Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

I saw the look in his eyes. Like Genya’s. Like the one-armed man’s. I could take him up and put him down, and he would never recover from the blow. For once, I spared his lonely heart. “I’ve got no address.”

  He tore a page from his notebook and wrote his own on it. “If you ever want to…it’s just around the corner. I’m usually home Tuesday and Thursday nights…” He handed me the shred of paper. “I’ll remember you, Vintovka. ‘And on this earth / My presence is a friend to someone’…”

  I put the paper in my sheepskin pocket. We both knew I wouldn’t use it. I would have to find that tiny light inside myself, that bit of humanity, and walk a dark stretch of unknown miles with it cupped in my hands. If I wasn’t careful, the least wind would blow me out.

  Part III

  The House of Arts

  (Winter 1919–January 1921)

  28 Number, Please

  CLACKCKCKCKALLLAAACCCKKK

  clatterCHATTER

  click click click clack

  clack CLACK CrACKEtty CrACK

  That furious hail, like a universe of pebbles bouncing down a galaxy of stairways, the frozen, echoing hall of the Petrograd Telephone Exchange. Hundreds of girls connecting thousands of calls on Bolshaya Morskaya Street.

  Number, please. Number, please.

  The telephone exchange needed nothing but my hands, ears, mouth. One more Soviet young lady.

  Number, please.

  That wall of sound, like a waterfall of kopek coins on a metal roof, as metal plug sought metal nest times ten thousand. Connecting whom to what, and why? In a city of frozen toilets and crumbling houses, rotten herring and carrying water from a pump up four stories, when right on Bolshaya Morskaya the carcass of a dead horse had lain since summer, bones picked clean, first by knives, then crows. The dogs were all dead.

  But commissars talked to Smolny. They talked to their girlfriends. They talked to their wives. Narkompros was tracking down a trainload of fuel. Sometimes the girls listened in.

  I dreamed of the sound, even at night, a steady rain of pebbles on an icy slab. To me it was astonishing that people still had working numbers and someone to call. The city making calls from beyond the grave, important appointments in this village of ghosts.

  Girls listened in. Cheap theater. Hoping to hear something dirty.

  Clacketty clack

  Number, please.

  The blessing of numbers. Of plugs in holes. I was lucky, I could not have returned to the orphanage. Could not bear living children, their terrible eyes, their fragile lives. I didn’t want to love anyone. I couldn’t hurt anyone here.

  Number, please. I’ll connect you.

  The great hall of technology was colder than a morgue. We wore our coats and hats. My headphones snugged under my fox-fur shapka, the mouthpiece on my chest under my dirty sheepskin coat. Some cut the tips off their gloves but I didn’t have a pair to ruin. Such was my life.

  They never teach you that there will be life after death. That’s the worst part. That you will have to go on putting one foot in front of the other. Go to work. Sleep. Just the burden of carting the body around. Keeping it warm. Putting things in the mouth. A half-hearted attempt at staying clean. I gave it a try. You spent your meager calories walking to work to earn ration cards to stand in queues to buy the bread that let you walk to work.

  I returned from my rifle nest to find families packed into the Shpalernaya flat’s two parlors, Golovin’s study, and the old lady’s boudoir. Collectivized. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Everything had disappeared from my little room on the servant’s hall—linens, books, blankets, my one summer dress, my pail from Izhevsk. I had nothing. I stood in the hall and waited. “My daughter just died,” I said. “I’ve been out defending Petrograd. She died ten days ago.” The pail reappeared. Some sticks of wood. Blankets and books. The neighbors were cold and hungry, but not without shame.

  But the days of aristocracy soon came to an end. The building’s old pipes groaned, shuddered, and burst. Now we descended the gap-toothed stairs to draw water from the pump, like everyone else, and shat in the second courtyard. The Ice Age had begun. It was like that all over the city—people took their trousers down right on the sidewalk, squatted. Men pissed off the side of a cart without even stopping, as one might urinate from a sailboat. It was a zoo with no keeper. We didn’t need one. There was no outside to run to.

  And yet there were telephones.

