Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Anton rose and introduced our group, the younger poets at the House of Arts, the Squared Circle, embracing an array of styles and ideas, so on and so on. He was nervous, he spoke too quickly…

  We began with Nikita Nikulin, the grandson of the great poet Nekrasov—chosen as most likely to still our elders’ fears about the offerings of the younger generation and our worthiness of their consideration. Nikita read three poems in his cubist style. I liked the way he stacked his poems around a central spine of a syllable, as if twisting his way down a spiral staircase. It was more for the eye than the ear, but he paused after each iteration, making sure the reader descended the staircase with him. He was a good performer of his work, though his voice was on the nasal side. A man with a face like a monk took notes. The blue eye, the pointed nose with its long slot of nostril—it must be the critic Tomilin.

  I thought Nikita did well. Then came our little bomb—Arseny. Ear to Nikita’s eye, explosive, a barrage of sound. He was the cannon. His poems were unfathomable, you had to just give yourself over to him, the sound of him, the energy. In the circle, Anton didn’t like us to talk about what poems meant. Only the recurrence of sounds, the structure, I learned a great deal from listening to him, though he never left meaning behind. I was the proletarian of the group, worried about emotional clarity. Arseny was our Red Rimbaud.

  Oksana cut through the smoke, etching her precise visions: the cooling relationships between a husband and wife, the hopes of a young girl, a soldier home from the front—poems about the residents of her collective apartment. The critic stuck out his lower lip, he sucked his teeth. But many people sighed, nodding in recognition—finally, something they understood.

  I was next. I wished Oksana would go on forever, that I could sit here watching the back of her blessed head, the halo around her light frizzy hair from the electrolier. I couldn’t look into the faces of the audience—the audience! Not people on the street corners hurtling to and from work who had to be captured by a simple clever line. Literary Petrograd. I had wanted this, I had wanted to be a part of this—I would have to show them that I belonged here. It was not politics. Politics could not get you a seat on Olympus. For that, you had to sing.

  It was my turn. I walked to the little lectern behind which we declaimed. Here they all were, Eikhenbaum and Chukovsky, Zamyatin, Grin, Gumilev with his students, Kuzmin. Was my hair ridiculous? Should I have tried to be prettier? Or more serious? Breathe, don’t smile, don’t trip…Don’t rush!

  Taking a breath, I recited the poem I had not wanted to write, had never wanted to write, but had to, if I were to keep on living:

  Under the Trees at Kambarka

  She slept all the winter

  covered with white eiderdown

  curled at the foot of a hard gray bed.

  Now it is spring.

  Rain waters the earth.

  The spark that glowed between my two cupped hands

  Didn’t last the night.

  The wind blew it out and

  the world went dark as the devil’s armpit.

  Oh, give me the trees at Kambarka

  Soft-lipped summer green.

  And golden the fields

  And the scythe’s ancient song.

  Yes, I know, that future is past,

  the leaves fallen

  from the family tree.

  Sweep them, sweep them away.

  But leave me the green trees of Kambarka

  The gold of the fields

  The long dusty road

  The midwife’s shack

  The slow river’s turning

  The pattern of leaves

  In her dazzled eyes.

  I could feel my words move out into the room. The stoniness of the crowd. Free verse. Why couldn’t they hear, there was music even if there wasn’t the pattern they wanted? There was rhyme, just not where they were listening for it. But then, I saw my words enter the chests of a few—a woman here, a man there, Galina. Inna. Listen, I said, and they said, Tell us, then. Tell us how it was, make us shiver with your song.

  They took me in, they rose, they fell. Even Blok looked less haunted, riding on the sound of my voice. I was so afraid people could no longer feel these things, that their souls were gone, that they’d had enough of death, I’d feared they were so hardened that you couldn’t vibrate them anymore with feeling and sound. But they were still able. Lift us up, their hearts whispered. Make us live. Even these poets, these artists of song. And I did.

