Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  The old man, Tikhonov, was with the union at Skorokhod, and one of the founders of the factory committee. “I’ll be the first they line up against the wall,” he said proudly.

  Dinamo—Slansky—built radios, he was studying to become an engineer. He’d joined the party just last year, a real go-getter.

  “Why aren’t you in the army, a fine young man like yourself?” Tikhonov asked, thinking he was so clever, like a prosecutor.

  Dinamo turned around and pulled up his jacket, his shirt. Terrible scars boiled the skin, like a wet cloth that had been balled up and left to dry that way in the sun. “Took it in the back on the Dvina,” he said. “My kidneys are shot. I can’t march for shit. But people need radios, the trains and the troops.”

  Chizhova was Petrograd born and bred, her mother a laundress, her father a tanner. She had a boyfriend in the army, Vitya. “I know he’s gonna come back and talk about all the battles he’s won and where he went, and what am I going to say for myself? That I stayed home and dyed leather? That that was my civil war? At least now I can say I did something.”

  “What about you?” Tikhonov called over from the table. “Comrade Rifle. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “You can see the shooting from Pulkovo,” I said.

  “I mean who are you? Come on, be friendly. We’re going to be here for a while, we might as well get to know each other.” He tipped his chair back, folded his hands behind his head.

  I told my story, plain as boiled water. “My baby died in an accident, nine days ago. She’s buried down there at Novodevichy Convent.” My lungs hurt, from all the dirt I’d breathed. I lifted the rifle to my shoulder, sighted down Moskovsky. “I don’t give a damn what happens to me, so I thought I’d do the revolution some good. That’s my story. Like it?”

  They looked like people in a painting, sitting at that table, the flickering candlelight caressing their faces. Their eyes averted. Yes, I could feel them recoiling, the way you recoil from someone with smallpox, cholera. How they leaned away. No one wanted to be around a bad-luck person. Someone who didn’t want to live. Especially with a rifle.

  “How horrible. In the middle of all this,” said Chizhova. “Such a shame.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” said Tikhonov. “I didn’t know.”

  “No time to even mourn,” chimed in Dinamo. “Tough luck.”

  “Where’s your family?” Chizhova asked, her gray eyes big with pity.

  I shook my head. “No family.” I wouldn’t cry. Not in front of these people. When it was all over, maybe then, when I could seal myself into a room by myself, maybe then I could. I went back to staring out the window, into the empty street. So empty, so strange, that broad boulevard in the sifting snow. Waiting for the end.

  They started up chattering again, trying to air the dread that lapped at the baseboards of the room with its bit of plasterwork and its empty child’s cot. The guns from Pulkovo sounded like thunder. I tried counting between the flash and the rumble, but it was too fast. At one point, I noticed, the men got up from the table and quietly carried the child’s cot into the other room. Nice of them. Kindness and death all mixed together.

  We slept in rotation, two awake and two down, on the commissar system—someone to keep watch and someone else to keep that person watching. Dinamo and I took the first watch. He had a pencil and notebook, he was sketching something. I gazed out at the curtain of falling snow. Iskra never lived to see her first snowfall. Not even that long. Summer and autumn were all she ever knew. What if she were right here, just on the other side, like Ukashin thought. Would she still be a baby, just a baby, floating, drifting, alone? Or would she have returned to that undifferentiated consciousness? Would she understand? But really, what was there to understand? The accident that life on earth was? Not fate. Just a random hand of cards. We stumbled in and we stumbled out, like a drunk opening doors in a strange apartment.

  Tonight, or tomorrow, I would put my own death to some purpose.

  I kept thinking of Maxim. His agony, his guilt. I hoped maybe they were together, keeping each other company. I wondered if you were met by those who’d gone before, or were accompanied by those you died with. I looked around the room. I would not want to die with these people. Especially Tikhonov.