  In the canteen, I sat next to a girl I recognized from the Tagantsev Academy. We’d once shared a desk in Madame Buliova’s elocution class. Yelena Rumakhverina. She looked into my face and spoke to me as a stranger. I wasn’t even in disguise. I descended to the icy washroom and looked into my own eyes. The person in the mirror was not me. Not merely older, thinner, hollow-eyed, rough-haired, dogged by bad luck. Someone else. A hand not my own put on my headset, a mouth not my own spoke into the receiver amid the clatter of steel plugs against the rims of ten thousand steel sockets.

  Number, please.

  One of a thousand girls, each in her place, wearing the headset, connected by snaking cables that snapped back into the shelf—multiplied by hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

  Home life was a hunt for food and fuel, the need to keep the body alive, conserve calories, warmth, maximize the little strength we had, we denizens of the new Ice Age. Ice froze in the pitchers overnight. We attacked fences, siding, anything wooden. I took surreptitious trips down to the wharves on the Neva to gouge out wood from Petrograd’s fine fleet of rotting barges. It was dangerous, counterrevolutionary—stealing wood from the People. A secret war waged each night between the soviet and the cold, hungry ants of its citizenry. Whole buildings tumbled, eviscerated. People chopped up scaffoldings around buildings under repair. They hacked up the balustrades and stair rails—every stairway became a death trap. I bought a child’s sled and, with Arkady’s hatchet, stole wood viciously, a small ravenous weasel hacking up an exposed wall, running off before arrest. There were too many of us to catch us all and I was by no means the slowest.

  I did my living in dreams. I dreamed of trains, trying to get on, pushing and grappling only to be heaved off at the last moment, butted with rakes and brooms. I hung on the doors, clung to the roofs with bare hands, slid away on the turns. I rode inside cars so crowded they became a tank of flesh. There were dreams of suffocation, clawing for breath. There were dreams of riding on the tops of the cars, and being pushed off, or seeing the impossibly low tunnel coming at me. Or else I was back in the orphanage, losing my way in the corridors. The stairs were all wrong. I had to find Maxim before he did something bad. I dreamed I was back on Furshtatskaya Street in my mother’s last room. Bad men pounding on the door. Don’t open it, I always yelled. But my mother never listened, she always wanted to see who was there.

  Yet my one prayer, to see Iskra again, was always withheld.

  I dreamed of the telephone exchange. It wasn’t enough to work there all day, I also had to labor all night. The cords snarled, the plugs too big for the sockets. I hung up on Lenin. I dreamed of water filling the great hall, and operating the switchboard ankle-deep in water, knee-deep, water rising. The plugs were a million shrieking mouths. One night, bees flew in and out, and the holes dripped with honey.

  In the rooms of the collectivized flat, people regularly sickened and died. Some died quietly, freezing to death, starving, others noisily, vomiting, groaning, crying out. Eventually you stopped pitying them. It was just part of life. Their loved ones carried the bodies out in rented coffins. I hated how I eyed those scarred boxes, estimating how long a coffin like that would burn—close to a week if you kept the flame small.

  Yet unbelievably, we were winning the war. Gatchina fell, and Iamburg in the west. In the east, we rolled into Omsk, Kolchak’s capital. The Tula card had stood fast. But would victory come soon enough? Or would we all be dead by the time it came?

  St. Basil’s Eve, the women of the flat cast the wax, huddled over a scarred kitchen table. A sun, a s
eal, a wedding ring…They offered to cast mine, but I refused. There was no point in predicting one lone person’s fate when the world itself was riding an out-of-control horse. And frankly, if the ship with sails came into the Neva this very night, I didn’t know if I would have the energy to climb aboard.

  That night, I dreamed of a ship caught in the ice. The sound of its hull cracking, crushed in the growing pack ice. We’d set out too late and winter overtook us. We had to abandon the ship, move out on foot across the frozen waste. A group of city people, dressed in street clothes, arguing which way to go.

  In February, amid the hunger and cold, death a part of daily life, I reached my twentieth birthday. No child, no husband, no friends, I was as hollow as a gourd, but still here. No one celebrated. I left work early to buy a slice of horsemeat—happy birthday to me.

