Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  We emerged into the heat and glare of the afternoon, and I gazed across the great expanse of Znamenskaya Square. How quiet it was. Where had all the people gone? Here, where the Volynskys had once wheeled and slashed, where the soldiers had fired on the demonstrators in ’17, I could still hear the gunfire, smell the sulfur…where the student had bled in my arms, and died. But only a single cart traversed the enormous open space. Had everyone perished in some plague?

  I touched a wall, warm from the sun. The stones were still pockmarked from those gun battles. He’s dead, Marina. Let’s go. Running with Varvara across the square, where we crouched with the other patrons behind the closed curtains of the restaurant, while braver people hauled the wounded away and left the dead.

  Now people walked around me, as if I were a stone in a river, no one said anything as my tears flowed. I was no longer a girl whose appearance drew attention, just another weathered woman in a faded kerchief newly arrived from the country, holding an infant, weeping next to a wall. Where was everyone? Weeds grew in the roadbed in what had been the busiest square in Petrograd. Not a tram in sight, not an automobile, just a few ragged pedestrians, a bony horse pulling a two-wheeled cart. One of the buildings had fallen in, leaving a mark like a missing tooth in a familiar face. Seeing Znamenskaya Square like this was like greeting a father or a brother after a war—the battles had left their mark.

  The passersby tended to their business, walking wherever they liked, even down the middle of Nevsky Prospect. I kept touching walls. How the city had changed. So many broken windows, street doors nailed shut with all kinds of junk. I knew every shop, the painted signs boasting luxury businesses that no longer existed. All those clerks and businessmen and women in the latest hats, restaurants and shops, dentists and doctors on the floors above. Vanished, leaving only Blok’s light blue vault untouched overhead. I caught my breath at a flash of seagulls, snik snak, across the canvas of the sky. Iskra gazed around her, bobbleheaded and astonished, her curls sweaty.

  I paused at the corner of Liteiny Prospect, and pointed up to the curved windows at the top floor. “Mama’s friend Auntie Mina lives there.” I imagined her up there right now, in her father’s studio photographing some commissar’s girlfriend, her mother getting supper ready—no canteens for them. If Sofia Yakovlevna was still alive. I felt like a ghost. Perhaps in another time stream we were all still sixteen, sitting on the wide window seat up there and sharing a secret, Seryozha sewing a patch for a dress or in the darkroom with Solomon Moiseivich, Dunya in long plaits, Shusha banging away on that old piano. How angry would Mina still be? But who could resist Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova?

  I imagined I smelled burning rubber from the February 1917 barricades. And the flower shop—from my dream of the little boy, who turned out to be this little apple! I would show Iskra Furshtatskaya Street. The broad parkway—I wondered what it would look like now, when there was grass growing even on Nevsky Prospect. I smiled to think what Basya would say if I showed up at the flat with my kerchief and bast shoes. I’m sure she’d love to see how the mighty had fallen. She’d probably give me some wretched hole of a room in our old servants’ wing, just so she could bask in my downfall.

  But I had papers now. I was the proletarian Kuriakina. I wouldn’t have to submit myself to that humiliation.

  Here was the Fontanka, its quiet looking-glass reflection. I held Iskra up so she could see the river, so gay after the long days on the train. Her eyes lingered on the shifting waters, the pastel buildings admiring themselves in the water—pistachio, peach, butterscotch. Iskra had never seen such marvels. She had only experienced earth and trees, fields and that eternal train. She gazed down into the water, exceptionally clear these days—no sewage to sully its surface, no oils from boats—no boats. No barges. It was the absence of human beings—the city was returning to its pristine state. No factory smoke smeared the crystalline air. I could see, upriver, the yellow glow from the Sheremetev Palace, and wondered if Akhmatova still lived there. Had she stayed, weathering the storm at anchor? Or had she returned to her childhood home in Tsarskoe Selo, or headed south in search of food? Thought I could not imagine her leaving, not after having written, I am not one of those…

  The massive bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge still fought their sandaled grooms as it passed over the Fontanka. I knelt so Iskra could inspect the mermaids and seahorses of the bridge’s ironwork. Below us, the waters shot diamonds into our eyes. Metal and stone, water—these things at least hadn’t changed, nor did the passion of horses that could never be tamed, no matter how hard the grooms tried. We still flung ourselves to the ground and trampled our saner nature.