  I recited the other two poems Anton had chosen—“The Five,” and one about the telephone exchange, “Listen to Me,” where honey poured from the sockets, and it became a honeycomb full of bees. I recited, feeling them with me, like making love to them, whispering to them in the darkness, when I saw a familiar face appear at the back of the hall. Standing behind a broad-shouldered sailor, the sharp face and frizzy black hair of Varvara Razrushenskaya. I stumbled, recovered. Paused. There was no way to escape. I gathered my courage and finished strongly. If I was going to be arrested by my Chekist friend—lover, enemy—if I was going to be shot, I would go standing at full height and not cringing.

  Then she was gone.

  I sat down. I could hardly see for my confusion, my pride, my mortification, my shock at seeing Varvara again. The thing I should have considered and had not. Arkady was dead, Iskra—wasn’t it enough? I had taken a chance to use my real name on the fliers, thinking who but other poets would trouble to look in the literary papers? I tried to gauge the applause—polite? No. Genuine. And I had so enjoyed being myself—Makarova, not Kuriakina, but me. I had done nothing illegal. My crimes were personal. I was unable to listen to Dmitry Tereshenko, who followed me. My thoughts were thundering, cascading in my head.

  Afterward, the old Eliseev servants, who had stayed on for the housing and the rations, handed around tea and even a few stale cookies. I was suddenly shy, as if these people had seen me in my torn underwear. I stood with Anton and Oksana, Inna Gants, the people I knew. I should go over and speak to Aura Cady Sands, but she was with Gorky—and I literally smelled like shit. Was it a success? Just to be here was a success, I told myself. To be among these people. I wasn’t torturing citizens for a living, interrogating them, imprisoning aristocratic old ladies and wizened peasants selling frozen potatoes. I was creating worlds.

  I didn’t see Blok—had he left? I probably should vanish too, before Varvara caught up to me. I knew she would still be furious—Did you think I would forget? I could sneak out through the interior courtyard on Bolshaya Morskaya Street. But I didn’t want to leave. This was my night. It might happen only once if I disappeared into the cells of the Cheka. People would think, Whatever happened to that poet, Makarova? I was someone. I would not vanish without a trace.

  I began to move toward Aura Sands, my songbird, my hope, when Kuzmin joined us—fin de siècle sulfur rising from his slight figure. “A very interesting evening,” he said to us, slowly raising his heavy-lidded eyes, his hair combed up over his bald pate. “I’m especially looking forward to hearing more from you,” he said to me in particular, shaking my hand. His touch was light, moist, cold. “I don’t care for vers libre, but this was quite musical, very much like contemporary music, that horizontality—like Debussy, and Brahms. And I liked the odd rhymes, like little explosions.”

  I was burning with joy. Kuzmin was a classicist if anybody was, but he was also a well-known musician. He’d understood my work musically—how generous of him! “Thank you, Mikhail Alexeevich.” Kuzmin! Another legend. He had lived with Olga Sudeikina, Akhmatova’s beautiful friend from the Stray Dog Café, and her husband—until Sudeikina found out he was having an affair with her husband! What a generation—like the Blok ménage. It made me happy to know that I wasn’t the only one with two husbands.

  He took his handkerchief and pressed it to his nose. Did I stink? Oh God.

  Terrifyingly, the tall, erect, correct figure of Gumilev approached. I shrank back into myself. He could crush me with a word. Be
fore I knew what he was going to do, he took my hand and kissed it. If it reeked of carbolic and Shpalernaya shit, he gave no indication. His long thin hand was as dry as paper. “May I ask you, why did God create the Russian language with its potential for rhyme and meter, like no other language in the world, if not to create verse?”

  Oh God, was Gumilev going to make me argue the case for free verse? I was no theorist. I left that to Anton. Gumilev was one of our greats. Also, he wouldn’t let go of my hand. He was standing embarrassingly close. “I have nothing against established poetic forms, Nikolai Stepanovich,” I said, trying to defend myself while stealthily attempting to recover my hand. “It’s just not what spoke to me when I was writing these poems.”

  Not only did he not relinquish my hand, he tucked it under his arm and began walking away with me, leading me somewhere. Where? Away from Anton, most likely, who scowled after us. Away from my well-wishers. I had the feeling of being led to the headmistress’s office for some disciplinary offense. He guided me to some chairs under the gilded mirrors. The lights would be coming on down the street in Orphanage No. 6 now, the orphans settling in to dinner. And I was sitting with Nikolai Gumilev, in the anteroom of the hall where I’d just given a reading.

