Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Such a shame,” a man said, helping me up, handing me my pail, which had clattered to the ground. Jack and Jill went up the hill…Of course, Iskra was bawling by now.

  So back I went to the labor exchange at the district soviet, squeezing us onto a tram, holding on with one hand. I chose the Second City district, out of allegiance to my days in the Poverty Artel. The last time I was here, I’d gotten married. Nothing but queues—to get housing, to get work, propuski for travel or blowing one’s nose. It looked like everyone still living in Petrograd had decided to cram into the Second City Soviet, coughing and weary and spitting on the floor. There were other districts to be sure—Liteiny had more job potential, but too many people knew me up there. Here I could say the Poverty Artel was my last address, not Furshtatskaya Street. Marina Kuriakina was plausible, though not without holes in her story. In any case, I didn’t want to run into anyone I’d known before Genya. He might have been the wrong man, but I was grateful that I could use his name and his all-important class category, proletarian. He did me that much of a favor. Without that, there would be little work and little housing for me and my child.

  A painful wait. The fat-faced Communist bureaucrat behind the counter at the labor exchange glanced at the papers of the petitioners, her mouth in a frozen sneer, not even looking at their faces—mostly ragged Formers of varying ages—telling each in turn that there was nothing for them. “How are we supposed to live?” wailed one middle-aged woman, thin as paper. “Really, you’re trying to starve us out of existence.”

  “What do I care if you starve or not?” she said. “Lousy burzhui. Why don’t you go sell your silver?”

  “I’m an educated woman,” she continued. “I graduated from the Bestuzhev Institute. I could teach, I could be a clerk.”

  “Move along,” said the fat-faced paper pusher.

  “My husband’s ill,” the woman begged. “Please. Anything.”

  “You’re holding up traffic.”

  The woman didn’t even cover her face, just let the tears spill down as she left the office.

  “Next!”

  I reached out as the woman passed by me, and touched her arm. “You’ll find something,” I said.

  She pressed my hand. “I’ve been coming here every day for two weeks. I don’t think we’re going to make it. My husband’s talking about killing himself. He can’t stand the humiliation.”

  Yes, it was worse than the hunger.

  A bald man wearing a jacket black with dirt, and no shirt cuffs under the sleeves, approached with his hat in his hand. “There has to be something,” he said. “I’m an editor. Anything. Proofreader, clerk.”

  After him, another Former.

  Then it was my turn. The apparatchitsa opened my labor book at the high counter. I felt like a child, peering over a table. “I read, I write, I’m not bad with numbers,” I said.

  “The telephone exchange is looking for someone.”

  Well, it was something. “Do they have a crèche?”

  “A what?”

  “A crèche. A baby nursery.”

  “You’re joking.” She held up the chit. “Take it, or leave it, it’s all the same to me.”

  “But my baby, she’s only three months old,” I said, opening the cloth so the woman could see Iskra, asleep inside it like a peanut in a shell. “I can’t just leave her in the cloakroom.” Surely they had crèches somewhere in the capital! Peter’s great city, birthplace of the revolution, et cetera. “What am I supposed to do with her?”

  “What’s anybody do?” the woman said, her mouth twisted and sour. “Look around your building. Or go to some mother’s home—what do I care? You want it or not? It’s all the same to me.” She held out the slip of paper.

  I took the information, moved away. It was a good job. I was lucky, I told myself. Yet I remembered the chaos of our collectivized apartment on Furshtatskaya, could only imagine my child left in that milieu, with one of the mothers deputized to take care of her. Letting her cry, or shaking her, or watering the milk, or using it to feed her own children. I realized I had believed the propaganda. Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday.

  I left the building with the chit in my hand and a heaviness in my stomach. I’d thought I could come back and find my way somehow. Stay with Mina, and find Kolya on the second day. Ah, the Lord would take care of holy fools. But why would he? He was letting everyone else die. It was twilight, too late for the telephone exchange, too late to look for housing. It would be another night in Mina’s hallway.

