by Janet Fitch
It was the same with every workplace in Petrograd. We all had to eat. Too bad we couldn’t all live on self-pity and propriety like this old bag. “I need Wednesday afternoons.”
She glared at me. Who was I? Only an insect in this great swamp, a clicking cicada in the vast hall of the switchboard, the merest gnat. On and on she went, flatly refusing my request and heaping invective on every Soviet worker, every girl with a bit of a flush in her cheek. The old bat. I would take both, then, Wednesdays and Sundays. Some provisioned their bodies, I would provision my mind, and bureaucrats be damned. When she finally did turn away, I personally provisioned myself of the pad of paper lying unguarded by her telephone. It was the least she could do for literature.
Now, propped up with my pillow against the wall, covered with my featherbed and my sheepskin, my fox hat on my head, surrounded by my fellow coughers, farters, yammerers, shiverers, and snorers, and someone quietly weeping, I tested the ice of my imagination. Would it hold me? I felt the sharp tip of my pencil, which I’d shepherded since the orphanage, carefully shaving only so much from its precious lead. Lord knew when I’d ever get another.
An unholy scream shattered the normal quiet talk. The man in the next room had typhus. His wife was nursing him in his awful fever. “Leave me alone, Devil!”
A few of the neighbors shouted back, “Keep him quiet in there!” “Take him to the hospital already!” “Let the devil take him!”
You had to admire his wife’s determination—most of them packed their relatives off to the typhus hospital as fast as you’d turn a pancake. But she refused to move him, and we quarantined them in their own arctic room so as not to spread it to the rest of us. Typhus was a monster, and the epidemic had finally found its way into our flat. I was terrified. If I got typhus now, who would fight for me, nurse me, keep me from jumping out the window? We were all so close to death here, I could see its black veiled form walking among the mattresses. It was a terrible thing to say, but I was lucky that Iskra had died when you could still dig a grave. So many succumbing in the city now, you couldn’t get a burial. We ourselves had bodies stacked in an empty room—the daughter of this one, husband of that. There was no one to collect them. How much worse it would have been to have Iskra frozen in the next room. And yet people stood it. It was hideous how much a human being could get used to.
I took off my mitten, blew on my hand, rubbed it against my face and returned it to its sheath, concentrating my attention on that little stub of a pencil. I breathed through the pores of my skin as we used to do at Ionia—otherwise, the stench in the room was unbelievable. Old stale clothing, dirty hair, flatulence, the horrible tainted breath of people who cooked their dinners with linseed and cod liver oil, added to the smokiness of the little stove, which my neighbors had placed under my care. Oh, for a moment out of the fug and the horrible togetherness! But it was beyond unthinkable to attempt the outside air.
I would have gone out of my mind, except for this, the notebook, the pencil, the sounds alive in my head. Despite the cold, the deep nausea of hunger, and the higher nausea of half-rotten potatoes fried in cod liver oil, I was alive again, and poetry was like a reed I could breathe through, connecting me from this premature burial to the fresh outer air of my imaginative life. Meanwhile the man next door screamed and pleaded with his monsters. I imagined his wife, perhaps sick herself, mopping his brow. Perhaps they would both die. Sometimes being with someone was more terrible than being alone. At least if I died, no one would mourn me. It was cleaner that way, simpler. My exit would leave an unblemished surface on the waters.
The flickering of the lamps gave life to exhausted, anxious faces. A family installed closer to the door was arguing about the division of their rations. The father kept shorting one of the daughters. She shrieked and swore. “You’re trying to starve me. Why do you hate me?”
“Because you’re a noisy bitch,” someone shouted.
“Mind your own business!” she shouted back.
The one thing nobody could do, however much we wished it.
I lowered the flaps of my fox hat, and thought of that long-ago night on St. Basil’s Eve, the night we had cast the wax. Mina got the key, Varvara the broom, and I the sailing ship. I tried to remember sailing. The feeling of giddiness on a summer’s day. The freshness of the wind off the gulf, all heaven before us. Sailing in a little boat with the big boys, Kolya and Volodya in the sun, Kolya saying he was taking us to Spain. Seryozha left behind on shore with Avdokia and his paints and little easel. Oh, the speed of it, the sun on the water.