  Farther on, Eliseev’s fine grocer’s still stood, with its art nouveau mirrors encased in grime, where once a refrigerated counter stocked every grade of caviar, where we bought our Pears soap and imported wine. Now it was a dingy ration point—Distribution Center No. 3—while across Nevsky, Catherine the Great rose on her bronze pediment, sheltering her courtiers in her bell-like skirts. The weeds sprung up like a field before the classical pillars of the Alexandrinsky Theater, the tree boughs tickled with yellow.

  Iskra gazed at it all in green-eyed amazement. How could I have ever left her behind in the village? “See those arcades?” I pointed out Gostinny Dvor, its double rows of empty shops. “That’s where your grandmother shopped. And this is Nevsky Passazh.” The entryway to the luxury arcade boarded up. The perfumer, the milliner…Zimniye Nochi. Winter Nights. I’d had a Zimniye Nochi baby blanket from Orenburg, so warm and light it was like sleeping on a cloud. Iskra would never know a blanket like that. I brushed the soft hair from her forehead. Well, what difference did it make if she never had an Orenburg blanket and soap from Eliseev’s? She would have Petersburg.

  We continued past the Singer Building, and Kazan Cathedral—site of my terrifying dream, the white wolf stalking me in the forest of its columns. A pang of fear shot through me. The Archangel would be stalking me here. If you don’t like wolves, stay out of the woods, his man Akim had once said. I would try, but these were my woods as well. And here was the Grand Hotel Europa, site of that last ridiculous lunch with my great-aunt before the February Revolution, a string quartet playing Bach while we ate our soup. It seemed like a century ago. Now a number of ragged children played under the hotel’s porte cochere. It must be some sort of school or orphanage now. The forecourt on Mikhailovskaya Street was cracked, no fine automobiles lined up there anymore, no carriages. I could only imagine what the hotel’s lobby looked like, that patrician dining room. Was this all that was left of Petrograd—soldiers and abandoned children? I kissed Iskra’s sweaty forehead. Don’t worry. We’re going to be all right.

  We paused on the Kazansky Bridge over the Catherine Canal, and I pointed to the windows of that green-and-gold apartment, from which I’d once gazed out into the falling snow. “That’s where your papa and I made love the first time,” I whispered into her small ear. One of the best things about babies was that you could tell them all your secrets. I hummed “Mi Noche Triste” and danced with her in the empty street—the Argentine tango. Its rhythm, its balances, the changes of direction. She already liked to dance. I remembered how careful we’d been in those old days, not to start a child. It made me laugh—and now, the whole catastrophe!

  I felt him here. I knew he could feel me too. In some abandoned palace or hotel in this city, Kolya was living his mysterious life. Maybe at the Astoria, pouring the last of the champagne into hoarded crystal. Or in some decayed flat with elegant old people. I knew he’d feel the change in the air, and sense that I’d come home. The city resonated with our love. I would find him. And then? But I was no seer. I would leave the future to itself.

  At the top of Nevsky Prospect, the Admiralty flashed its golden salute, and across the river, the Peter and Paul Fortress returned it. The kino was still here, showing an old Kholodnaya film, the placards faded but the ticket window open. I was shocked, really, that such bourgeois trash would stil
l be playing in the heart of revolutionary Petrograd. And yet, there were other songs than “The Internationale,” other moods. We were more than just units of work, representatives of class. The wily individual was more stubborn than the forces of history, and our needs, our desires, our deepest dreams, would always rear up and run crazily around our lives like a horse escaped from its stall. The soul knew no politics.

  Palace Square lay vast and as empty as an old walnut shell, and silent as snipers, the statues on the roof of the Winter Palace scanned the horizon. The Alexander Column looked taller than ever in that empty circle of buildings, shooting up into the pale northern sky. Grass grew between the stones. I passed the Admiralty with its nautical bas-reliefs, its park overgrown, passed the Astoria, and St. Isaac’s Cathedral, along wide Senate Square. I wanted to touch the Neva, and see if Peter yet stood, commanding.