  As I walked up Nevsky, I couldn’t stop thinking of the midwife Praskovia, and the village in the trees, the women preparing for winter, threshing the grain. A baby was no obstacle there. In the countryside, at least, there was room for women and children, the needs of an infant one of the many duties of a peasant wife. But I had wanted a civilized life and here it was. No place for the most elementary need—to care for one’s child. It was just one box inside of another. Now I had the possibility of employment, but in exchange I would have to leave my tiny baby with some distracted hausfrau, some half-witted crone. Everything in me screamed out in rebellion. I did not save her life to offer her to the carelessness of an arbitrary stranger.

  I argued with myself. This happened every day. People worked, they left their babies with near strangers, the children lived. At least most of them. But my mother’s curse rang in my ears, and memories lingered of those hard-faced harridans, those beaten-down women. There was no one I’d met I would trust with a dog, let alone Iskra Antonina. No. Whatever I did, I would not be separated from her. There had to be another way. It was too late for me to become a Sovetskaya barynya at the telephone exchange, but surely there was another answer.

  I passed the Former woman down by the Moika, just leaning on a lamppost, gazing down into the water. I’d never seen such sadness. Even my own paled by comparison. “Here,” I said, handing her the chit. “It’s for the telephone exchange.”

  She looked at me as if waking from a dream, utterly confused, her worn, intelligent face.

  “I don’t know if you can use it, but give it a try.”

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “You’re not taking it?”

  “I can’t leave my baby,” I said. I closed her hands around the slip of paper.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh God, thank you.” She began to weep in earnest, covering her mouth. “Sometimes I wish we could all just die. That the Cheka would come and put us out of our misery. I look at the horses that fall in the street and I feel just like that. And no amount of lashes will ever put me on my feet again. But my husband, I can’t let him see me—he’s in an even worse state. Frankly, I come looking for work just to get out of that room.” She took my hand and pressed it to her cheek.

  17 Hotel Europa

  A group of tattered boys loitered in the porte cochere of the Hotel Europa, smoking and watching my progress up Mikhailovskaya Street. It was six o’clock, the twilight smelling of water. I entered the vast lobby stinking of mold and old soup, sour cabbage. Who would have guessed how quickly a grand hotel could become as squalid as any Haymarket Square tenement? A few years ago, the lobby would have been filled with elegant women and polished men, bellhops squiring mountains of luggage. Now the chandeliers were dim and the unwashed mirrors reflected only ghostly forms of those long-ago guests. The moldings on the wooden pillars had been savagely broken, and the marble underfoot was so black that you would not suspect its former honeyed hue. Iskra was awake, taking it all in. Groups of children hovered by the pillars, watching. One of them said something, making the others snicker. A dark and dangerous place, a place you’d never permit a child to enter, but I was the stranger here, and they the tenants. An orphanage, a hotel for the abandoned.

  An older woman in a white kerchief worked the front desk behind the amber marble top, now pitted and brown. I sighed in relief just to see a face over eighteen. As I waited for her to look up from the heap of papers she was sorting, I had the uncanny vision of m
yself tapping on a polished brass hotel-desk bell, a grande dame in hobble skirt and huge hat with a veil. Signing the register, the glossy pen in my soft kid glove with little pearl buttons, while behind me waited servants with my trunks and a maid holding the leash of a tall feathery dog.

  “Excuse me, Comrade,” I said.

  She still didn’t look up. “Infant Department. Second floor, to the back.”

  It took me a moment to realize—she thought I was here to abandon Iskra! Assumed it! Was I so desperate-looking? Did it happen so often? “I’m not leaving her. I’m looking for a job.”

  Now the woman lifted her gaze, sheaf of papers clutched in one hand, her pince-nez uncomfortably clamped to a long narrow nose. She took it off and rubbed the indentations. “Can you read? Know your letters?”

  Certifying my rusticated appearance. “A, Be, Te, De, Er,” I rattled off as a joke. “Something like that?” But the expression on her face, weary and exasperated, told me she was the wrong person to joke with. “Sorry. Yes, I can read, write, alphabetize, do calculations, cook, and scrub up if necessary.”

