Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “The individual can either help or hinder development,” said the British labor man, dabbing at his salt-and-pepper moustache. “But the control of the means of production drives history. You’re mad if you think you’re free. Here at least you’re in possession of the means. On the side of the working man, you’re making progress.”

  “I’m with you, Marina Dmitrievna,” said Goldman. “You’re an anarchist, even if you don’t know it.”

  Moura translating.

  “Lajos, what does the mathematician think?” Gorky asked.

  “No free will,” said the Hungarian. “The structure of the universe is discoverable, we’re born into it, and it works through us. What we think of as will is just another aspect of the predetermined structure.”

  “So why teach anybody anything?” asked Valentina. “Either way we’re just enacting the predeterminancy.”

  The Hungarian’s eyes smiled while the rest of his face remained mournful. “Intriguing, yes?”

  I translated for Aura, who began talking about an idea she had for a school—for orphans. Orphans…I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “You see them everywhere, the poor things, you know?” Oh, I did know, Aura. Alas. “I want to do something for them. Give them their voices. Teach singing. And dance! Languages. Music and theater arts. Maria Andreeva says she’ll help me once she’s done with the May Day spectacle. She’s head of the entire Theater Department now, you know. Right up there under Lunacharsky.” What a nest Aura had found her way into. Maria Andreeva wasn’t just Gorky’s wife but a power of her own. “Perhaps you’ll help me with it,” she said.

  My throat closed. I was trying not to see orphans at all—their needy faces, their cunning, the horror of their lives. Write while you can. If she had asked me in the fall, I would have thought myself lifted right up to heaven. Now I felt myself dangling over an abyss. But what were the chances she’d actually get something like this done?

  “All I can say is good luck,” Emma Goldman concurred. “Every time we’ve tried to get anything going here, they cheered us on to begin with, promising every ounce of help, but nothing ever comes of it. Hospital work, a rest home on the islands, labor exchange for the Buford refugees. Nothing comes to anything here, unless it’s Cheka business, and that’s on a different set of rails.”

  “If Maria Andreeva says she’ll help, she will,” said Gorky, clearly irritated.

  After a while, the party broke up. I thanked Gorky and he invited me to come back again, and soon.

  “Tuesday evening, we’re having guests, you must come,” Moura told me, pointedly not inviting the anarchist.

  Goldman and I walked out together. She was much shorter than I’d imagined. “You think me rude, don’t you?” she said as we descended the stairs.

  “I think he was hoping for a little more fun at tea,” I said. “A break from the political threshing floor.”

  She sighed. “I’m sure you’re right.” I held the door for her, let her out before me.

  The sunset had gathered on Kronverksky. The smell of new grass lifted us up out of the gloom of the apartment, lifted us up into spring. I just wanted to stand on the sidewalk and breathe, breathe in the headiness of the conversation in the quiet of the canal and the trees, but Goldman was still worrying her argument, like a dog with a bone. “It makes me so mad,” she said. “Do you really think the Bolsheviks are going to loosen the reins once the Whites are defeated? This has all played right into their hands. They’ll keep coming up with enemies and emergencies, whatever it takes to deflect blame from themselves. You just watch.”

  “I assume we all will,” I said, a little stiffly, not wanting to start her up again.

  “Oh, don’t be like that,” she said, shoving me with her shoulder like a schoolgirl. “I’m not just some boor, trying to vex our Alexei Maximovich. The system needs fleas to keep it honest. Everyone’s being shackled by their dread and fear of reprisal. In the hospitals, the workplace. And it gets worse every day. We have to speak out. Never stop letting people know what you think. Once there’s silence, no one will want to be first to break it.”

  A flea indeed. I prayed for her safety, that no one would squash such a flea. She’d given me much to think about. “Bonne chance, Emma Goldman.” I shook her hand, and prayed she would not be assassinated like Rosa Luxemburg. A woman like that had a calendar over her head and a target painted on her fiery breast.

  35 A Visit

  I stopped halfway across the Troitsky Bridge in the beautiful dusk, shadows blue against the silvery blue, pausing to glory in my new life. It was beginning again, dangerous and volatile, as heady as champagne. Gulls screamed overhead, fighting over something. That’s when I saw the unmistakable lanky form, my brunet, the Void in a leather jacket. There was no point in running. She knew where I was registered, where I worked. If she wanted to talk to me, she would. I prayed she would walk on, showing herself as a warning, as she had at the House of Arts. But there was no safe place—the shifting depth of the river was the only place she could not follow.

  The figure grew larger on the long bridge, crossing from the Palace side. The wind tugged at her narrow skirt. The glossy leather of her jacket gave her an insect look, like the carapace of an ant, a slender black wasp.

  If I jumped in, could I swim to shore? I was a strong swimmer, but the current was mighty, few people survived it. No, I would meet her, get it over with. I would walk away a free woman, or under arrest, but I would not play the mouse again. She kept coming, her stride confident, hands at her sides. I couldn’t see the square Mauser at her hip but knew it was there. I gazed west, toward Kronstadt and the open sea, a lick of gold still at the horizon.

