But I did it. He sat on the floor and I handed him to her. “So, here’s what you do,” he said as he settled my poor screaming baby between his bony thighs. “You hold her arm still.” He showed me, pressing Iskra’s tiny upper arm against her rubbery baby body, as she shrieked and writhed. “Now ya gotta lift the bottom part up.” He raised Iskra’s forearm. The shrieks!

  “Gently, please.” Sweat and tears stung my eyes. “Gently…” Oh God, please let this be over soon, please help Iskra. She’d been through so much already. “It’s going to be all right, kitty-cat. Just another minute. We’re going to fix you right up.” Hoping I wasn’t lying.

  “Now you just gotta feel around for where it pops in.” He secured his tongue in the corner of his mouth and lowered the forearm and moved it across her body, holding the upper arm tight, completely resistant to her piercing shrieks. Then he rotated it outward, the arm at a ninety-degree angle, feeling, listening with his fingers like a safecracker. “Vot.” There. She gave one last body-shaking scream—and stopped.

  The boy grinned shyly, as if it were nothing, but I could tell he was bursting with pride as he handed her back to me. I held her against my breast, rocking her, begging her to forgive me, thanking him, thanking all of them, and whatever sloppy God was watching and not watching. I wrapped her cloth around her shoulders so she couldn’t move her arm, and turned to lift my skirt to remove half the food I was carrying, and pressed into dirty hands—cheese, chunks of bread. “Forget you saw any of this.”

  “Saw what?” the boy said, already eating. “You think any of us talks to the Cheka? That’s nuts.”

  “Good luck, boys. Thank you.”

  “Good luck, mamenka.” Once we’d regained our composure, I carried Iskra back through the crowded car, quietly, quietly, as Ukashin had taught us to do. I’m a shadow, I’m a figure in your dreams. I’m a ghost, I’m nothing. I’m smoke. I’m no one. Anyone who saw me would recognize me, the girl with the baby. My shoes were sticky with blood. I could feel the tack against the rubber of the floor. Was I covered with it? The cloth, my dress?

  Finally, I knew I was back in my little enclave when I recognized the whistle of the shipping clerk. I lifted Iskra onto my bunk, and clambered up, quick as a monkey, careful as a thief. How long had I been gone? Twenty minutes? An hour? Once in my place by the ceiling, I quickly cut a strip from one of the diapers—with the scissors my victim had saved for me!—and made a brace for her, tying it gently across the arm. Oh, oh, I know, I know. Please don’t start screaming again. I carefully bandaged her arm and collarbone and swaddled her up tight, then put her to my overflowing breast like a fountain, and lay as quietly as I could, through the thunder of my heart. Someone was dead because of me. And I would do it again. Anyone in this life who wanted to hurt my child would find me as cold-blooded a killer as any Chekist.

  I dozed a bit toward morning. In my dreams, I was back at Furshtatskaya Street, tending chickens in a locked room, caring for them among the embroidered chairs and the polished parquet. The next thing I knew, people were talking. I peeked over the side and saw that they’d already put up the middle bunks. I’d been sleeping so heavily I hadn’t noticed. Natalya Romanovna was combing her hair. The man from Eliseev’s washed his hands and face with a little boiled water poured onto his handkerchief.

  “He was stinking drunk last night,” said the woman, working out a snarl in her hair. “It was awful. He pinched me when I was getting ready for bed.”

  They were talking about the Chekist. I pretended to awaken, yawning.

  “Maybe he’s gone to the toilet,” said the spets.

  “Maybe he found someone to play chess with in another car,” said the timber man, whom he’d beaten in seven moves and never played with again.

  “Well, good riddance,” said the wife. “A very unpleasant man.”

  The boy said nothing as he stood at the window, ostensibly looking out at the fresh sunlit morning, but he kept stealing looks at me over his shoulder. Had he seen me get up, and the agronomist follow me? I wouldn’t know until we were searched again, until the railroad Cheka walked between the rows of bunks, until we showed our papers and answered their questions. Would he blurt it out, betray me for revenge? I had to get rid of the gun. Maybe Mama Natalya’s sewing basket? That would be a rude surprise. The man’s valise was still under his bunk. Surely they would find it, open it, and ask whose it was, what had become of him. The railroad Cheka would notice any blood. I looked down at my dress, with the torn buttons. It was dark with a pattern of cherries, but the baby’s white cloth was spattered in red. I turned it, refolded it so the blood went to the inside. My boots had a line of blood at the sole, I could disguise it if I stepped in some water. I drank from a cup the timber man passed across to me, and saved a bit to wash my own hands and face.

  I spent the rest of the day worrying about the gun, and the children, the people who had seen me. Should I throw it down the toilet? Give it to the boys still riding the rear of the car? They could sell it and get something to eat. Each search increased my chances of being caught, and a girl with a gun nowadays would be considered a potential Fanya Kaplan, Lenin’s would-be murderer. Who was I traveling to Petrograd to assassinate? I had been raped before, I might not have shot him even to prevent him from fucking me—but he’d hurt Iskra. If he had gotten her out of the cloth, he would have thrown her on the floor, even down the toilet onto the tracks. But now it was he who was on the tracks somewhere to the east of us, where he belonged. Give up this gun? Going to Petrograd, which by all accounts had become an even more dangerous place than it had been when I left it? Where Arkady and people like him still walked the streets? Even if I had to suffer an agony of suspense each time we were searched, I would not give it up. I’d never be able to replace it.