  That much had not changed. The man who had created this dream in stone still pointed toward the river. Here I will build my city. His only true child. Peter, marvelous and cruel, who had built it from the swamp, leaving forty thousand dead. Their bones creaked under our feet. Now his dream belonged to the masses. Yet the Bronze Horseman remained. Without a soul left to follow, he kept his post, his great and terrible purpose locked in his implacable heart.

  I strolled along the embankment, feasting on the distances and the gallop of the river, the sea air, wind fanning my face, sun-kissed gulls flitting over the water. Sea wind and Neva spray, the ensemble of eternal Petersburg’s classical facades and secret courtyards, shining canals. It was music, it was history, alive despite the silence, perhaps more than before, as now it was mine alone. Not a fishing boat, not even a rowboat, sullied the sparkling surface of the waters. I could feel the Allied blockade just beyond Kronstadt in the gulf. I could see no ships waiting for cargo at the great wharves. We were in quarantine, not from fear of disease but against the contagion of our ideas. I had not forgotten the gloomy news from the Germans on the train to Vyatka—the failure of the Soviets, the death of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet all that could change in a day. The English were backing away from the Whites. Then I remembered who had told me that.

  Soldiers did worse on the field of battle, I told myself. In the world’s eyes, the Chekist was just someone who died, fell off a train. Iskra, will you judge me someday? I hoped her times would be much milder. I was not going to chastise myself for lack of feeling. Things happened to people in this world, they disappeared, they were arrested, they were packed off in work parties, conscripted, shoved into provisioning units, they died in childbirth. They got typhoid and typhus, they drank bad water and worse. The Chekist had had the bad luck to run into me. Which of us controls his own fate?

  I held her upright, taking care not to hurt her arm, so she could better see the wide, whitecapped river, the university, the Sphinx. “She’s from Egypt, lisichka. Very old and very wise.” She always seemed to understand everything I said, waving her little fingers, exploring my kerchief, my collar. I chewed on her fingers. Sometimes I wanted to bite her. I could see why there were so many fairy tales about witches eating children, you really wanted to. I turned around so she could look over my shoulder and pointed to the Strelka, its two red Rostral Columns with green verdigris prows. “When I was a boy, I climbed way up there.”

  How would she understand the strangeness of my life? She blinked her long coppery eyelashes and made squirrel sounds that turned me to jelly. What she had been through already.

  I was sad that she would never know Petersburg as I’d known it, as my parents had known it, my grandparents.

  On the other hand, she would never be subject to an imperial will, she’d have no idea what that meant—the entire country at the whim of one person, the aristocracy chewing up the wealth of the nation. She would not take her privileges at anyone’s expense. She would vote, make decisions without the interference of fathers and husbands and tsars. What were ice creams and drawing rooms, Orenburg blankets, compared to that? To her, our lives would be as archaic and unimaginable as that which gave birth to the Sphinx.

  We just had to live through this time. She gazed into my face as into a tree, her trust absolute in this nineteen-year-old holding her. My Soviet girl. She would be so modern, the life she would live was unimaginable. How dare I be teary for Pears soap and the tango? I sighed. No matter how revolutionary I thought I’d become, my ideas, my beliefs, my very bones, had been marrowed in that old world. It would take another generation to breed these predilections out of us, do away with nostalgia and tangos—perhaps even passion itself.

  Though I couldn’t imagine that a daughter of my blood and Kolya’s would manage to stay free of that curse.

  She started to whimper and fret, and I felt my breasts let down their milk in plain view of Peter the Great. I took advantage of the city’s emptiness to nurse her up against its foundation rock. She wasn’t a fast nurser. She liked to finger my skin, my dress, her eyes closing in blissful reverie. I leaned back on the warm stone. I felt like I was living in a dream of Petrograd where all the people had disappeared.