  “It won’t be up to me,” sniffed the woman. It occurred to me, there were some people made sour by life, and others who were sour and tired of life from their very birth. I wondered which one she was. “But there is a vacancy, lucky you. They’re taking applications.” She indicated the heaping piles of records. “Commissariat’s got a new idea. Wants the files redone. As if I didn’t have enough to do. There’s no one here right now to talk to you, but Matron’ll be back in the morning.” She scrutinized me more closely. A tall, rangy woman, she had at one point been beautiful, but life had proved brutally disappointing. “It’s night work, I’m afraid. We had someone, but she disappeared. After that, nothing but thieves or complete simpletons.”

  Imagine, someone had walked away from this gloomy hole. I hoped the missing woman had found something better and not fallen afoul of dark forces. “Nights, days, doesn’t matter,” I said. “I just have to have the baby with me.”

  “No family, no husband, is that it?” She smirked. You could see how she hoped that’s how it was. So that she could feel superior.

  Well, fine. If it made her like me, gave her confidence to think she knew me, all the better. I would have trotted out my husband with the agit-train, but she seemed to so enjoy my sinful suffering, I didn’t want to disabuse her. Anyway, I was sick of that story. I shrugged and sighed. “They say, He who does not work, does not eat. So here I am.” It was in our labor books, even on the ration cards.

  She considered me again—bundle, sheepskin, baby, pail, the architecture of my face, my rough hands. “Read this.” She handed me a piece of paper from the monstrous pile.

  “Commissariat of Social Welfare, Department of Motherhood and Child Welfare, Northern Commune, Petrograd Orphanage Number Six, Notice of Transfer—”

  “Thank God.” She exhaled deeply. “You should see the illiterates who’ve been marching through here.” Now she looked upon me with a bit more enthusiasm. I handed her the page. It was a notice of transfer to another orphanage for Shushkin, Gavril. Age 4. Date of birth, 17 May 1915. Age four, and already the subject of such documentation. I could imagine Gavril, his dirty snot-nose, his rags. Lost and terrified. Transferred to a children’s home in Detskoe Selo, Children’s Village—once the elegant town of Tsarskoe Selo, Tsar’s Village, where Akhmatova had grown up and Pushkin had attended the lycée. Now orphanages.

  The sharp-chinned woman continued filing papers. “A nice mess, eh? They want it all refiled on a new system—how that’s going to get any more of these little brats off the street, I can’t imagine, but nobody asked me. Look, give me a hand with this tonight, and I’ll put in a good word with Matron in the morning. I’ve been on since six a.m. and I’m ready to drop off this stool.” She glanced up at the clock in the old cashier’s booth—miracle, it was still working. “They’re feeding the animals now—if you don’t mind the noise, I’ll have them give you something to eat.” She lowered the grate with a bang, startling the boys in the lobby—purposely—and locked it. “Don’t leave anything you don’t want to lose,” she said. “There’s no private property anymore—in case you haven’t heard.”

  Her name was Alla Denisovna, a blonde of forty with a long-legged stride—yes, she must have been quite the beauty twenty years ago. She led me through the blackened lobby, absent the potted palms and carpets, past languid gangs of boys with whom she exchanged a look of mutual loathing. “Hooligans.”

  “Dried-up hag,” a boy called back at her.

  “Bow legs,” another one chimed. “The wind’s whistling.”

  “Degenerates.”

  She led me down a wide corridor into what had once been the hotel tearoom. The wallpaper was faded and stained and the floral beams too dirty to distinguish their patterns. It had been a pretty room, an afternoon gathering place for the ladies, known for its dance floor and small orchestra. Now the floor was black with grime, and little emaciated bodies with shaved heads crowded around rough tables. Some had to stand. She hadn’t been joking about the noise. The din would deafen a railwayman. But Iskra didn’t seem at all worried. She was gazing about her with fascination.

  “They feed them in shifts,” Alla shouted. “This is the last one.” There were seventy or so children here of youngish school age, all boys, crowded onto benches. They ate out of tin mugs, with spoons or their fingers. A group of red-cheeked women in stained white aprons and white nurse’s kerchiefs sat at a table of their own at one end of the deafening, airless room, smoking and jabbering away. They moved over to let us sit down.

