Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Somehow I’d become resident bourgeoika doctor. It was just as well to have good relations with the neighbors—you never knew when you’d need their help. We had these temperamental stoves, but no one seemed able to make them work without smoking themselves half to death. With a soldering iron, I could have been king of this building. A bourgeoika is basically a tin box with a few lengths of pipe venting out the window, and required the gentlest adjustments to make it draw. Usually it was a case of the pipes being misaligned, so that smoke leaked out—people tended to dry their clothes there—or else the stuff being burned was too wet, or the owner had failed to heat the air in the chimney sufficiently, so a plug of cold air walled off the rising smoke.

  Olga Viktorievna’s room was larger than mine, but crammed to impassability with beds, trunks, boxes, piles of rags, an indescribable puzzle of broken things. It smelled of vinegar. Her son and daughter looked at me as if they were drugged, as if I were a moving shadow on a wall. The boy, about thirteen, coughed, wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. Their little stove emitted clouds of gray smoke. I squatted before it, opened the door. Inside lay a half-burned book, the pages smoldering. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. The sight trampled the good feelings I’d gingerly assembled. This great book had survived almost a century only to be consumed for the worth of its paper.

  I showed her, sadly, how to properly burn a book. “You can’t just throw it in there, you have to take the pages apart. Look.” I made small dense coals, rolling each individual page and then twisting a knot, wondering if Olga Viktorievna or one of her blank kids had burned my youthful poetry, had immolated Genya’s fiery verse. Someone had. This sad, hard little woman, like a knot herself. And I was not so naive as to think I would be above burning my books someday. Even people who knew their value were burning their libraries for heat. But it didn’t take away the sharpness of the sacrifice. The worst of it was that books burned quickly and gave little warmth. Their heat was all in the mind. No, I’m not Byron, I’m unknown, Lermontov wrote,

  I am like him, a chosen one,

  an exile hounded by this world—

  only I bear a Russian soul.

  An early start, an early end

  little indeed will I complete;

  within my heart, as in a sea,

  lie shattered hopes—a sunken load…

  I went back to my room, my mood soured and my clothes stinking of smoke and the death of poetry. After securing the door behind me, I pulled out the nightstand’s drawer. Hidden behind it, wrapped in a folded vellum page, lay Arkady’s marafet. If this wasn’t the occasion, I didn’t know what would be better. I shook it onto the back of my hand, divided it with the tip of my knife. “An early start, an early end,” I toasted myself. And sniffed it up.

  The first nostril burned, and then suffused me with a warmth that had nothing to do with fire. I inhaled the other. Suddenly I had to defecate, urgently, something that didn’t occur more than once a week. I was already in my coat and hat, took the scrap of paper—that picture of Saint Agatha—and in Anya’s mittens, went down the back stairs into the courtyard, where I relieved myself in the dark, politely ignoring others doing the same. We would pay the price come spring, when the water table rose, and cholera struck us down like ants.

  But all that seemed so far away now. In this moment, I felt free. Shimmering with health and beauty, untouched by grief and the brittle cold. A strange sensation. These days you braced yourself whether indoors or out, as tight as a fist. Suddenly I could stand up straight, breathe deep the frosty air. No wonder the orphans liked their marafet. No wonder they froze to death wearing next to nothing, having failed to find shelter. Starving, buying cocaine instead of food. No wonder.

  I walked out onto Shpalernaya Street, feeling light, feeling immortal. I wasn’t even sure people could see me, I was so beautiful. Perhaps I would look to them like a fish gazing up at the sun through water. Though no one was looking at me—who would be out tonight walking in the dark and snow? The street unrolled between elegant buildings, crisp and precise. All down the block one could discern the living apartments, dark between the silvery dead ones. I felt I could see through the walls to people curled in their beds, nose to tail like foxes, preparing to live through yet another cold night. Like bedbugs, we retired at seven. Bedbugs, that’s what we were now. But not me.