  I shouldn’t have taken that job at the orphanage. It gave me the false sense that I could handle Iskra alone. I shouldn’t have left Mina’s building. I should have slept in the hall outside their door until I shamed them into taking me in. Like a beggar exposing her wounds. But I’d been too proud, wanted to go my own way. So proud. Damn Mina for her own stiff-necked certitudes—and yet, it hadn’t been she who had turned our friendship to vinegar. I’d ruined it myself, not once but twice.

  I thought again of that note someone had pressed into my hand on Millionnaya Street. It was astonishing to me that after two years of Cheka searching and spying, there was still White conspiracy in Petrograd. The Cheka cells were packed with supposed conspirators—just ordinary people—and yet, at the hour of the White advance, suddenly a real counterrevolutionary organization had sprung to life like an animated doll. Who would have believed it? Even now I would have been skeptical, but for that pamphlet.

  And Papa? Perhaps he’d sneaked off to England after this summer’s attack. But I doubted it. He was more like me than I would have been able to see before. Stubborn to the end. No, he would be printing pamphlets and slipping messages to the front. Or sitting in a Cheka cell himself—beaten, bloody, bearded as he’d been that night. Disguised as a worker, but unable to disguise his air of superiority and absolute confidence in his own cause. I remembered what they’d said about defeated armies being the most brutal. The Cheka would shoot everyone in their cells when the Whites arrived, right before we blew up the bridges and the power plants. Yet, even now, I didn’t want him dead.

  I wish he’d seen her. But we were a nation of orphans, childless parents, parentless children. Civil war had cut the thread. There was no then. Then was outlawed for people like me. I hadn’t realized how important the past would be, family, those connections. I’d thought nothing of breaking them myself. And now it was a dead end. There were no family jokes I would pass down to her—how her Uncle Volodya had once sprinkled pepper into our dyedushka’s mouth on the porch at Maryino when he was enjoying his after-lunch nap, and he chased him around the yard trying to hit him with his cane. The time Grandmère bought a white marten scarf complete with head and eyes, and Tulku would not stop barking at her. Iskra never got to ride the rocking horse in the nursery on Furshtatskaya Street, never held Avdokia’s soft, gnarled hand, never played with the hand-painted Columbine and Harlequin in Seryozha’s little theater. She didn’t know our favorite childhood game—Cossacks and Robbers. She hadn’t shared her own dyedushka’s English butterscotch, ordered all the way from London. She’d never heard our love story, mine and Kolya’s, how we kissed in the coatroom on St. Basil’s Eve, or that he smelled of honey and cigars and Floris limes. She’d never smelled white lilacs in December. She never saw December.

  “You okay, Vintovka?” Dinamo whispered from the other window, not to wake the others. Vintovka, rifle. He was my commissar.

  I nodded, swiped at my telltale tears.

  “Scared?”

  “Not of dying,” I said.

  He laid his rifle across his knees. “What does scare you?” he said.

  “Living.” It made my eyes sting.

  He swallowed. I could see the Adam’s apple jump in his throat under the black, unshaven chin. “Can I tell you something?”

  I braced to hear what he might have waited until now to confess. I hoped it was not anything sexual.

  “When I was lying out in that field on the Dvina, dying like a piece of meat”—he felt in his pockets, produced a bag of tobacco—“all I wanted was for a moment to live like a man. My comrades to bury me with a few words, knowing who I was. I didn’t mind dying, I just didn’t want to die like a dog.” He rolled a cigarette in a bit of
Pravda.

  “In those days, there was a third enemy—wolves. Whole nations of wolves, starving for game. They started attacking the men in the trenches, both sides the same to them. Sometimes we’d declare a cease-fire to beat them back. They felt like darkness itself, closing in.” He smoked, turning away from me, lifting the curtain to see down the street, the falling snow was thickening. “We were afraid of everything. The wolves. Gas. We had no masks, we had nothing. With gas, you don’t feel anything until it starts to burn, it burns your eyes away, your lungs.” The snow drifting down, the smoke drifting up.