  The Chekist never did come back, and no one gave a damn. The spets’s family were able to spread out, the boy had a bunk to himself again. It didn’t keep him from staring at me at odd moments, though. I sensed he knew something, but I couldn’t ask. Every hour that passed, every mile we were farther away from that stretch of track, I felt less terrified. And now the familiar stations began to appear. Cherepovets. Babayevo. Tikhvin.

  Tikhvin! I dared not get out to walk, in case my one-armed mechanic was at the station. I thought of Avdokia—how I wished she were here. I ached for her gnarled hands, her pity, her love. But I had to go on alone. Could not retreat to the infantilism of bourgeois motherhood. Theotokos, have mercy on us all.

  When I went back to the toilet, the children I had seen that night were gone, replaced by new orphans, who stared at me with the same hunger I was used to seeing. The others must have gotte
n off, deciding to try their luck at other stations.

  One more day. My fellow passengers gathered up their bundles, straightened their clothes. I had sewn up my dress with a borrowed needle and thread, fashioning some elegant new buttons out of the hem—cut, rolled, and sewn. Again, the lessons of Ionia had not been lost on me.

  As we approached the city—city of my heart, my arteries sluicing under its bridges, Petersburg!—the train slowed to a walking pace, that brutal grinding of metal against ungreased metal. From the window, I could see not only bagmen but ordinary citizens jumping off not in twos or threes but by the scores—falling, rolling, scrambling to their feet and disappearing into the shaggy woods on the outskirts of the city, dragging their bags and suitcases of illegal foodstuffs. Hundreds of people from a single train. Self-provisioning. I had a moment of doubt. If the food situation was so bad…But I had made my decision. I stood, hanging onto the open window, holding Iskra and waiting for the first sign of Petrograd to appear. Yes—there! The Admiralty needle, far off in the distance, just a wink of gold catching the autumn sun, just a stitch between sky and earth. The spets’s wife and the Eliseev man cried out as well.

  “We’re home,” I whispered to Iskra, kissing her hair. She needed a bath, and her arm was still tender, but she was alive. We were both alive—and going home. I blubbered, letting my tears wet her hair. Somewhere in this maze of a city, Kolya lived. I felt him out there somewhere, making deals, living his subterranean life. I have your daughter, Kolya. Can you feel us coming? I imagined him stopping in the middle of whatever he was doing—midsentence, in an office, or a courtyard, as the image of me crossed his mind. While hundreds of miles to the east, a naked man lay on a train track with a bullet in his chest. And in some small railroad town, a boy with brown eyes remembered the redheaded baby he had saved, and her mother’s tears.

  Before we were able to leave the car, the railroad Cheka arrived. Too late to jump off the train now. We sat on the berths while a sharp-faced man in leather examined our papers. He was quite literate, too bad for me. “Why is your residence in Tikhvin but your propusk from the Izhevsk Soviet?” I had to explain the Red October, the baby, the agricultural work. I showed him Iskra’s baptismal certificate—he sneered at that bit of backsliding. I shrugged. “Peasants.” I showed him my hands, the calluses from working the crops, though I didn’t explain the scar on my right palm, courtesy of the Archangel. I had, however, replaced my bloodstained boots with my woven bast shoes. My eyeballs burned with the effort of not looking at the agronomist’s valise nestled under the bunk across from us, wishing it would disappear. Unfortunately, the Chekist had eyes in his head. He lifted it out.

  The generalized sense of anxiety heightened, a twang, like the tightening of a string, as if everyone had been guilty of doing away with him, or was afraid they would be accused of it.

  “Whose is this?” he asked.

  I should have thrown it out the window, but that would have been too obvious.

  “There was a man here,” said the shipping clerk from Eliseev’s. “He disappeared, after Vologda.”

  The hatchet-faced Chekist tried to open the bag. Locked. The boy was staring at me. I glanced back as if it was of no interest to me whatsoever, but I could feel sweat trickle down my neck and under my arms. Iskra was sweating too, her red hair plastered to her skull. I kissed her, swayed her a bit in her bloodstained sling. It was airless and hot in the car without the train movement. I sent Yasha the telepathic message: Nobody beat you, you got your own bunk—do you really want to make trouble? You don’t know how far this might go.

  “An agronomist, didn’t he say, Talya?” said the spets. “From Ekaterinburg. Though he didn’t seem like any agronomist I’d ever met.”

  “A very unpleasant man,” his wife chimed in.

  I waited. Iskra’s good arm came up, playing with my nose, my lip. Her other in its sling. What would happen to her if the Cheka arrested me? Please, God, get us through this. I hoped I looked like a sad-eyed redheaded Theotokos. Who would suspect a Virgin and Child of murder? I felt the weight of the gun against my belly. Please let him not search too closely. Had anyone, of all these hundreds, mentioned the shot in the night, the recognizable figure of a woman with a child skulking through the car? I could only depend upon the way people minded their own business these days. Why should they help the Cheka?