  Petersburg the seafaring,

  You opened your arms to the world

  And sailed out, nose to the great earth’s winds…

  At last, Varvara leaned on the railing of the bridge next to me. She looked older than she had when she’d rescued me from the Cheka prison at Gorokhovaya 2, stronger than she had in the flat I’d shared with her off the Fontanka, more severe, less kinetic. We said nothing, just watched the water pass under the bridge in the unfrozen center—green-black waves heading for the open gulf. Sheets of ice traveled past from time to time. How many desperate people had jumped from this bridge in the last few years? I avoided looking back at the Peter and Paul Fortress, the enormous silent fact of it.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  I nodded. Everything had caught up with me eventually—Arkady, and now Varvara.

  “I heard your reading,” she said. “It sounded pretty good.” She leaned forward, her hands clasped, the Mauser at her hip. “Though I’m no critic.”

  What was she after? Varvara couldn’t have cared less about echoes of sound or the movement of the human soul.

  “I didn’t know you had a baby.” Gazing upriver, not meeting my eyes. “Was it Genya’s?”

  Why should I help her? If she wanted information, she would have to ask the right questions.

  “Shurov’s?”

  Just beyond the rail, a gull hovered on the freshening wind. She put her hand on my arm, and I flinched.

  “I’m not the enemy, Marina.”

  I had used my own name, that was my mistake. My hubris. Ever my weakness. To feel confident that now I was safe. That’s how she’d found me. I could have used a pseudonym, created a new self for the next life. But I wanted to stand whole, with all my mistakes, to be everything I had ever been.

  “Where did you go?” she asked.

  “Daleko,” I said. Far away. I knew her, she would never forgive my having abandoned her for Kolya, for humiliating her. She had offered me her love, and I had left her.

  “Von Princip’s dead,” she said. Pretending to be casual—ah, she was an operator, our young Chekist. She turned, resting her back against the railing, a silhouette against the western gold. “He was running a gang of orphans out of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. He was half eaten when we found him.”

 
The starving children…I could feel her black eyes, probing. “What’s this got to do with me?”

  “Seems to be a theme, don’t you think?”

  “What theme? Dinner?”

  “Orphans,” she said.

  “It’s our major industry,” I said. “Orphans and corpses. If only we could build tractors and rail stock so bountifully.”

  The Kamennoostrovsky tram trundled slowly onto the bridge, groaning and screeching, the bell clanging, people hanging from the sides like bags off a donkey.

  “Why did you come back?”

  “The baby,” I said. “I didn’t want her growing up a hick.”

  She turned her face to the wind. “I never understood the attraction of the countryside. Fresh air. Trees, fields! What’s so special about a bunch of trees?”

  As we stood together in the lowering dusk, I waited for the axe to fall. I could see the edge glinting. I knew her better than anyone on earth.

  “That was Emma Goldman you were talking to,” she said.

  The flea. So that was it.

  “You came from Gorky’s.”

  Yes, an interrogation. I gazed downriver, toward the other bridges—Palace, Nikolaevsky. And Kronstadt, unseen on the horizon. West. Where one could breathe. “I was visiting a friend who’s staying with them.”

  Her black cropped hair whirled in the sea breeze, flying up like a wing. “What was Goldman doing there?” she asked.

  A man pushed a large bundle on an old bicycle past us, as if we were just a couple of girlfriends standing on a bridge, taking in the view. Or did he see her Mauser? “I don’t know,” I said. “I was there for tea. Probably wanted something from him. Most people do.”

  “Any idea what?” She leaned toward me.

  I shook my head.

  “What did they talk about?” Not what did she talk about. I had to be careful. “The other guests.”

  “Typical political things, trade unions, what Lenin said about art. I was visiting my friend, an opera singer. She came to my reading.”

  “The American, Aura Sands.”

  I once might have teased her about keyhole peeping, but I had seen her in her element, an interrogation room at Gorokhovaya 2. My mouth went dry. She was getting closer to her purpose and I waited with dread to see what it would be. She seemed compressed within herself, steely, her rangy shoulders braced, her thin hands spread beside her along the rail. The fingers seemed too delicate for what she did with them. I wanted to swallow, but I knew she would notice.

  “How well do you know her?” Was this about Aura, being an American?

  “We met at the reading, she invited me to visit.” I made no show of resisting. I imagined myself a clear pool, hiding nothing. I knew to resist her was like tugging at a rag when you played with a dog. If you wanted the dog to lose interest, you had to stop tugging.

  We began to walk again, south along the wide bridge with its art deco stanchions for the tram wires, toward the Palace Embankment. The farther we got from the fortress, the better I liked it. I told myself if we made it as far as the Palace Embankment without incident, everything would be fine. She might still be hurt by my abandonment, but nothing would happen to me. But, oh Lord, if we turned back…

  She took my arm, startling me. “This is me, remember?” Leaning in. She smelled sour, of dirty hair, and pencil shavings. “I know you. You remember exactly what they said. Who said what, and how they said it. You remember how many buttons Gorky had on his shirt and whether he cut himself shaving. Who do you think you’re talking to, some provincial strawhead?”

