Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  But I’d been ignoring Harris too long, and turned back to the trade unionist. “Are you the whole delegation?”

  “Oh no, there’s a whole gang of us,” he said. “I just wanted to get away from the minders and do a little poking about on my own. Gorky’s been very accommodating. A great friend to the trade union movement.”

  A servant in a white apron brought in a tureen of soup, placed it on the sideboard. Spices, meat, cabbage. Solyanka, my favorite. I had the nose of an animal these days. She left, and we passed around plates and cutlery, family style. She brought out a platter of piroshky, and we passed it from hand to hand as she doled out the soup with a keen eye to portions, everyone receiving a potato and one ladle of the precious liquid, bits of plump sausage floating. And crusty piroshky. I had not dreamed of such largesse.

  Just as we began to tuck in, Gorky emerged through a door with Moura and another woman of middle age. “Please, sit over here.” Moura steered the woman past the Gorky cousins into the seat on Harris’s far side, facing me across the corner. Evidently the woman and Harris already knew each other. “Emma,” she introduced herself, smiling, holding out her small hand—uncalloused, with little sharp nails.

  “This is the poet, Marina Makarova.” Gorky introduced me himself, in Russian, from the head of the table. I almost fell from my chair. Maxim Gorky knew me! It was like being known by Blok—not the same; Gorky was a good writer, while Blok was one whom the angels had chosen for their own. But Gorky was our greatest prose writer, and he ruled the life of intellectual Petrograd. If something happened to me, I would not disappear. He would remember the young poet—we had her to tea. “And this is Emma Goldman, American troublemaker.”

  Goldman laughed. Her Russian was obviously excellent. “Somebody has to do it, Alexei Maximovich.”

  Aura explained to us in English, “Emma came in on the Buford.”

  I had no idea what that meant.

  “You didn’t hear? People have been talking about it all winter,” said Aura, putting another piroshok on my plate. “In America, they decided to silence every leftist who wasn’t born there, threw them on an old rusty tub—the USS Buford—and sent them off to Petrograd.”

  “I’m sure they hoped it would sink.” Under her tangled topknot, Emma Goldman had a soft, kind face and piercing hazel eyes. Something about her, the animation, the intensity, reminded me of the Left SRs I’d met during my imprisonment in Gorokhovaya 2. Who doesn’t love concrete? “Two thousand Americans, arrested without cause and deported without trial,” she said, taking a plate passed to her. “Well, at least I’ll see the revolution, I thought. Do something useful. But the Bolsheviks have stymied us at every turn. The Communists were all right, but the anarchists? Once they saw we weren’t going to pledge allegiance to Lenin, pfft.” She snapped her fingers. “Red tape, red tape, red tape. I thought something else was going to be red besides tape.”

  All the Russian speakers laughed but Moura, at Gorky’s elbow, and Gorky himself.

  “Emma and I first met in America in 1906,” said our host from the other end of the table, trying to lighten the mood. “Remember that trip, Emma?” I translated for Aura and Harris. “Quite the experience. I got two books out of it. Have you been in New York, Harris?”

  “Twice,” said the Englishman in Russian.

  “Monstrous place,” said Gorky. “The most interesting people in America were the Indians and the Negroes. The rest were as ignorant as mud. Completely caught up in the pursuit of Mammon. Like livestock raised to feed the great mouth of Capital. Such a scandal, when they discovered Maria Andreeva and I weren’t married!” He laughed merrily, which devolved into that heavy cough. “It made the front pages of all the daily papers. We were turned out of our hotel—and this wasn’t some little provincial capital; this was the Holy Babylon herself. Mark Twain refused to introduce me at a dinner held in my honor, I was thought to be such a scandal. Emma here had to come to my defense.”

  I translated as best I could. When had all this happened? I must have been a child, unaware that the author of the “Stormy Petrel” was causing such an uproar.

  “Imagine,” Emma drawled. “Me, coming to Gorky’s rescue. I only hope that you won’t have to return the favor before too long.”

  “I hope not as well,” Gorky said. Not smiling now, and there was a warning in his face. I got the feeling that their meeting had not gone well.