  “They’re really not poems,” he said. “They’re just images set in rhythmic prose. Sometimes you’re just a fraction away from the lip of the pool, the very edge of poetry, but then you sidle away. It’s terrifically frustrating to listen to. Chernikov is doing you no favors, my dear.”

  What an ugly man he was, walleyed, like a goldfish, but interesting, commanding. He had a clipped, military way of speaking. Yet he kept taking my hand, gazing at my mouth, my breasts in this old patched dress that had seen me through so much. Wasn’t he remarried to a beautiful doe-eyed woman who lived in this very house?

  “You mustn’t waste your talent,” he said. “You had some wonderful lines tonight.” He stared out toward the others, milling and smoking and talking—or at least one eye looked in that direction, the other lingered on me. “‘Soft-lipped summer green. / And golden the fields / And the scythe’s ancient song.’”

  He remembered my lines. Nikolai Gumilev. But he kept ogling me too, an interest that was by no means literary. “I’m glad you liked that.”

  “But it’s still not poetry. Yet.” He held up a clean, bony finger. He leaned closer, this man at the very heart of literary Petrograd. “I could teach you to write poetry, Marina Dmitrievna. That first piece, your elegy—that should be an ode. Then people would remember it forever. They could recite it in their sleep. Have you ever recited a poem to save your life, Marina?”

  I nodded.

  “It wasn’t vers libre, was it?” He gazed at me from under his neat eyebrows. “What was it?”

  I would not tell him it had been Pushkin, under the snow halfway to Alekhovshchina. Or the Tyutchev I recited to Dinamo that night in our sniper’s nest on Moskovsky Prospect. I said the thing I hoped would stop this conversation. “Whitman.”

  “Whitman? Are you now an American? Are you writing in English? Do you have the blood of Shakespeare running through your veins?” he said decisively. “No, I suspect that Mayakovsky’s the stronger influence, and Chernikov. First see what our treasury has to offer. The Onegin sonnet. Alexandrines, iambic tetrameter, terza rima. Once you’re a master of prosody, write all the vers libre you like. Write in Chinese if you prefer. But learn to handle the palette you were born to, make its brushes dance for you. You must work with me. Chernikov can teach you nothing. I made Akhmatova, I made Mandelstam, and if you would put yourself in my hands, I would make you a poet.”

  It was lucky I was sitting down. No wonder Blok had been hesitant about my attending Gumilev’s studio. I could not imagine anything less Blokian than his saying he’d made another poet. Like God, like Pygmalion. What arrogance! Yet…wasn’t that secretly what I had been hoping for? Someone to anoint me? To bring me in, to “make” me? No. Not anymore. This might work on the doting girls I’d seen following him around at the House of Arts, but I was too old for masters.

  “Honestly, I could never put myself entirely in anybody’s hands, Nikolai Stepanovich.”

  “Come, come. Every woman wants to put herself into someone’s hands, my dear.” The light from the electrolier fingered the side of his elongated head. He looked like he’d been extruded through a tube.

  I could only imagine what Varvara would say to that. Me, I’d already known the Archangel, had seen Ukashin at work. I didn’t need a father, a master, or an elderly, overbearing lover, only colleagues and friends. I saw people eyeing us, but no one would approach me as long as the Maître had me to himself. And there was Blok! He had his coat on. He looked like he was leaving. I had to speak to him before he left. I rose and offered my hand to Gumilev, smiling coolly, just as my mother would have done to break a conversation with a wearisome guest. “Thank you. I’ll think about that ode.”

  He rose as well, and I could see he was irritated that I’d eluded his little seduction—as a teacher and God knew what else. I hoped he wasn’t a vengeful man. I had enough enemies.

  I located Blok in the foyer, putting on his galoshes. “Alexander Alexandrovich!” I had to catch my breath. “Remember me, from that day on Bolshaya Morskaya? Marina Makarova?”