  The thing was to find Kolya, tell him that I was ready to reconsider my decision to leave him. Anyone else would call it quixotic, and perhaps it was. I hummed to Iskra as I nursed her. I thought she’d fallen asleep, but then felt the gurgle, and knew what was next—allowing me the strange experience of walking down the stone steps of the Neva to wash a baby’s diaper. What a poor example of Soviet hygiene! Like a peasant woman, I rubbed her laundry on the stones, draped the cloth to dry in the sun. It was heaven to sit on sun-warmed granite by the mother-river in the honeyed light. We slept for a while there, under Peter’s disapproving watch. Go! his pointing arm commanded—but he was bronze and I was flesh, and in this, flesh emerged triumphant.

  Afterward, we walked down to the English Embankment, in search of a certain yellow mansion. It was smaller than I remembered it but its facade glowed like sun through a spoonful of syrup. I tried the street door—locked…but perhaps the service entrance off Galernaya Street, in the back, might be open. From that street, I easily found the courtyard—the big gate was showily padlocked, but the smaller one gave way. The yard was a filthy hole now, filled with all kinds of junk. No sign of black horses, as on that terrible morning when he left me. Go back to your poet. Those giant blacks that were in fact Arkady’s.

  I tried the doors. It was like rapping on panels for a secret entrance. One door was locked, the second nailed shut, but I knew people got in there somehow. Success came in the form of a modest, almost invisible entry at one side of the yard, its wood weathered to silver. I slipped inside.

  The cold darkness immediately wrapped us in its ghastly embrace, a zoolike smell. I hesitated a moment—Iskra heavy in her sling—and reached through the slit in my skirt for Kolya’s gun, held it against my leg. I was by no means the only one who’d found this door. As I wound my way through the decimated pantries and storage rooms, the stink assaulted me. Everywhere the tooth of wood scavengers had made its mark, gnawing away doors, cabinets, furniture. Light fingered the broken windows on the front landing, dust motes hung in its rays, as still as death. The marble of the grand staircase rose as pale as a nude in the gloom. How cold it had been that winter—even now, its chill was just this side of a grave. I ascended slowly, listening. Iskra talking to herself in her sling. Shhhh…I jiggled her.

  Last year, the abandoned mansion had just felt empty, but now it seemed occupied by something that skittered in the corners of my eyes as I walked soundlessly, tiger-footed, through the dusky rooms of the bel étage. Shattered bits of upholstered furniture lay across the elegant parquet, or what was left of it—half had been pulled up, darkness gaping through from the next level. I had to be careful in the gloom not to take a misstep and break my leg.

  Someone had harvested the frames from the couches and left the springs and wadding like so many slaughtered sheep.

  Footsteps. I halted, listening with every hair on my body. Light footsteps running down a corri
dor. His name jumped to my lips—Kolya!—but I stopped myself from calling out. Those were not his feet. I wrapped my fingers around the revolver’s grip, slid off the safety. A sensible person would leave—a sensible person would not have entered this desolate place—but I’d long dreamed of this mansion, the perfect hideout, derelict as it was. I remembered the door, flush with the wall. I had to know if he was here. My hands were sweating despite the cold, sweat ran down my back into my homemade drawers. The baby bulky in her sling. I crept toward the small boudoir, that jewel, feeling the wall for the giveaway crack.

  There it was again, the sound of running steps. Cats? I shuddered to think rats.

  There. I had found it, not by sight but by touch, the seam in the wall, and pushed it open, this room where I’d spent those four mad days of grief, my passion blindly bounding, wounded and dripping blood like an arrow-shot deer.

  The dirty windows permitted a dull light, the room smelled of smoke. Its yellow wallpaper had been charred black by fire, lit not in the fireplace but right on the floor against the plaster. The corners of the room were littered with civilization’s shards and refuse, a torn mattress heaped with rags. I was surprised to see the little chandelier yet hung from the ceiling, as well as a few of the paintings. Hadn’t anyone thought to sell them?

  The rags moved. I practically shot my own foot off. Not rags but children. Huddled together in the corner like a clutch of hedgehogs, three children with gray matted hair and filthy faces the color of their rags, watching me. Listless, inhuman, their eyes the only clean parts of them. I heard running in the corridor, light feet fading away. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered, my heart somewhere in my neck. “How long have you been here? Are you alone?” They stared at me as if they’d been deafened by a blast.