  Above a sideboard, in the red corner, a series of small icons gleamed. They confused me. Was Gorky a believer? Or had he just rescued them, as he’d rescued so much else in our times? The mirror over the sideboard reflected our images: glorious Aura; Emma Goldman, intense and messy; Harris; and this scrawny corpse—who was that? My pale face, my hair, it seemed darker, drabber than it used to be, my patchwork dress. I was so used to thinking of myself as possessing a hint of beauty. Always an unpleasant shock to see how vanished it was. What would Kolya think if he saw me now? Would he feel even a shred of his former ardor?

  The hell with him. I may have lost my charm but I was gaining something far better—the right to sit at the table with Gorky and Aura Cady Sands and this Emma Goldman. To be someone. To have a face.

  “We saw you last week at the House of Arts,” said the mathematician’s son, a young man with black longish hair and green eyes behind spectacles, his Russian clear but accented. “I liked the one about the telephone and the bees.” He switched to English for Aura. “The poem of the bees.”

  “Do it for us—could you?” Aura asked. In that electric light, her skin shone like polished walnut. Though her profile was stern and fierce, her dazzling smile exuded ten thousand volts of joie de vivre.

  I couldn’t think of anything more embarrassing. Like a drunk standing on the table and doing a clumsy dance amid the plates and glasses. “No, really, I can’t.”

  “No, you must,” said Moura at Gorky’s elbow.

  The Gorky cousins and Khodasevich’s niece concurred.

  “It would be so kind of you,” Gorky said.

  Well, it was Gorky’s table, Gorky’s solyanka. How could I refuse him? I took a sip of tea and decided against rising—it seemed too awful—and I began to recite in a soft, conversational voice, letting the rhythm, the chant of it rise, looking mostly at Gorky’s cousins, the Hungarian boy, and Khodasevich’s niece, and purposefully avoiding the scarecrow in the mirror. The way the girls at the switchboard became part of the machine, the signals whirring in our hair, the dream of bees, the honey. When I finished, a round of applause greeted me. I hoped I hadn’t seemed a fool, but the response appeared genuine and not merely the expression of relief that the clumsy child had performed her last pirouette without upsetting the glasses.

  “Is that where you work, the telephone exchange?” Emma Goldman asked. “Do you have a union?”

  “We have a committee,” I said.

  She frowned. “Do you really think it’s the same thing? How do you redress grievances?”

  “Through the committee, to the Commissariat,” I said.

  “The Commissariat’s your boss. You should organize. You’ll need that union sooner or later.”

  I thought of the Soviet young ladies, my fellow telephonists. A few were studying to become Communists—ironically the last ones interested in collective action on the shop floor. They were interested in currying favor from those above them and lording it over the rest. And most were Formers who wanted as little to do with the collective as possible. I told the American as much.

  “This is what I worry about,” said Goldman in Russian to the British trade unionist, and to Gorky. “The way the party is taking over the unions. This so-called militarization of labor. I’ve visited factories where workers are literally chained to their machines. Soldiers with bayonets guarding factories against their own workers. In the so-called workers’ state.”

  “Absenteeism is crippling industry,” said Gorky. “It’s an unenviable position, but we have to do something.”

  I wished she wouldn
’t fight with him, he was clearly not feeling well. Me, I just wanted to enjoy my solyanka and not listen to people argue. I wanted to talk more to Aura, find out what she was doing, where she was performing, what she thought of us. I wanted to talk to Gorky about the House of Arts. Or to the mathematician’s son, or the cousins, about Nizhny Novgorod. Khodasevich’s niece was a painter. I wanted to enjoy the life of these cultured people. But the politicals wouldn’t quit.

  “I worry when they take us to tour factories, and we see plenty of fuel and materiel,” said Harris. “It doesn’t seem possible the country would be in such straits if what we are being shown is the true state of things.”

  Emma leaned forward over her soup and gestured at the Englishman with her spoon. “Go to Putilov. No one would tell me a thing until they found out who I was—an American anarchist, not a Bolshevik flunky. Then I got an earful. They’re not getting their rations, and they’ve got soldiers breathing down their necks. One old man said there’s only two thousand working there now, and another five thousand watching them. We’ve all seen it. The Bolsheviks have created this monstrous bureaucracy that’s sitting on the backs of the worker. It’s slavery that wouldn’t be tolerated in a Ford plant. The workers would have struck months ago.”