  What freedom! To walk through the streets unchilled, alone, as snow drifted past the streetlights on Shpalernaya, globes like great South Sea pearls, heavy and far apart. I sing the body electric! I didn’t want to stand in the light, it was more beautiful to stand in the darkness and watch them burning in their crowns of snow. Like giants, like stars. I pictured them as Pushkin, and Lermontov—still smoky from the fire—as Blok and Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva dancing by campfire light, Tolstoy and Whitman keeping pace with one another, their hands behind their backs. They lit our darkness, and I was the only one who could walk among them.

  The weight of Iskra’s death slid from my shoulders. It had been cracking my back in two. Iskra, just for this one night…I let the syllables rise like bubbles into the air. I pictured her eyes, fingers wrapped in mine, and for once it didn’t make me want to die. I recalled the soft, compact weight of her, her adorable limbs, her ginger curls, and yet the twisted blade of my grief remained in my hand. The snow fell with such tenderness, forgiving me.

  Tomorrow I would pick up my burden—but tonight I was twenty. Tonight I was a poet. I’d met Blok. You’ll come, won’t you? I walked out to greet the great frozen Neva, ice covering its secret life where water still flowed and fish whispered into the darkness. The important thing was this—the life within the ice, the water flowing. I could feel it, Kitezh—the city inside the waters. I could hear its bells. I laughed out loud. I’d met Blok! That silver stag among cattle. Your name—a bird in the mouth…What fate had dropped him in my path, what undeserved charity? I had been silent for so long, crushed by the weight of Iskra’s death—what had inspired me to call out to him? Was it madness, or did he seem as grateful as I? Snow fell on my eyelashes, making stars of the streetlights. My breath a white cloud. How I loved this city, loved it still.

  Petersburg!

  I love you!

  Your frozen poetry

  your bridges and facades

  Neglected and abandoned,

  mirage amid the northern swamps.

  The young queen wanders

  mad, staring into windows.

  No wonder politicians scramble

  behind Moscow’s ancient walls.

  Here we need no walls.

  Our ghosts protect us, our illustrious dead.

  The echoes of music in our frozen air—

  waltzes and tangos.

  The thrum of balalaikas never suited us,

  never suited the lap of our waters,

  the sweep of our skirts.

  May we be forgiven our decadence,

  our snobbery,

  our pitiless exploitation—

  the ancient curse.

  But our modernity was glorious, wasn’t it?

  Though it bloomed and died

  like a great unnatural mushroom.

  We exploded

  and cast our spores

  to the earth’s four corners.

  What a death we are dying,

  Petersburg, my brother.

  How long did I wander, touching the stones and railings? Only the dead accompanied me. Yet the city shimmered, alive, alive, this miracle at the edge of the world. Like legendary Kitezh, safe beneath the waters. I heard its bells tonight, I heard them! We who were from Petersburg knew how, we kept its melody sewn inside our skins. They rang in Blok’s smile and would never disappear. Even in death, we’d gather together with our poems in a circle and watch the buildings brush their hair in the mirror of the waters.

  Tomorrow a thousand shivering Soviet citizens would rise and shovel fresh white from the walks, snow duty noted in their labor books. But tonight it was as sumptuous as ermine,
like a clean white featherbed covering the sins of the city. All mine. The abandoned buildings silvered with frost. For a moment, freed from hunger and insensate to cold, I felt like an angel. I sing the bodiless, ecstatic. I had not known how heavy Iskra’s death had been until it slipped from my shoulders. Now I floated untethered along the stately streets, remembering carriages and duels, the echo of a waltz and harness bells.

  Furshtatskaya Street. The most beautiful of all, with its parkway and netted streetlamps. I stood in the dark and gazed up at the flat in which I’d had parents, and brothers, lived all my young life. Most of our old building was already dead, but our flat remained dark, inhabited. I had hoped to show it to Iskra when the trees came into leaf again. Not to be. I understood in that moment that we were all prisoners of time—and I too had my fate awaiting.