But I couldn’t write about that. Mama and the time a Red Guard smashed my doll.
All the foreign shores were out of reach now. All the sails furled. The world had retreated from us, behind the blockade, leaving us to stand or fall, indifferent to our fate. The sight of the empty Neva this silent autumn had filled me with melancholy. No freighters, no fishing boats, just ruined barges. The river had never glittered so, people could actually fish it again after the centuries of heavy shipping. This Petersburg, built for sailing, built for the world, dying alone.
Petersburg the seafaring,
You opened your arms to the world.
Sailed out, nose to the great earth’s winds, to…
To do what? Adventure, explore, buccaneer? Nothing was quite right. Come back to it.
But now the world’s retreated
What could be quieter than the Neva stripped of commerce, more naked, more neglected, more forgotten? The city was returning to that miserable Finnish marsh that Pushkin had described so well. Just another provincial outpost, crumbling away on this misty shore, this mausoleum of ice, this dead city where citizens crowded themselves into a single room like animals in a pen. Cave dwellers.
and Petrograd lies dying
How does Petrograd lie dying?
like an old sailor in a bed by a window,
Yes, I could do something with that.
legs black with gangrene,
no nurse to bathe him tenderly,
Yet despite the stench of death
he still smells the brine.
Yes, let’s give ourselves that much.
No longer does your ship leap beneath you.
Dolphins doubling in the wake.
Once the silver line of any distant shore
under gull-winged, light blue skies
My Blok—light blue, gull-winged.
was your
homeland.
My true homeland. Not Russia, not Red or White, not passports and propuski, but anywhere the mind could take you.
Oh, for those windward wild days,
a brazen long-limbed crew
dazzling white-toothed Argonauts.
Yes, yes, old man.
I too have stolen golden fleece
and tasted the oxen of the sun.
33 The Thaw
Like Yudenich, winter sounded retreat. Snow grudgingly gave way to the first rains, pelting the window of my little room, where I worked in the nest of my bed, rereading my poems. I already had them memorized, but I wanted to be sure, for tonight was my first public reading. Anton had managed to convince our elders that our group, the Squared Circle, was ready for a Living Almanac. These had taken the place of printed publications in this paperless year. Would I be able to make my words sing for strangers, as they sang for me in my head? Or would I just stare out at a crowd of stones? At least I would know if I belonged to the fraternity of poets, or whether I was simply fooling myself. I had been happy with my poems, but now that the reading approached, I was less sure.
Even if it was a disaster, it was still thrilling to see our fliers posted in windows and on fences, boldly drawn and lettered in cubo-futurist style by Sasha Orlovsky. The little cultural newspaper Literary Herald carried an advertisement. This was no mere salon reading. Living Almanacs were treated as publications and would be duly reviewed and criticized. I’d been working like a peasant in harvest time to finish the poems Anton had picked for m
y part of the offerings, cutting and replacing and adding and reordering. The audience would include the city’s best poets and literary figures—by no means supportive of our aims. Knives would be sharpened. We were known as having futurist sympathies. Anton was a protégé of Shklovsky’s, an avant-gardist and upstart. They would be out for blood—radicals and conservatives both.
I rose and tipped some water into my pail—you didn’t even have to break the ice anymore—when a smart knock came. It was Olga Viktorievna, that busybody. “Marina Dmitrievna, they’re here for your sanitation duty.”
Oh, it couldn’t be. Today? Of all days?
“They’re out in the hall, waiting for you.”
On the day of my grand debut, it seemed I would have to serve as part of a mandatory sanitation squad. I could have pretended I wasn’t here, taken the chance…but Olga Viktorievna was on the job, dedicated to being wherever she was not wanted, hoping to find an unguarded door. I locked my door firmly behind me and descended to the street.