  “Mal’chik, what do you know about this man with the suitcase?” the Chekist asked the boy.

  I let my eyes rest on the timber man, who was pressing his abdomen with his fingertips, something not working in his bowels, and steeled myself in anticipation of the spets’s son spilling his guts. “He was fat. And he snored,” the boy began in an overearnest voice. “He wore a big metal buckle, like a sheriff.” He pronounced it sharif. A Zane Grey fan. Yes, the belt would have caught his attention. It was riding the rails somewhere, around the waist of a Vologda orphan. “He played chess. He had a little tiny set and he beat everyone. He didn’t want to teach me.” The screwed-up face as the little liar thought of other facts about the man he could share. “He was from Ekaterinburg. Talked about the war. He knew a lot about it.”

  “What did he say about the war?” the Chekist asked.

  The mother was making eyes at him. Be quiet! The boy paused. “He knew a lot,” he continued. “He said the English were going to abandon the Whites. That they didn’t trust Yudenich or he’d have Petrograd already. I think he was a spy. An English spy.”

  The Chekist was clearly disappointed in the boy’s information. “Anybody else know anything about this man?”

  “He just disappeared,” said the timber man, his breath sour with indigestion. “After we’d left Vologda. I thought he’d passed out, but I guess not.”

  “He came on the train stinking drunk,” added the spets’s wife.

  “The English were in Vologda,” said the shipping clerk. “Maybe he joined them.”

  “And left his bag?” The sober, thin-faced Chekist clearly didn’t like the bag. That’s what was troubling him.

  The shipping clerk scratched his head. It made me want to scratch.

  “Maybe he wandered off at one of the stations and missed the train,” I said, not to be left out of the general guessing. Thinking about the dead man’s advice, what makes the guilty look guilty. If the innocent were putting in their comments, I needed to join them. Not be the one visibly inching for the door.

  “Or maybe it was supposed to be picked up by someone else, like in Pinkerton,” said Yasha. “His contact.” Supporting the spy theory. But the way he looked at me, I knew he knew. He was doing this for me.

  The Chekist spat on the floor of the train. Where someone would have to sit later. “The simplest explanation,” said the timber man, “is that he went for a smoke and fell off. He was in pretty bad shape.”

  “Well, tough luck for him.” The Chekist tucked the case under his arm, and moved on through the car.

  In a few minutes, they unlocked the doors, and we spilled out onto the platform at the Nikolaevsky station. I loved every member of this sweating, shoving crowd, the high arched roof covered in soot and fluttering with pigeons, the patched but decidedly urban clothing, the begging orphans. I loved it all. We were back among the living. We were home.

  Part II

  Petrograd

  (Autumn 1919)

  14 My Petrograd

  Nikolaevsky station soared before my eyes, a city within a city, just as I’d left it ten months ago. Dirty and crowded, but a beautiful sight regardless. “Here it is, Iskra. This is where we’re from.” She gazed up at the rosettes on the smoky ceiling. Perhaps not as impressive as I’d hoped for her first introduction, but what did she know. The station hadn’t changed, though the people looked a little sicker than before, skinnier, and more resigned—as if they’d been waiting for centuries. Maybe they weren’t even traveling anymore. “Traveling” had perhaps become a permanent condition. Ten months ago, I’d left this station a girl delirious with love, o
n the brink of a great adventure. Now I had returned, the prodigal, sans swagger, sans lover, with an infant in her arms, the Izhevsk Committee’s pail over one arm, all my worldly goods in a little satchel. The Petrograd Soviet had not sent a welcoming committee. I kissed Iskra, checked her arm. “We’re home, milaya.”

  Beggar children seemed to outnumber the passengers now, besieging them with their outstretched hands. A woman my own age, perhaps a young teacher, knelt to address two tiny children, holding something out in her hand, trying to coax them closer, the way you tamed animals. She’d almost lured them to her when a gang of them swooped in and hurried the little ones away.

  I noted the Petrocommune shipping clerk stride past, determined to ignore the raft of orphans trailing behind him. Petrocommune—why hadn’t I thought of that? The state’s food distribution network. They would receive regular rations if anyone did, and all they could steal besides. I ran after him, trying to joggle Iskra and her poor arm as little as I could. “Hey! Comrade! Is there work in your office? I have my papers. How would I go about it?”

  “Go to Smolny,” he said, not slowing his pace or turning his head to regard me. “Talk to Gogilevsky. Tell him Strumlin sent you. And God help you.” He cast a glance at me briefly. “That was an evil man.”

  He knew. He knew! I wanted to thank him, but he had lost me in the crowd. Strumlin. Gogilevsky. That’s exactly what I would do. But today, I wanted to show Petrograd to Iskra. I was hungry for the statues, the red granite of its embankments. I wanted to show my daughter this empress of mirrors, its beauty and poetry, the reason I had dragged her all the way from Kambarka.