  I breathed out great plumes of white vapor and stamped like a horse, the cold was beginning to creep in, but I was not ready to go back. I wanted this night to go on and on. Perhaps we were still up there, the Makarovs. It was only dinnertime, nine o’clock at most, glasses chiming as we shared our daily triumphs and sorrows over the fragrant dishes, the white-clothed table, Seryozha imitating a schoolmaster, making fun of his pretentious gestures, Volodya as he’d been when he left for the war, a man—the clinking of his spurs, his dark glossy eyes, the rich moustache, his laughter. Mama, her skirts trailing behind her, playing Scarlatti. I in my room, preparing for bed in a pressed nightgown, combing my hair in the round mirror, taking from my shelf a volume of poems. What should I read tonight? Blok, of course! Those perfect rhymes, as effortless as snow. I imagined I might stay here in the freezing parkway until I became another statue, a Galatea in reverse. But Blok had reached down from a passing ship called life, called art, called memory, and offered me his hand.

  30 59 Moika Embankment

  Snow wet my hat, blew sharp flakes into my eyes. People lingered in my way, people walked into me. I shoved back, bristly as a hedgehog. The whole day had been like this, gritty and coarse. I felt feverish, but I didn’t want to be late for Bely’s reading. When I finally stood before the door at the corner of Nevsky and the Moika Canal, I grew suddenly shy. What if they didn’t let me in? I waited for at least three people to enter before I gathered the nerve, rehearsing my lines: Blok invited me. Alexander Alexandrovich said I should come.

  I pushed open the anteroom door, and found a girl sitting behind a rickety table. “You’re here for Bely? Ten rubles.”

  Admission, I hadn’t considered that. But of course, the writers had nothing, of course they would take up a donation. That was probably the point of the evening. Tolstoy would have had to sell his beard if he lived in Petrograd now. I handed over the ten rubles, the entire contents of my purse—made from a chair’s cushion, after I’d hacked up the rest into kindling.

  Inside, the splendid hall was filling with people young and old, their faces familiar—not that I knew them, but their curiosity marked them, the light in their eyes. Intelligence. Tall windows framed the snowy vista outside, magical in the glow of streetlamps, and between them, where a painting had once hung—I could detect its ghost on the wall—stood the lectern. The view framed dark, boarded-up shops and ragged, huddled passersby, but it was easy to imagine what it had been—bright with signs, the chicest pedestrians, new automobiles, the Eliseevs sitting here enjoying an aperitif before the theater. I saw it. Otherworldly, when everyone in the room was gaunt and still wore their coats and hats in the unheated hall. All except for one tall man in a suit and white shirt with a high stiff collar. Without having to be told, I knew this was Gumilev, Akhmatova’s ex-husband.

  Three things in this world brought him joy:

  white peacocks, the singing of vespers,

  and faded maps of America.

  He hated to hear children cry,

  hated tea with raspberries

  and women acting hysterical

  …Me? I was his wife.

  No cringing for him, cold or no cold. He was as proud as an officer. I marveled at his cleanliness—his linen, his face. You had to admire his strength of will to shave in icy water, somehow wash that shirt. Gumilev was surrounded by young people, each one speaking, hoping for his approval. What I would give to be that young again, competing for the teacher’s attention. But I wouldn’t know how to do it anymore, idolize someone like that, hang on his every word. I’d grown as wary as a trap-wise fox.

  I’d have thought Akhmatova would prefer someone ethereal, deep and full of music, more like Blok. His eyes are so serene, one could be lost in them…And where was he? I stood at the back of the crowd, watching for him as the audience found seats. I felt as I had that night at the Stray Dog, waiting to be thrown out. How could I possibly be here, watching my heroes at play? I recognized the poet Kuzmin with his heavy, sleepy eyes, and Khodasevich, tall and lanky, with round spectacles.

  “Well, look what came in on the storm,” said a man to my right.

  Standing next to me in a worn-out overcoat stood the ultimate anti-Gumilev. Long-nosed, badly shaven Anton Chernikov. Just when I thought my life was a series of rooms, where the doors slammed firmly shut behind me. But here he was, still sneering, this angular bony figure. Smoking his cheap makhorka. I would have hugged him if his expression—that permanent ironic scowl—hadn’t warned me off. He’d shaved his dark hair, as most men did now, and glowered like a convict. “Still living with your mother and that old baba?” His cigarette dangling from his lip. Tough guy. But I remembered those sweet days when he and my mother had labored together translating Apollinaire.