  It wasn’t yet dark. If it had been, I wouldn’t have seen him, walking up Bolshaya Morskaya Street. Tall and long legged, in a blue overcoat and gray hat. The poet of poets—Alexander Blok.

  Your name—a bird in the mouth, Tsvetaeva wrote.

  No one else seemed to notice him as he made his way along the gloom of a dim street—exactly his climate. He seemed haunted and worn, as though he’d lived through some terrible disease. Honestly, I had thought he was dead. A ghost among so many. I supposed I’d been thinking of Andrei, the intelligent.

  “Alexander Alexandrovich!” I called out, astonished at my own boldness.

  He turned. The snow sifted down over his shoulders, his hat of curly lamb. He squinted as he cast his glance around him, looking for someone he knew. But it was just me. My stony eyes suddenly found their tears.

  “I have a premonition of you. The years in silence pass…” I recited.

  “Dear girl,” he said.

  Heartened, I continued:

  “And as the image, solitary, I have that premonition of you again…”

  We stood there on Bolshaya Morskaya near the corpse of the felled horse for a long moment. The snow fell between us, rubbing out his form like chalk. He came to me. Put his hand on my shoulder. His voice was very soft, his smile sad. He didn’t wear his own face anymore either.

  “Are you a poet?” he asked, peering under my fox hat.

  I was dreaming. I must have fallen asleep. I was talking to Blok next to a dead horse on Bolshaya Morskaya Street!

  Was I a poet? I once had been. Though that was when I’d had a face. Not this blank automaton.

  I nodded. It was easier to agree than to explain.

  “Come, walk with me. I’m going to the House of Arts. I have a meeting in a few minutes.” He sighed and together we started off. “But tell me one of your poems.”

  I recited:

  I slept just fine

  on your floor.

  Like a baby.

  Who doesn’t love concrete?

  My poem about my Cheka imprisonment, “Alice in the Year One.” He walked slower, nodding, laughing quietly at some of the lines as I kept pace at his elbow. I was not a short girl, but Blok towered over me.

  Tell me, where does the Future sleep at night?

  Can you see it from here?

  He listened closely, bending his head not to miss my words, and when I was done, I saw that his face had darkened, covered with clouds. “Be careful who you tell that one to,” he said. “Write anything, but be careful of your audience. What’s your name, dear girl?”

  “Makarova. Marina. Dmitrievna. Though it’s not what’s on my papers,” I confided.

  “And where do you come from, Marina Dmitrievna?”

  “From Petersburg,” I said.

  He smiled. “And I as well.”

  We knew what that meant. We were from Petersburg. Not Petrograd, this hungry, jargon-speaking town where you tore your firewood off a barge rotting in the river, but Petersburg, that state of mind. The chimes and bells, silver and lilac. Where there could still be beauty, and poetry, that lost world.

  We came to Nevsky, and he turned right. I hesitated a moment, not knowing whether to continue to follow him like a stray dog or have a shred of dignity and bid him good night. I kept walking alongside him.

  “Do you know what building this is?” he asked me. The three-story one on our right had high arched windows that extended all the way down from Bolshaya Morskaya to the Moika Canal.

  “It’s the Eliseevs’ house.” The very name could flood any hungry Former with near pornographic associations. The Eliseevs had purveyed luxury foods to the upper stratum of the capital. I could see Mama in her big hat pointing to cases full of caviar, tins of Seville marmalade. The pyramids of pineapples! Horrible pungent cheeses, Chinese tea and French pâté, Papa’s English clotted cream. Surely the Eliseevs were no longer in Petrograd, fallen to selling horsemeat and frozen potatoes on surreptitious back stairs and in second courtyards.

  “It’s the House of Arts,” said Blok. “Haven’t you heard of it?”

  But I had heard nothing but the waterfall of the telephone exchange.

  “You should come. We have readings and studios—Gumilev teaches one that’s very popular. Though I disagree with everything he does, you might enjoy the young people.”

  Gumilev, the poet! Once married to Akhmatova.

  “And Chukovsky’s teaching a translation studio—have you read his Whitman? I imagine you’d like it.”