  He glanced up, those light blue eyes. “Yes, of course,” he said. His face was very still. He stood, picked up his briefcase and umbrella. “You didn’t work with Gumilev after all, did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Quite right. I so disagree with the man. Poets aren’t made,” he said. Softly but clearly. “They are. A poet can hear or he can’t. What’s important is listening. The sound, the harmony. Trust the sound. Not classes and critics.”

  “Do you think I’m a poet, Alexander Alexandrovich?” I blurted it out. I knew how ridiculous it sounded, but I needed to know, once and for all, and Blok would not lie.

  He stopped in the doorway and put his heavy briefcase down next to his galoshed foot, wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck. “A poet isn’t a person who writes in verse, Marina Makarova. A poet is a person who writes in verse because he hears verse—the harmony, the rhythm, the chimes and water. He takes the sounds he hears and makes them heard in the world.”

  I could see why Blok didn’t teach poetry. He was a genius, and geniuses never knew how they did what they did. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t explain it to mere mortals. I just needed to know: Was I a poet at all? Or only someone who loved poetry, loved it so much she wanted to be one of the elect, prayed for the Muse to kiss her lips? I needed him to tell me, he who had for so long been the Muse’s favorite.

  He put his hand gently on my arm. So light. Like a snowflake. “When I hear poetry—so-called poetry—for the most part, it’s so boring and unnecessary it makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t stop writing altogether. It makes me think that I really don’t even like poetry. That poetry is a worthless occupation. It makes me want to curse it from the rooftops. Tonight, when you read your poems, I felt that I do love poetry. That it’s not nonsense, that there’s joy there, the sound of leaves, skies, and weeping. I envied you those sounds. Really envied you.”

  He didn’t take my hand, he didn’t kiss me three times, but it felt as if he had done both, and more.

  “Write,” he said. “Write while you can.” And went out into the early spring rain.

  I walked back into the gathering and found Aura Cady Sands coming my way, her dark skin and green dress so vivid in this wren-brown gathering that she looked like a bird of paradise. She was accompanied by Gorky and his mistress Moura Budberg and others in their party—a small neat man in his fifties, a tall boy with pale skin and dark hair, a grizzled man in his sixties. The mistress was the one to speak. “Marina Dmitrievna, may I introduce Alexei Maximovich Gorky?”

  He was a warm and appealing man, tall, with a low, broad forehead and dished face, a good face, a muzhik’s face, short-nosed, his cropped hair not even gray—sp
orting his full shoe-brush moustache. Here was the man single-handedly keeping the Russian intelligentsia alive. The living link between our world and that of Gogol and Dostoyevsky. “Congratulations,” he said, shaking my hand with his right one, patting it with the other. “A fine debut. Marvelous work—substantive, emotional, wonderfully controlled. You make us feel your purpose while we soar on your song. How old are you, child?”

  “Twenty, Alexei Maximovich.” Luckily, the mistress had introduced him or I wouldn’t have known how to address him, Maxim Gorky being a pseudonym and pseudonyms had no patronymic. I couldn’t just call him Gorky like a fireman on a locomotive. Eh, Gorky, pass me that jug.

  “Twenty.” He chuckled—a bit ruefully. “Poets and mathematicians start so young, don’t they? A young poet is like a string of fireworks, exploding in the summer sky. We novelists are so shamefully slow, it takes us forever just to learn to put our pants on.”

  Moura translated for Aura Cady Sands. The singer was dazzling. We all disappeared compared to this marvel. “We say that about our blues,” said the American in Russian—she had made progress since I had last seen her. “The blues takes a whole lifetime to sing.”

  “May I introduce the famed American soprano Aura Cady Sands?” said Gorky’s mistress.

  Sands praised my poem. “Very strong.” The compliment sweet to my ears. Though she could not have understood it, she heard its song.

  I shook her firm, fleshy hand. “We’ve met before,” I said in English.

  I had startled her. It was my face she didn’t recognize, my new face. “We have?”

  “At the Katzev photography studio. Last fall.” It would be understandable if she didn’t remember. Sometimes an encounter can be hugely important to one person, even change his life, and yet make no mark on another’s. Just like love. “You invited me to visit you at the Astoria.”