Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  A change in the sound—the echo of the car’s powerful engine dropped away for a moment. It must be the bridge. Anichkov. The Fontanka. I reached out with all my energy to feel the width of the river, the openness, and then, the echo returning. Still going east.

  “So what’s he want with her anyway?”

  “Shut your face is what.” A girl’s voice, commanding.

  Now shouts. Harsh, low. Sentries? “Help!” I screamed from the floor of the car. “Shut up, bitch!” The kids kicked me in the head and the stomach as the driver sped on. Two shots rang out—the children shrieked and laughed and cursed in the floridly foul argot of the street. Put a bullet into us, a hail of them, the more the better, I prayed. But we careened forward, a crazed hilarity blazing through the quiet.

  A different echo—vast. A big sweeping right-hand arc. Znamenskaya Square. Alexander III again. I imagined him looking out at this child-filled car racing through the Bolshevik night, and being glad he was already dead. I listened for the shrill of a train whistle, anything to confirm my guess. Please, O Holy Mother, make this not be happening. I swore I could taste cinders on the air, the smell of coal smoke.

  I twisted on the car floor, desperate to get out of the sack. I’d forgotten nothing of my week in captivity on Tauride Street, I couldn’t survive another encounter like that, and this would be worse. Hadn’t the Kirghiz said as much? You should have flown fast and…Take care, little hawk. There are bigger hawks than you. Their wings will darken the sky. I couldn’t stop shivering. I knew I should be planning something, but all I could do was think how foolish I’d been to return to Petrograd like it was a game of hide-and-seek. With my redheaded baby, thinking I could avoid being caught…forgetting the depth of the danger. I shouldn’t have come back for all the Kolyas in heaven.

  I tried to inch the sack up my body, to free my hands. Another series of kicks. “Forget it, shitbrains. Might as well relax.” A few more pricks and blows just to make sure I understood that I was completely in their power.

  Different paving. Thrumming. I screamed, in case there was another roadblock. “Can’t you keep her quiet back there?” Hard little boots, kicking me in the back, head, and stomach. I put my arms around my head inside the burlap.

  Rough paving. The crunch of tires. The car stopped. We hadn’t turned once since we left Mikhailovskaya. I was bruised from head to toe, my head ached, my breasts ached. This was the end of the road—it had to be the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where my family was buried in the grand Tikhvin Cemetery. Please, Dyedushka, Grandmère, help me! Yes, the Archangel liked a quiet, out-of-the-way spot to set up shop. And this one was cemetery-convenient. The monks must be gone now. Lots of room for his gang of murderous tots.

  They hauled me out onto the pavement, dropping me like an old rug. I curled as much as I could not to hit my head. They hauled me to my feet, my soles clad only in stockings on the wet and freezing stone. Untying my legs so I could walk, they shoved me along with kicks and jabs from their knives, talking excitedly, calling me every name in the book, telling me how the Archangel would cut my nose off, my tits, and each of my fingers in turn. Then a creaky door swung open and I stumbled over some sort of threshold. Smooth stone, dry. Still icy, but interior. Another door. Stairs—wood, warmer through my stockings. One, two, three, four, five…Then forward. A wooden floor. Warmer now. A long hall. “Watch your step.” A bony little leg caught my shin and I found myself felled, wrenching my shoulder and bashing my nose on the floor. I swore I would kill that urchin. They laughed and mocked me. “Let me go, please oh please oh please,” “I’ll give you big money,” “I’ll give you marafet,” “I’ll let you fuck my sister,” “Let you fuck Lenin up the ass!” Oh, they were having a grand time. The bubbling laughter of children would never sound the same to me after this.

  They dragged and pushed me, again, into a wall. The slam of a door. The dropped bolt.

  I explored the space, reaching out inside my bag as much as I could. Small—a closet. They’d locked me in a goddamn closet. The stink of mops, yes. Silence. No footsteps, no whispers, no giggles. They were gone. Terror, wordless and ancient and as absolute as the distance between stars, descended on me now. If only I could reach the gun that I’d lugged around since Kambarka, but I was trapped in his spiderweb, the burlap sack my shroud. Out there, a giant arachnid waited to pull me in on its sticky threads. All that learning, all those aspirations, my hopes for Iskra—for nothing. I would never see my baby again. Oh God, oh God, she would grow up never knowing me, without even someone to tell her who I was and how I loved her. A Soviet orphan, if she was lucky enough to grow up at all. I had played this game like a sucker, a rube. And now I would die.