  What a firebrand this Emma Goldman was! To talk like this at Gorky’s table? I translated some of it for Aura. It might be true, but it was awfully insensitive to rail against the Bolsheviks, who were, after all, her hosts in Russia. Then I thought of myself in the days when I lived under my parents’ roof, the dinner conversations so much like this, where I would speak out just as heatedly against their bourgeois smugness, and I was ashamed of myself. How cowed we all were these days, myself included, how politically nervous. No Russian would speak out against the Bolsheviks so plainly without wondering when the axe would fall. Even Gumilev the monarchist stopped short of criticizing the Bolsheviks directly. I wondered what Emma Goldman’s status was here in Petrograd, what the Bolshevik policy on anarchism was these days. I wasn’t following politics so closely since I’d had Iskra. I only knew that the White threat had subsided, and I was writing, and that was enough.

  Gorky’s face looked waxen as he rubbed it in the palm of his large hand.

  “What do you think, Harris?” Goldman demanded. “What are they saying in trade union circles?”

  “Well, it’s unfair to say what we in the West would or wouldn’t put up with, Comrade,” said Harris, leaning away from her on one elbow. “The situation here is so different. Think of what they’ve had to bear, and how long. I think the Bolsheviks are doing as well as they can with what they’ve got—”

  She slapped the table. “The full Punch and Judy show,” she said.

  “I’m not here to take in a show!” Now Harris was losing his temper. “I’ve talked to Shatov—”

  They started quarrelling about Shatov, who I gathered had been some colleague of Goldman’s in America, now here working for the Bolsheviks, who’d “swallowed the Bolshevik line, hook and sinker,” as Goldman snorted contemptuously, while Harris argued that the labor situation here couldn’t be compared with that of England or America. “It’s a workers’ state,” he stated. “If strikes cripple the country, who pays the tab? The worker. It’s a much different situation.” They got into the militarization of labor and Trotsky’s call to overcome “trade union prejudices” in favor of labor armies.

  The mathematician’s son whispered something to his father, who laughed and ruffled his son’s hair, kissed his temple. Khodasevich’s niece Valentina rounded her eyes at me. Good poem, she mouthed. Thanks, I mouthed back.

  “You watch. The unions will be completely suppressed before long. Unnecessary in the workers’ dictatorship,” Goldman continued. “Already they’ve become adjuncts of the state. Unless their independence is secured, they’ll just be absorbed. What happened to the ‘disappearance of the state and centralized power’? The factories aren’t being run by the workers, the worker is no more than a gear now. All the shots are called by Moscow. And from what I can see, the trade unions are enabling them.”

  Gorky looked so painfully tired. What a crossroads this household was, not only for literary Russia but politically as well. His was the only independent voice in the country—of course, everyone would be scrambling for his attention. I wished the wind could pick him up and blow him into the blue, like that escaped hat. He saw me gazing at him, and smiled. “Lenin thinks Trotsky goes too far, saying that the unions are no longer necessary,” he said finally, steepling his sensitive fingers. “The workers need to defend themselves against the state whenever necessary. Also to defend their state, when that’s necessary. But let’s ask someone of the younger generation. Marina Dmitrievna, what do you think of all this?”

  Everyone was looking at me—to decide the fate of the Russian worker! I must have turned pale, because Aura patted my hand. Hers was solid and meaty, her nails unpolished like everyone else’s but well manicured, and she wore a large ring with an odd-shaped, unpolished green stone. “I think everyone’s looking forward to the end of the war,” I began. “So we can take a breath and repair and rebuild. Maybe the blockade will end by then.” Then I realized that, yes, I did have an opinion. I wasn’t as dead as all that. “During the White invasion, I worked on fortifications with women from Skorokhod, our shoe factory. They’d gone out on strike because they had no boots. I think the state is thinking on the big scale, and I suppose it has to…but the worker as an individual will be overlooked if he can’t strike and remind the state of his existence.”

  “Well said,” said Goldman. Moura nodded her approval, and it was clear Gorky was relieved at the slight lessening of the militancy of the discussion.

  Now Moura was able to turn the talk toward Aura Cady Sands, who had sat for so long with the Russian political talk swirling around her, to ask about her recent trip to Moscow. “You met Lenin in Moscow. What was your impression of him?”

  “Well, you’d never guess he was the leader of all of Russia,” Aura said. “He’s very unassuming. Maybe he’d come by to sweep up or something. Yet—you look in his eyes, and oh. There’s that focus, that will, that plan. You know he’s very capable of ruling.”