  “I sing the body electric,” I recited in my heavily accented English. “The armies of those I love engirt me.” Though the armies of those I loved were gone, slipped through my fingers and under Whitman’s grass.

  People entered and exited the street door at 59 Moika Embankment, stopping to glance at Alexander Alexandrovich talking to this girl without a face. He shook my hand in its ragged mitten. “It was so good to meet you, Marina Dmitrievna. Come tomorrow night, won’t you? Bely is reading. One should never miss that opportunity. I hope we’ll speak again.”

  A young woman held the door for him.

  The gossips said Bely had once tried to take Blok’s wife from him. Such a close-knit mountaintop, our Olympus. “Thank you, Alexander Alexandrovich. I’ll be there,” I called out as he slipped inside the door to the House of Arts. “What time?”

  “At five,” he said.

  29 From Petersburg

  I could feel the ice in my soul beginning to crack, as if he were the sun. I hope we’ll speak again. Nothing but death would keep me from showing up tomorrow night. Blok and I would speak, and he would save me, like a passing freighter plucking a drowning stoker from an icy sea.

  I had given him my true name.

  I slipped into a courtyard off Basseynaya Street where a furtive, flat-eyed man sold horsemeat at forty-five rubles a pound. I traded him a good Izhevsk brass rifle shell from the box I’d had the presence to forget to turn in when we returned our rifles. He examined it, weighed it in his hand, and sliced a chunk from a bloody package with a dirty knife, wrapped it in Pravda. I could smell the raw meat, half enticing, half nauseating, as I carried the dripping package home, its blood dotting the snow.

  There was simply no way to keep meat private in a communal apartment. Or anything else for that matter. As the perfume of cooking meat filled the kitchen, I could hear the stomachs of my comrade tenants growl as they tried not to stare. The power of sizzling flesh was primal, magnetic.

  A neighbor, Olga Viktorievna, followed the scent, sniffing like a bloodhound. “Our stove is smoking again, Marina Dmitrievna,” she wheedled. “Could you come fix it?” Saccharine sweet. A Red Army wife, she lived next to the kitchen with her children, and was a tremendous thief. Everyone knew it. You had to watch your food like a bank auditor. She spent her day gossiping with the wife of a Soviet clerk, whose child was wasting of some unknown disease.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I’m done,” I said.

  She eyed my dinner enviously.

  I took my meal in my room, as everyone did—we beasts didn’t want to be watched while eating. I remembered when dining in public was considered a pleasant
thing. Now we hid ourselves away. The pleasure was too intense, almost sexual, shrouded by guilt. My dining table was the nightstand, my chair the cot, my candelabra a smoky candle stuck in a dish. My window looked out onto a mean little courtyard. In the flats opposite, the curtains were drawn. You could only see strips of light in the inhabited ones.

  But I had something to celebrate tonight beyond my entry into this world. A new entry, a rebirth. What had given me the nerve to call out to Alexander Alexandrovich? Like a ghost, he’d appeared from the destroyed city where I’d dwelled since Iskra’s death. Perhaps he was an apparition from another dimension, some impossible world up four rounds of the spiral, where I’d been granted a wish I’d not even expressed. How else to explain how he’d arrived at just that hour, and had spoken to me. Impossible, and yet—his verse welled up in my throat. And I’d recited my own poem, written when I’d still had a self, when I still could take joy in the mustering of words…

  I chewed the tough horsemeat, savoring each atom. Oh, it was so good! Thank God I had sunflower oil, not castor or fish liver. The meat and fat raced through my bloodstream like trains through a city. When had I last felt even in the slightest bit lucky? I imagined a table full of silver and crystal. Why not—who could judge my counterrevolutionary thoughts? I wore black velvet gloves. A vase of roses rested on the table, dark red wine, and the tall poet with blue eyes lifted his glass to me! And I thought, like the woman in his poem, said to be Akhmatova: That one’s in love with me too.

  Tonight I was twenty and the poet raised his glass to me—

  The knock on the door. “Marina Dmitrievna?” That horrible wheedling sound.

  “One minute!” I finished my luxurious repast, licked the plate as clean as a barynya’s pinafore. Then locked the door, slipped the key in my pocket, and went to help Olga with her stove.