  I could imagine him, wounded. I could smell the dirt, the mud, feel those wolves prowling. “So they got you out?”

  “Yeah. I was in the hospital a year. Do you know what those places were like?”

  All those brave men, groaning, sweating, in their unchanged bandages. Talk about dying like a dog. I nodded.

  “I lay in that bed for a year. With those pigs of nurses, changing the bandages every three days if you were lucky. No morphine, not even water sometimes. No piece of it that wasn’t hell. You know what I dreamed of?”

  I couldn’t imagine. Murder? Lakes? Women?

  “I wanted a moment, just one moment, that wasn’t about the flesh. No bodies, no screaming, no eating, no clawing for this and that. All I wanted was a moment to be a man. You know? A human being. Something with a little dignity, something that didn’t stink, that didn’t hurt. Just to have a thought, one simple thought. Like, where does electricity come from?”

  He was wounded in a bed in some hideous military hospital, and that’s what he wanted to think about. Electricity.

  “Crazy, I know. But I was a good student back in school, if you can believe it. But who asks a poor boy, son of a muzhik, You want to go into the Engineers, Mitya? No. I left home at fourteen to go to work. Up at the Nobel factory. Then the war came. Who cares what Mitya Slansky wants? Into the infantry with him.” His bitterness, the hollowness of his eyes, his cheeks.

  “Let me tell you, Vintovka, lying in that bed, I decided I was going to be a man. I wouldn’t wait until I’d healed, I might die instead, but meantime, I would try to be a man. I forced myself—Think thoughts, Mitya. How does a plant drink the sun? What does a fish think about, under the ice? I thought about people on other planets, and if we went there, would they look like people to us? We might walk right by them, thinking they were rocks. Like the bourgeoisie used to walk past us.”

  In the street, a single man was walking through the falling snow, down the center of Moskovsky Prospect. Where was he going? To report to the Whites? Was he mad? I sighted my rifle on him. Then I saw the sled. Now I understood—he was going to the barricade to pull firewood off it. Didn’t he know there were snipers up in these buildings, that we’d turned Petrograd into a fortress?

  “I thought about people from long ago,” Dinamo was saying, the smoke coiling over his head like a halo. “Egyptians. Greeks. Or Africans. Are they like us, do they think like us, or are there ways of being a man that are so different from us—maybe better too?”

  I lowered my rifle. I was a merciful god. Dinamo’s eyes burned in the light of the flickering candle. He wanted a question that had nothing to do with the belly, or the nerves, but that came from the soul of a man, doing the one thing a man could do. Think, wonder. “Then the revolution happened, and it was like Easter, remember?”

  “Everybody kissed each other in the street.” How happy we were then, everyone alive, the country all together.

  “The whole country, dreaming of being treated as human beings. Of living like men.” He brought his chair closer to mine. His brown eyes, his long nose in his narrow face—in this light he looked like a tormented monk, something El Greco might have painted, Zurbarán.

  “And yet, as things went along, it was still the same old thing, wasn’t it? The boss, the owners, the generals, the war. The Constituent Assembly, run by the lawyers and the landlords. No, we said. We want the soviet! We want to make our own decisions. We’re sick of living like dogs, eating the scraps from the table!”

  The old man on the divan startled awake. “The devil take you,” he grumbled. “People are trying to sleep here!”

  “Go back to sleep, old man,” I said. “Yudenich isn’t here yet.”

  Dinamo rubbed his face in his hand. He looked a little abashed, but still, he had to keep talking. The steady flood of words—had he never shared this with anyone before? “So, here we are,” he said, keeping his voice down. “We have our soviet, we have our revolution, we’re our own masters, and what has changed? What has changed? It’s still the same. Meat.”

  “Or no meat,” I said.

  “Rations, production—this is all a dog’s life. Is this our fate on earth? Food, work, have a little fun, back to work?”

  “I thought you were a Communist,” I said. “You sound like a Christian.”