  “We met him too,” Goldman said, in English. “He told us there were no ideological anarchists in jail. Only bandits and Makhnoists. Madame Ravich was kind enough to help us get two of them—two little girls, fifteen and seventeen—out of that nonexistent jail last week.”

  Clearly Moura had had enough of Goldman, and the anti-Bolshevik line of her conversation. She wanted Aura to talk. “Did you sing for him?”

  “I sang Isolde,” said Aura. “He speaks German. I don’t think he liked it much—but he admitted he’s conservative in matters of art.” She sipped her tea. “I was surprised. You’d think revolutionaries would be revolutionaries of art as well as life.”

  Moura translated for her end of the table.

  “It’s just as well they’re not,” said Gorky, his amusement masked by his big moustache, but blooming in his eyes. “Preserving culture is a good project for the state. Let the artists be the ones to swing the axe.”

  Valentina took the view that modernity required the base of rooted culture. “If we destroy culture for the sake of modernism, I mean really destroy it, there won’t be anything for the next generation to root themselves in. Nothing to react to, to advance or reject. You won’t have modern men, you’ll have ignorant ones who’ll think there’s never been anything worthwhile except for the few pitiful scraps they themselves have been able to assemble.” She sounded very much like her uncle. That must be quite a family. She made me want to talk more with Khodasevich when I saw him next.

  It was a heady afternoon, and Aura promised me tickets to Aleko, the new Rachmaninoff opera she was singing with Chaliapin at the Mikhailovsky Theater on May Day. I recalled watching the crowds emerging from the Mikhailovsky through the windows of the Infant Department at Orphanage No. 6. It put a crimp in my pleasure, to thi
nk that Iskra had been alive then, howling with the others. I thought their fate was the worst it could get. How simple I had been. And how I had yearned to be in that intermission audience. “You sang there last fall.”

  “Did you see me?” Her smile, her smooth gleaming cheeks.

  “Oh, I didn’t go. I just thought it might be you.”

  “Well, you’ll absolutely adore Aleko. Very modern. I play the gypsy, Zemfira. Chaliapin kills me in the end, of course—marvelous. The Russian hero claims to love me as a free woman, but in the end he is not liberated enough to live his ideals. So strong, so passionate!”

  Aleko was Pushkin’s “The Gypsies.” I knew I would love it.

  “The next time you visit, I’ll sing you some of it,” she said. “And you will come again, now that we’ve found you? Moura, she must come, yes?”

  “Of course she must.” Moura smiled, a feline smile. She said something to Gorky.

  “Anytime,” he said. “We’d be honored.”

  “Do you believe in destiny, Marina?” Aura asked, gazing into my eyes with her own, large ones not a solid brown but flecked with gold. I wondered how old she was. Twenty-eight? Thirty? “When’s your birthday, honey?”

  “February third.” What did that have to do with anything?

  “That’s Aquarius. I love Aquarians! So avant-garde, so daring.”

  Oh no. A spiritualist.

  She patted my knee. “And your name is Marina. Appropriate, don’t you think? Do you believe in astrology?”

  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She wanted to include me in her life, wrap it around my shoulders like a cape. Cautiously, I responded, “I hope we have the power to shape our own destiny. If we have the courage to do so.” Though Iskra’s death hadn’t been shaped by me. There had been a black fate waiting for her. But I wanted to believe our will still mattered.

  “What about Marx?” she teased. “Aren’t you a Marxist?”

  I could hear the Hungarian mathematician eating his soup. The muddy truth—I did believe in fate, though I didn’t want to. I could not take the spaceman’s view of human life, it was capitulating to helplessness. “Economics shapes our lives, but what’s the virtue in fatalism? We should act as if we had free will, even if we don’t. A Negro American classical singer comes to Soviet Russia—that must have taken a fair bit of free will.” Emma was listening, as was Moura across the table. “Say that parts of life are predetermined—say that most of it is. There will always be areas in which our actions matter. And we’ll never know which ones they are. So I’d rather concentrate on that, whether I’m being compelled by destiny or history or economics.” That wasn’t very Marxist of me. “I can’t accept that I’m just an automaton run by blind forces.” An abdomen on legs. Yet, certainly, I was compelled by all sorts of forces. Freud’s as well as Marx’s.