  “I was in the countryside,” I said. I wanted to touch him but knew he would flinch. “You?”

  He shrugged. “As you see.”

  “Okno?” Our literary journal.

  He shook his head. “No journals. No paper.”

  “I had a baby,” I said, my eyes on the crowd, still coming in. “She died. In the fall.” A fact. The fact of my life. “Her name was Antonina.” I hadn’t even thought about the echo.

  Anton confronted by human tragedy was always several levels out of his element. That hadn’t changed either. He scratched the back of his neck. He took off his cap and rubbed his head. “A baby. That’s rough,” he said. “Does Genya know?” Anton and Genya, inseparable.

  “He knew I was pregnant.” More people passed before us, in various stages of starvation. But what faces! So clever, so awake. I was struck by a wave of pure love. I could die here, with these people, and die happy.

  “He didn’t say anything. Not a word.”

  We stood together, as awkward as children. “Did you ever publish the Apollinaire? Alcools?”

  He brightened. “No, but I’m trying to get Gorky to take it for Universal Literature—have you heard about that? He’s publishing translations—but it’s all those old warhorses. Dee-kens, Shaks-peer. Gyu-go.” The eloquence of his sneer.

  “You think the worker would rather have Alcools?” said an older woman standing with us, with wild gray hair and bright brown eyes. “You think that’s what he’s clamoring for after a hard day’s work? Gorky’s got to justify those titles.”

  O Holy Theotokos, they were arguing about Apollinaire! I felt as giddy as a prisoner broken out of a dark police cell walking into the sunshine.

  “Inna’s translating Gyu-go,” Anton said, and I understood he’d exaggerated Victor Hugo’s name on purpose, to tweak her.

  “Jealous. It’ll keep me in work for years. Thank God for Universal Literature,” she said, her hand on my arm. “Gorky’s single-handedly saving the Russian intelligentsia, translation by translation. He’s gotten us rations and labor books. But he has to publish titles useful to the common people.”

  “What about useful to me?” Anton said. “What about my needs?” I noticed the people around us eavesdropping. “Am I not also a worker?” Appealing to his audience. “A literary worker? A miner of verse? There’s more to literature than what the worker wants to read of an evening, you cow. Mayakovsky sai
d there was literature for the consumer and literature for the producer. And the producer needs advanced literature. Otherwise, we’ll keep on cutting the same old shoes, year after year.”

  “I could use a pair of shoes,” said the older woman. She studied me with her friendly dark eyes. “So who’s your friend, Chernikov? I didn’t know you had any.”

  “Marina Makarova, this untidy female is Inna Gants.”

  I’d heard of Inna Gants! She’d written short fiction, ghost stories, and a popular detective novel.

  She took a hand from the pocket of her capacious sweater to shake mine. “I’m a neighbor. Third floor. When the moon is full, we hear the howling.” She pulled me closer, lowered her voice theatrically. “But no one has actually seen the transformation.”

  “A bald exaggeration,” Anton said. “Only a slight growl. I keep it quiet.”

  They were living here? All these writers? How could all this have been going on, and me know nothing of it? Because I’d been in the grave, that’s why. I hadn’t looked up from my shoes since Iskra’s death. “They rent rooms here?”

  “Rent being a relative term,” said the older woman.

  “Like bats, clinging to cliffs. And literature is our guano.” Anton obscured his head in a cloud of smoke.

  “A pretty image,” Inna said. “But of course, you’re the poet.”

  When was the last time I’d witnessed a witty conversation? I felt the fizzy intoxication of last night’s marafet rising in me again.

  “And I will survive these frozen caves as I survived the Poverty Artel with the lot of you sleeping on my head.”

  “You lived with Chernikov?” Inna Gants took a step back. “My God.”

  “She’s Genya Kuriakin’s wife,” Anton said.

  Now Inna’s expression changed, became less warm but more curious. She examined me as if we hadn’t just been chatting away like old friends, her silence an awkward contrast to her volubility a moment before. Clearly Genya did not feature as a universal favorite at the House of Arts.