  I couldn’t stop my tears.

  I thought of Dostoyevsky in his room in Dom 13, on his long walk. I would walk to Siberia too, rather than face Arkady von Princip as a prisoner once more, his human toy. They would hold me down—like in my dream, where the people caught me with their little knives and skinned me in the courtyard, leaving me to walk around Petrograd with no skin. How would he start? With a deer, you hung it upside down, and started at the rear legs, pulled off its skin like a sweater.

  Stop it.

  I focused on Iskra, picturing her sleeping, snug in her basket next to Nadezhda. She would wake for her next feeding at two, and if I wasn’t there, they’d take her to the Infant Department, for Nonna to feed. Maybe Arkady’s shadows wouldn’t think to look there. And there she would remain, safe. I cursed myself for not teaching her to drink from a bottle, as if I’d always be there to feed her. Would she be stubborn? Would she go on refusing? Wanting what she wanted and only that? Like her mama, the strength of her personality would prove her undoing. Comrade Tanya, you were right, damn you. But she was healthy, she could go without eating for a day or two. If only they didn’t think to look for her there.

  I thought of Akhmatova, her cool dignity, but she melded into the image of the dark Theotokos, the Virgin of Death. Have pity on me, a poor sinner. But I didn’t need pity. Dignity was beyond me. I just had to survive.

  Suddenly I got the strongest image of Ukashin, as he’d been the day I shot the stag, the Master in his Mongolian robe and astrakhan hat, his energy flowing through his hand into my shoulder, filling me with it, steadying me. Those waves of heat flowing. I knew how to do this. I pulled my life force, or what was left of it, into a pinpoint, a red ball, and shot it through the artery of Nevsky Prospect, back to the Europa, back to the baby still sleeping in Room III, Boys 9–12. I’ll always love you, Iskra, whether I’m there or here or nowhere. You’ll never be alone.

  But thoughts of death and pain kept flooding in. I was nineteen years old and had taken every wrong road, wasted my talent, burned every friend. Had given birth to a golden child, whose life I’d put in jeopardy just for wanting to return to this cursed place. Would I live to see her run after butterflies, hands reaching to the bright scraps of wing just out of range, the sun kissing her face, leaving its freckled traces? What would happen to her if I died tonight?

  Concentrate. Concentrate on the now.

  But Ukashin was a fake. Fakir, fraud, usurper.

  But not completely.

  No, not completely.

  A dark, defeated part of myself wished I was already dead, so I wouldn’t have to live through these next hours. The good thing about being orphans is that you can’t be an orphan twice. But I had to live to return to Iskra. I would allow no other thought to come through. If I could just reach my gun, but these ropes, this bag! I twisted and yanked, rubbing my fingertips raw. My stockinged feet ached—the old frostbite had returned like burning flames. At the detsky dom, they take their boots away, so if they run, they have to run barefoot. And they did it too. Some of my own charges had done it. In the snow. They’d ridden under boxcars until they’d lost their hearing. They’d done what they had to, far younger than me, weak and malnourished, six, seven years old.

  I wasn’t dead yet, I told myself. Nothing had yet happen
ed to me but a few kicks and bruises. You’re battling shadows, Ukashin whispered. Concentrate. Breathe. I took big shuddering breaths, inbreathing energy through my skin, inflowing. Whether it was real or not, it calmed me enough to think about this bag, and the ropes that held it around my hips and waist. I thought of Volodya’s fat pony Carlyle, who took a big breath when you saddled him, so he could exhale later and loosen the girth, making the saddle slide sideways when you mounted—his idea of a joke. I wished I’d had the sense of that fat horse, but I hadn’t had the presence of mind.