The spring thaw had revealed all our sins. As the frost retreated, human waste tidily frozen all winter was beginning to melt in the apartments and courtyards. It was up to the sanitation squads to clean the rooms that had been used as latrines and remove the evidence from the courtyards before it washed into the groundwater, cursing us with cholera again. Much as I disliked this duty, I had seen what cholera could do. I wouldn’t want to see its effect on the capital of Once-Had-Been.
There were eight in my squad. We handed around cotton wool soaked in menthol to stuff up our nostrils and picked up our shovels. In our party were old bourgeoises who did nothing but complain, plus five real workers—two men and three women. We started with the top floor and worked down. One of the men became our crew leader. His name was Sinyakov, an old-style SR with nothing but abuse to heap on the Bolsheviks as we shoveled and carried the result in buckets down long flights of stairs to the wagon. We consoled ourselves that it wasn’t as bad as the first crew, who’d had to clean the courtyard in the rain. Nobody envied them—though the stairs made this a harder job. It made my heart sink to see the devastation the winter had wrought. The occupants avoided meeting our eyes, the shame of people who three years ago would not have thought themselves capable of such filth.
“What do they know about how to run a city? We knew how to run a city,” said the SR, “but they kicked us all out. That’s the thing about the Bolsheviks. Anybody who knows how to do anything—a bullet in the back of the head. They don’t care how it all falls apart, as long as they’re kings of the shit heap.”
What a day.
I preferred working with a housewife, Agnessa, who joked about the state of gastric health of the tenants as we scraped down the boards. “Look at this—my God, a wolfhound! I’m lucky if I shit once a fortnight.”
We went from apartment to apartment, knocking on doors, always the same—the tenants avoiding meeting our eyes, someone showing us down a hall to the next site of the terrible and the repulsive. Some were beyond help, they’d torn out the floorboards for firewood and then shit between floors. It would soon seep down into the next apartment, rendering those rooms uninhabitable as well. Some flats had only two livable rooms left. No flat was any better than ours and most were worse. At least ours didn’t have the water damage of the upper floors—not yet anyway. My throat and eyes stung with carbolic. I shoveled and scraped and carried and retched, and recited my poems to myself, imagining the audience, then trying not to imagine them.
I wondered if Blok would be there. He was the only one I really cared about. Terrifying, but essential. In a moment of madness, I had taken a flier to his home on Ofitserskaya, third floor, that window I’d once gazed upon as another might gaze upon a star. His name was still on a strip of paper over the doorbell. BLOK. I touched it for luck and rang.
His wife answered, a big, tall, academic-looking woman—it had to be she, Lyubov Mendeleeva, the daughter of the eminent scientist. A pretty hall, red-and-white-striped wallpaper. Was it still a private flat? She was taller than I’d imagined, with graying hair in a fringe. Was this woman really the inspiration for the Beautiful Lady? They had once all lived together in a shocking ménage, Bely and Blok and Lyubov and Soloviev…now she was just a rather stolid old woman. I had to remind myself, this would happen to us all. No matter how scandalous we had been, some young person would look at us and think, How conventional, how dull.
I’d pressed the flier into her hand. “I’m Makarova—” I pointed to my name. “I hope Alexander Alexandrovich will come. He was the one who introduced me to the House of Arts. He’s been so very kind…”
She took the flier, shaking her head. “You poets. Isn’t there a sane person in all of Petrograd?” Sighing, closing the door.
We worked all day in the sleety rain until the wagon was full, then turned in our shovels and had the domkom sign off on our labor books that we had accomplished our citizenly duty. Oh, for a real bath. I could only dream of the old bathhouse at Maryino, the oceans of hot water, the steam and fragrant branches. I had to make do with what was in the flat, carefully cleaning my boots with newspaper and water and ashes, then scrubbing myself in my pail with boiled water, but the reek of carbolic and human waste clung to me. Or maybe it was just my imagination. I dressed and stopped to comb my hair in the hall mirror. Olga Viktorievna squeezed out of her room, an obsequious smile on her awful face. “Date tonight? A boyfriend?”
I didn’t let anyone in the flat know about my other life. To them I was just the little scribbler, the Soviet young lady who spent an unusual amount of time in her room and could sometimes be heard talking to herself, who was so good with their stoves.