  “Hey, Polya.” Alla Denisovna called to one of them, a short-nosed peasant with the exposed nostrils of a skull. “This is my new assistant on front desk. I’ve got to get to the queues before the bread runs out. Give her something to eat, will you? She’s got to make it through the night, and feed the baby.”

  The woman Polya brought me a dented cup of vobla soup, and a plate with kasha. Alla perched on the end of the bench, lit a cigarette and sat smoking, watching me eat, her leg bouncing up and down with impatience. A sullen girl about my age, her face coated with pancake makeup—makeup!—grumbled, “She’s not getting that job, you know. I got a friend up for it, and she’s in the party.”

  “That cross-eyed tart from Tula?” laughed another woman, short and wide, with a beauty mark next to her surprisingly pretty mouth, like a star hanging from the moon. “I hope she doesn’t have to take the medical exam. I heard she’s the darling of the fleet.”

  The women snickered.

  “I’m sure Matron will make her own decisions,” said Alla Denisovna. She was at least fifteen years older than any of them, except for the peasant woman Polya, and clearly had no interest in being liked.

  A scuffle broke out at one of the tables, a fury of fists. I was amazed to see that none of the women did anything about it. At another table, a boy wrestled a cup away from a smaller boy, who now just sat, silently weeping. “Did you see that?” I asked Alla. “He just grabbed the other kid’s food.”

  “Degenerates,” she said. “Dog eat dog.”

  With Iskra on my hip, I marched over to their table and twisted the stolen cup from the perpetrator. The shock on his face was worth a thousand words. “That’s not yours,” I said firmly, and I gave it back to the silent child, who wouldn’t look at me, but grabbed it and devoured what was left in the cup.

  I rejoined the women. I tried not to accuse anyone, I wanted to work here, but my God, what a lot of apparatchiks.

  “You think we’re heartless,” said the woman with the beautiful mouth. “But he’ll beat that sniveling runt up tonight when they go to bed. They have their own ways. Better to stay out of it. I was like you when I first came here. What went on here made me sick. Now I just live and let live.”

  “Come on, Sister Charity.” Alla hooked her finger into the cord of my bundle, strapped over the shoulder opposite Iskra.

  As she led me back to the Sisyp
hean mountain of paperwork, I wondered what kind of a hell I’d wandered into. There was little light in the hallway, children slipped along like shadows. I supposed I wouldn’t want orphans kept under lock and key like in a Dickens novel, and yet, should they really be allowed to prowl the orphanage at will, coming and going out the front door as they liked?

  Alla led us back behind the door of the front desk, and locked me in. I didn’t blame her. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate for a minute otherwise. On the counter sat the monstrous pile of paper. “We’ve been keeping records by category. Children still at the center.” She touched one messy pile with the flat of her hand. “Children who’ve been transferred.” She gestured down the counter. “Children who’ve run off. And so on.”

  And so on? A shiver went through me like a knife blade. And so on…It was an ocean of suffering, a galaxy, neatly captured in bland words on official paper. I held Iskra tighter.

  “Now the Commissariat’s decided it wants us to file alphabetically, by last name of child.” She said the Commissariat in a disgusted tone, and indicated the wash of files, rising up against the grate protecting the desk from the shadowy lobby. “And who are we to question the Commissariat, eh? Well, as long as I get my rations, I don’t give a damn if it takes from now until Judgment Day. Oh, and we get our rations Thursdays, first and third of the month.” It was Saturday, the last week in September.

  “They let that child steal the other one’s food,” I said. “They just watched it.”

  She sighed, considering me with a certain measure of exasperated pity. “Are you still worrying about that?” A child screamed in the echoing lobby. She looked over at him as he burst into sniggers. “One week working here, I promise you, you won’t notice the hand in front of your face.” She shrugged. “Just paper and more paper. If they run—paper. When they’re transferred—paper. If they die, more paper.”

  “Do you have children?” I asked her, looking into Iskra’s face. She was goggle-eyed in the strange place, not knowing where to point her nose.