  “Not God and incense and holy holy holy, kiss the picture, and all that. But something. I mean, we need to improve material conditions, but that’s not what we’re talking about either. We’re talking about, where is there for a man to go in this world? In this world. That’s what scares me. That there’s material conditions and nothing else.” His face was like a Greek saint’s, hollow-eyed from his sufferings. How alone he was, in that chair, only five feet from me. How alone we all were in our mortal terror.

  I recited from Tyutchev:

  Soft the dove-hued shadows mingle,

  Color fades, sound droops to sleep…

  Life and motion melt to darkness

  Swaying murmurs far and deep.

  “What is that?” Dinamo asked.

  “A poem,” I said.

  “Is there more?” he asked.

  But the night moth’s languid flitting

  Stirs the air invisibly:

  Oh, the hour of wordless longing;

  I in all, and all in me.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “The hour of wordless longing…That’s just the kind of thing I meant. Sometimes I think I’m going crazy. But you, you don’t think I’m crazy, do you? Did you make that up?”

  “No. It’s Tyutchev. A poet. He’s buried in Novodevichy, right down the road.”

  “What’s it called? Say it again.” I did, and he wrote it into his engineer’s notebook.

  “It’s called ‘Twilight.’”

  Every sense in dark and cooling

  Self-forgetfulness immerse,—

  Grant that I may taste extinction

  In the dreaming universe.

  Tyutchev, cooling my burning brain. Yes, let me lose myself.

  Dinamo’s dark eyes shone, a secular monk’s, burning, burning. “I wish I knew some poems. I’ve just got a few chastushki.”

  Ukashin used to say that the soul was earth and spirit violently intermingled. That’s what Dinamo was like. Of course he was tired of earth, earth, earth, material conditions, rations, meetings—while God and angels were no substance, worse than our thin fish soup. Soul was what he was after, robust, nourishing. That’s what fed a man. Not spirit—pure, eternal, cold, and vaporous. Soul was a different matter. You couldn’t have soul without earth and spirit, mixed together uneasily, muddied, restless, animated. Soul was never pure, that was its very nature. That’s why my mother was soulless, why she could say, It won’t live. She saw, but soullessly. Purely, remorselessly. And the Bolsheviks, the spacemen, that same purity. That refusal to tolerate the muddiness. Only a soulful man could suffer in this certain way, like Dinamo here. To even recognize this hunger. That was a man.

  “Do you know any more?”

  And I did. I recited Baratynsky’s poem:

  My talent is pitiful, my voice not loud,

  But I am alive. And on this earth

  My presence is a friend to someone…

  How a great poet could reach out with words, across the years, and take you in his arms, some unknown reader, whether it be a weary matron in her soiled apron or a grown man with a rifle on th
e Dvina. He would hold you close, lift you up, comfort you as only another human could.

  I understood Dinamo’s dilemma. We wanted food for the people, justice for the people, freedom for the people, but then what? Material conditions. The body, the flesh. Sex, food, warmth. Essential, but for what purpose? So that we could live as human beings. So we could feed our own souls. Not just for better and more.

  I gazed down into the sifting snow in the street lit by a single streetlamp, and realized I had devalued too quickly my time at Ionia, thrown it out on the trash heap of my short and wasted life. Perhaps Ukashin had been a fake, but some of his teachings came back to me now. It was not any future hell that bothered me but the way through this one. Oh, Iskra, my sweet one. What had become of that little flame? Had she a soul yet? Or only the depths she drilled into mine? What were those green eyes that had looked up into the trees and marked their motion, that had gazed into my face as a thirsty man gazes into a spring?

  After two days, our vigil was over. No gun battle ever erupted on Moskovsky Prospect. The Whites had been pushed off Pulkovo Heights, and the Red troops were on the offensive, just as Trotsky had said would happen. The girl from the soviet came and took back our guns. We were free to go. It was the one thing I hadn’t been ready for, that I would not die in this room. I shook Dinamo’s hand.

  “Could I see you again?” he asked. “You could teach me some more poetry.”