I swept my hair, cropped to the jaw, back off my face. Honest, straightforward. Comrade. Then tried it forward in waves. Prettier. More Soviet young lady than comrade. Who did I want to be for my first reading? I wished I were like Akhmatova. She knew how she wanted to look, the famous fringe, the long hair twisted up, the beads, the shawl. But who did I want to be? From now on, this was how people would know me—Marina Makarova.
So stupid to worry about such a thing. Still, a decision had to be made. Side part, a single wave. There it was. A scarf instead of the fox-fur hat…but I had only Klavdia’s tattered coat, or my peasant sheepskin. The coat. I could take it off as soon as I got there, showing my Ionian patchwork, or leave it on. All of my clothes were outlandish, but everyone had seen them before. We couldn’t all be Nikolai Gumilev.
A bite of dry herring, a drink of hot water with saccharine, then the dash down through the sad, wet streets—it was still light out, but far from gladdening. You could see every half-ruined building, every dead horse surfacing like a drowned body cast up by the sea.
Down at the House of Arts, light shone from the windows like a liner on a dark ocean. Inside, I quickly found the others in the little room to the side of the main hall with its gilded mirrors and bare floors, each preparing for what was to come. This night might clinch my acceptance into the House of Arts, maybe I’d secure housing. God, to be rid of Shpalernaya! I watched my comrades’ faces to see if they could smell me, the reek of carbolic and shit. This would not be an audience of tired workers coming out of a factory; this would be a gathering of educated, opinionated people judging us against the best. People would listen, they would remember.
In the anteroom, we prepared, each in our own way. Everyone responded differently to the pressure—Arseny Grodetsky, the eighteen-year-old futurist, was showing Anton a whole new set of poems he wanted to read instead of what he’d so carefully planned. Dmitry Tereshenko, with his sturdy build and beat-up boxer’s face, relaxed and joked with Nikita Nikulin, our senior member, perched on the back of a divan. Nikita had been in a terrible accident as a young man, he’d fallen from a tram, and his body was as cubist as his poetry, offering angles and asymmetrical forms that suggested nobility in the face of terrible suffering. And Oksana Linichuk, from our old Transrational Interlocutors circle, she who had brought flowers to
my wedding, geraniums raining red petals onto the grimy floor. Still gray-eyed, frizzy-haired, she sat calmly on the worn cushions, legs crossed at the ankles, her notes neatly in her lap. Her poems were exact, calm, contained, and very clear, just like the poet. While Anton ran around like a cat watching six mouseholes.
Galina Krestovskaya came back to kiss us all and wish us good luck, showering her loveliness around herself like a scent around roses. She still wanted to write, took Anton’s abuse in his Wednesday afternoon studio, but what she was doing now had become clear at various House of Arts evenings when she’d bring her new lover, a commissar in finance and member of the Petrograd Soviet with a car of his own. Always politics, even among us.
I peered out from behind the folding doors to see a full house. Gumilev, Khodasevich, Kuzmin, and—yes! Blok! He came. But my God, he looked tired, standing by the door—most likely to make it easier to escape in case we were terrible. And here was Gorky, and, walking in on the arm of Moura Budberg like some great plumed bird, garbed in emerald green, the exotic figure of Aura Cady Sands. Did she know it was me? Did she remember the girl with the baby in Mina’s apartment? No, it was impossible. She must be simply taking in the offerings of the wet spring evening with the Gorky contingent.
Anton grasped my arm. “Ready?”
We walked in together, sat in the front in a semicircle on the little spindly formal chairs in the blue mirrored room. Friends and students from Anton’s studio had settled eagerly in the front rows, as it was our night. Here were Galina Krestovskaya, with her commissar, and behind them Gumilev leaned forward, saying something amusing, flirting with pretty Galina right under the nose of the soviet. What confidence! Kuzmin and kind round-nosed Chukovksy, who had translated Whitman into Russian. And Sasha Orlovsky, with a familiar dark-haired girl, braids crossed over her head—Dunya Katzeva.