  I exhaled and twisted against the bag, hoping to loosen the ropes. I pushed upward, pulled my shoulders tightly together. After several minutes, I had enough room inside the sack to move my arms. I pushed with my elbows, centimeter by centimeter. I clawed the burlap until I found an imperfection, a little hole in the cloth, probably from one of the brats stabbing me. I stuck a finger through and started working on it. Two fingers, three! I got all four fingers through. It was old and rotten, and after a few tries, it gave way with a satisfying rip. I worked my arm out and went for the gun under my skirt in its makeshift holster.

  Gone.

  I sat back against the wall. Breathe. Of course it was gone. All those hands, they’d probably found it in the car. Ha ha. Handed it up to the girl in the front seat, the driver with her red hair. The joke was on me. All this time, carrying that thing around so long I hardly felt it. For just this day. So prepared. Just a joke. So like my life.

  I tore the bag off and got my head and shoulders free. It was something anyway, to have that thing off my face, breathe the moldy air, untie the ropes. They’d been secured with a simple square knot. It was my own struggling that had tightened it so. I just had to push an end back through and it fell away.

  Although the situation hadn’t changed much, at least I was free of that bag. I could think, move my arms. I felt around on the floor for something I could use, something sharp, but there were only mops and brooms. I stood and examined them for the one whose handle seemed heaviest. A mop. The splintered wood bit my palms, but I tried jabbing with it, feeling its weight. It was hardly a spear, but it was something. I would dash it into the face of the first human to walk through that door, child or Archangel. I would not hesitate.

  I sat on my heels, resisting the urge to curl on the floor and sleep. I had to be ready. Where I’d dreaded the opening of that door, now I couldn’t wait—it was my one chance to fight my way free. I pushed all other thoughts aside—my child, my future. I was the hunter. Concentrated only on the door, the hall outside, the rooms on this floor, this wing of the great monastery. I felt my way out into the complex, room after room. A great silence. Either they’d killed the monks or the monks had fled. The place was empty like a derelict palace. Full and empty. Empty of monks but full of ghosts, the shadow world of orphans and criminals.

  I practiced concentrating energy and radiating it—warming my feet, warming the room—and whether or not it really worked, I felt warmer and more confident. I’d brought my child back to life with that energy, when she lay like a stone in my arms. Now I would be a bogatyr at the crossroads, surrounded by skulls and ravens. I would be the Tsar-Maiden.

  I felt them coming. Light feet, dragging, all out of step with one another. Disorganized. I felt them in their ragtag enthusiasm, their giggles, their brave whispers. The door was unbolted, dimness illuminated by lantern light. I uncoiled from my closet floor like a spring, leading with the mop handle. I caught one of the girls on the jaw. She staggered back, shocked, while the smaller boys made attempts to attack with their pocketknives. I jabbed the putrid mophead into their bluish faces, pushing them back, feeling like Gulliver. I swung the handle to clear a wider space around me, forcing them back toward the stairs, when the skinny girl with the sharp teeth of a ferret pointed my own gun at me.

  Had they not had it, I would have made the stairs, could have run for it, I knew I could outrun these runts or beat them with the mop. I was the one who had brought the gun into the equation. I had stacked the balance against me. “Drop it,” she said.

  I did as I was told.

  “The Archangel wants to see you. Get going.”

  Would she know enough to pull the safety off? I grabbed one of the children and twisted his arm, feeling like a monster as he started to shriek, but I would not be skinned alive as Arkady drank in my terror like milk. I had my own child waiting for me. I held the boy between me and the gun as I moved toward the stairs, the boy kicking me with his heels, clawing at my arm, swiping at me with his little knife. He turned it backward, the little shit, and stabbed me in the leg.

  The girl fired.

  The boy sagged against me. His blood was warm, soaking the front of my dress, my stockings. Hot, sticky. I was covered in it. I was holding a corpse. I dropped the boy, who had just been alive. Dead, because of me. A child about eight. Not so much younger than Maxim. “You shot Snotty!” another boy shouted.

  The hot gun barrel pressed against my nose. The girl’s eyes were old and dry.

  The blood spreading out on the floor, soaking my stockinged feet.