  Yes, I knew who I was talking to. The girl who’d asked me to spy on my father in the days before October. Who had revealed all his secrets and tore my family apart. The young woman who’d pulled me out of a blood-soaked cellar at Gorokhovaya 2, who had released me, but only in exchange for more betrayal. I’d made love to her, and then left her without a word. “He had a waistcoat on,” I said. “Two buttons showing. He hadn’t cut himself.” The leather jacket. I could hear it, creaking.

  “That’s better. And what did they talk about?”

  “Varvara. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was leaving—”

  Her sallow face darkened. She stopped, wrenching me around by the arm. “You think I give a damn about that? You think what happened with us, that’s what this is about? Do you think we matter in the least, our so-called feelings? The safety of the workers’ state, that’s what this is about.” She let me go with a tcha of disgust. “I don’t give a damn that you ran off with that speculator, that saboteur, and had your sordid little baby and that it died. I have counterrevolution up to my elbows and I want to know who was there.” Her eyes crackled like a frayed cord, sparking.

  She could squash me like a fly. And yet, to say something like that about Iskra…“No,” I said.

  “No?” She laughed out of sheer amazement. “You’re telling me no?”

  Never say no to me. Well, no to him and no to her. “You can’t use me anymore,” I said. “I spied for you twice. I think I’ve done enough.”

  Suddenly she was twisting my arm up behind me, like a cop. Right out in the open on the Troitsky Bridge. Forcing me onto the railing. “I say what’s enough,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

  “You’re hurting me.” I said it as a matter of fact. I would not cry.

  “I say what’s enough.” She leaned over and repeated it in my ear, as I tried to escape the pressure on my shoulder. “I could shoot you right here and no one would say a thing.”

  “Do it,” I said, my vision fogged with tears. “Because I’m not going to inform for you. I’ve got nothing to lose anymore.”

  “So you think,” she said, but she let me go.

  Passersby, a woman with a child by the hand, a man carrying rations, two old ladies arm in arm, turned their gazes pointedly riverward, left and right, and I knew it was true. She could shoot me and nobody would say a thing. People would make a point of not remembering this encounter on the Troitsky Bridge. “I think you’re going to change your mind about that.”

  I hunched my shoulder, rotated the arm. I didn’t like the crooked smile on her face, the air of withheld knowledge. I couldn’t tell if she was bluffing. She was a professional, she could make me think anything. But what did she know that I didn’t? What exactly could she hold over me now, when I had nothing? “I don’t think I will.”

  “Come with me,” she said, and nodded back the way we had come. “I want to show you something.”

  36 The Fortress

  The fortress loomed ahead of us in the dusk. It was still daytime in London. In New York, people were bustling in the streets, reading the newspapers, the ships thick in their harbor. And in California, where Uncle Vadim slept, the sun had just come up. I would give anything to be there. “Am I under arrest?”

  “Have you done anything wrong?” Varvara asked. As if the Cheka needed a reason.

  We turned off the wide Troitsky onto St. John’s Bridge, then passed into the fortress, entering a dark weedy forecourt bounded in stone walls. It was terrifying to see the golden steeple of the Peter and Paul Cathedral so high above me, an angle at which I’d never seen it before. Like a sword threatening the peace of the evening sky. All the warmth and gaiety of the afternoon at Gorky’s had dissolved like wet tissue. I was glad I was wearing my sheepskin. It hadn’t been strictly necessary, but if I were imprisoned, I would be happy to have it.

  Avoiding the puddles, we approached a stout and heavily guarded inner gate.

  “It’s called St. Peter’s Gate,” Varvara told me as she swaggered up to the guard on duty. He looked like an ant in the arch of the enormous wall. The post was reinforced with a machine gun. St. Peter’s, but you’d be lucky to be refused entry. Varvara passed the guard her credentials. He made a telephone call. A raw patch of brick showed where they had torn down the imperial eagle over the gate, where red flags now flew. He came back and opened the second gate.

  I would have given anything for a drin
k of water. My mouth had gone stone dry. But I refused to show her how frightened I was. The blue sky tinged with gold—it could be the last time I ever saw it. This horrible place was like a person you had known all your life, a frightening, powerful figure you recognized on sight, maybe even nodded to in the street, whose carriage or motorcar sometimes passed by you, but now the black door opened and he was beckoning you to go for a ride. “You want to tell me where you’re taking me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Now we were in the inner court, pavement and water and big avenues of bare trees, eighteenth-century administrative buildings and barracks and those inescapable walls of stone. Before there was anything else in Petersburg, there had been this—a church, a barracks, and a prison. The crude basis of a state. Power in all its forms. Reluctantly, I followed Varvara past the Dutch-style cathedral of Peter and Paul with its spire, and a brick-and-stone building on the left. I needed time to gather my wits, to think of a plan. Some way to stop this. “Can we go into the church?” I asked.

  “It’s closed,” she said. “What, have you become religious in your old age?”

  “I’ve always wondered what it’s like inside.” Pretending I was merely sightseeing.