  “He said not to let her get away. Come on, you.” She grabbed me and shoved me, stumbling, over the body, toward a thick door. “The Archangel’s waiting.”

  23 The Sandman

  They knocked at the wide oak panel. I could smell the child’s blood, clinging to my dress, still warm. Blood and death, and I had arrived in the heart of it. The murderous children opened the latch and shoved me in ahead. “We brought her, Gospodar.”

  Gospodar. Lord. It was how we once addressed the tsar.

  The cavernous room was lit by fire in an open hearth, and a tall candelabra dripping with fat candles. Incense, the smell of beeswax. An animal stink. They stood around me, anticipating reward, avid with the hope of my punishment.

  He stepped into the trembling light, their Lord. Taller than ever, his spiderweb hair flowing over his shoulders, the long Scandinavian face glowing white in the gloom. The Baron Arkady von Princip. My captor, my lover, my nightmare. It was I who had called him out of the darkness. It seemed the everyday world was the dream, a rickety theater set, while beneath it ran a black river, this monstrous world of myth, which was the true world.

  He’d fitted himself out in a black monk’s cassock secured by a wide belt, a heavy gold cross dangling over it. On the forefinger of his hand, a huge ring. Gospodar. His holiness, the Archangel.

  “Klavdia shot Snotty,” blurted the dish-faced boy. “He’s dead.”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Gospodar,” pleaded the ferret-faced girl. “She made me do it.”

  “I told you she was dangerous.” A smile played about his wide mouth with its thin lips. He stretched out a bony bejeweled hand. The girl approached him with my pistol on her upturned palms, like an offering to a god. He took the gun, sniffed it—newly fired—hefted it, and then laid it carelessly on the table among the books and papers. Taunting me.

  “Now leave us.” He dismissed them with a wave, as if clearing the air. His wine-colored slippers were worn out at the toes. I met his blue gaze, the white wolf that had been stalking me in my dreams all this time, waiting in the shadows of the column-forest. The Archangel isn’t himself…Was it true, Arkady? Perhaps, they said.

  “What should we do about Snotty, Gospodar?” The second, stocky girl insisted. She would not forget her fallen brother.

  “Take care of it,” he snapped. “And don’t disturb us.”

  They quickly retreated, like courtiers not daring to turn their backs on their lord.

  Once they were gone, he smiled his lipless smile. “Hello, Makarova. It’s been a long time.” That gravelly rasp I knew so well.

  I should never have come back to this cursed city. It was his city, his labyrinth. And not with Iskra—God! What was happening to her back at the orphanage, my baby, my Spark? My mouth went dry, my throat, as if all the liquid in my body had turned to sand. He came closer, his hands tucked into his sleeves. What did he have in t
here, a knife? Garrote?

  He circled me, examining me like a dealer to whom a piece of art had been returned, his mouth in its coquette’s moue—my blood-spattered stockings, my dress, my hair wild from my fight with the burlap bag. The air was thick and fatty, and my ribs throbbed where the kids had kicked me, the stab wounds from their little knives ripe with tetanus, I was sure. I swallowed, hoping not to vomit, hoping not to choke on the acid of my own fear.

  “You’ve aged,” he said finally. “Another year or two, and no one will ever guess you’d been a beauty.”

  I would be happy to have two years. Ecstatic! It was all I could do to strangle the whimper forcing itself into my throat, resist the urge to fall on my knees and beg for my life, clinging to his cassock’s skirts. I had forgotten the force of his physical presence. But I could not give way to hysteria. I had learned the hard way that a display of weakness brought out his cruelty, his lust to hurt you further. All I could feel was my shuddering breath, my heart seizing like a fist as he circled around me. The creak of his belt, the cross rasping the rough fabric of his cassock. His smell, wormwood and damp earth. Sweat trickled down my forehead, stinging my eyes, running down my neck into my collar. His face, peering into mine—marred by sores and dark spots. He didn’t look well. He breathed in my ear. “Eighteen months. Had you forgotten me?”

  Yes, I had forgotten, pretending it was just a bad dream. Just a mistake. Imagining that it was over, that he had gone on to other things. It was I who had forgotten exactly who this man was. This was always here, waiting for me.