Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “You slay me, you really do. Do you even know where you are?”

  I knew very well, as every Petersburg child did. Each alcove at the six corners of the wall had its own name. Behind us, the Menshikov and Peter the First Bastions. To the left, the Naryshkin Bastion, where the noon cannon used to sound across the Neva each day, the very cannon that had landed blows the night of the Bolshevik uprising, tearing chunks from the Winter Palace. And somewhere beyond the cathedral, the Troubetskoy Bastion, prison of the tsars, where the regime kept its most famous inmates. Here, Peter the Great had held his son, Tsarevich Alexei, invited him home like a prodigal son and had him beaten to death. Trotsky had done his time in the Troubetskoy Bastion, and the anarchist Kropotkin. Dostoyevsky spent eight months there before his mock execution changed the course of Russian literature.

  “Do you want to see where we shot the four grand dukes?” she asked with a smirk.

  Something else I’d missed. “No,” I said.

  I didn’t dare breathe. The yellow-red stone was a nothing color in the gloom as we crossed the large yard. Varvara, long-strided in black leather, seemed as tall as the spire of the cathedral. We passed the Neva Gate, where the prisoners were brought by river, its classical pillars and lintel so at odds with its grim purpose. Our steps echoed on the cobbles, splashed in standing water. To our right, a detachment of soldiers marched. I could not pretend I was that brave girl she’d once known. “Varvara, tell me you’re not going to leave me here.”

  She gave an arrogant snort. “Oh, you poor dear. Yes, you’ll sleep in your own bed tonight, with the storeroom on one side and the old Jews on the other.”

  She knew everything. “Swear to me?”

  Tch, she exhaled in disgust. “Have I ever lied to you? Ever?” She walked on faster. “That’s your specialty.”

  It was true. Varvara didn’t lie. With her, it was what she neglected to tell you that you had to worry about. What she conveniently omitted, and then later dropped on your head like a slab of masonry.

  We got to the end of the lane, and entered the last bastion.

  Troubetskoy.

  Again, she showed her papers. A Chekist in riding breeches and leather jacket, graying hair, a small tight mouth, clicked down the low-ceilinged hall, painted yellow to shoulder height and a dingy white above. Varvara took him aside. They were both looking at me, but speaking too quietly for me to hear.

  I breathed as we breathed at Ionia. I stepped out of my body, stood alongside myself. I am not my body. My spirit is eternal. I have lived many times before, and will live many times again. Not that I believed it, but I took comfort in the idea, the ritual. I counted the lightbulbs in the ceiling. Seven. I heard voices, but the walls must be ten feet thick. It was cold and damp and smelled of the river. I would live through this day. I would live through it, and sleep in my own bed. Gorky had lived through this, Trotsky, Dostoyevsky—but I was shaking. The Cheka tortured people, knocked out their teeth, cut off their fingers and toes—they could get you to confess to anything. I kept seeing that drain in the cellar of Gorokhovaya 2, filled with blood.

  Varvara and the elegant Chekist in his jodhpurs escorted me into an icy room furnished with a table and four chairs, two on each side, where Varvara searched me thoroughly, though not roughly, as my teeth knocked together in terror. Her mouth was set and she didn’t look into my eyes, which I kept on the portraits of Lenin, Zinoviev, and Dzerzhinsky on the yellowed walls. I thought of how many Lenins I’d seen since the revolution. Every office and canteen and bakery had one. Some were smiling and warm and grandfatherly, like in the Women’s Club of Tikhvin, others noble and intelligent, like the portrait in the main hall of the telephone exchange. But this one was severe and unflinching, the spaceman himself, flanked by the soulless vanity of our Petrograd boss and the thin, cruel, fanatical face of the Chekist, like a medieval inquisitor.

  It gave me small comfort to note that my friend left me my labor book, but she did confiscate the three penknives I’d been carrying, which she pocketed without comment. “Comrade Mstinsky will take you from here. I’ll see you when you’re done.”

  “Let’s go, sister,” Mstinsky said, shoving me in front of him.

  We turned at the bottom of a set of narrow stairs. A good omen. Even in the Troubetskoy Bastion, up had to be better than down. The bristlecone of keys chained to his belt jangled with each step. His boots were fine, well polished. Did he get them with the jodhpurs, or had he commandeered them from a well-shod prisoner? Was he taking bribes? I tried to think of the boots, rather than where we were going. I could feel the weight of a hundred feet of heavy stone above us, pressing down on me, the narrowness of the staircase. The light was harsh, electric, bulbs in simple cages. There was not room for two people to walk abreast. It was stuffy and held that smell I recognized from Gorokhovaya 2. Fear. It smelled acrid and dirty and electrical.

  A small landing, another door, metal this time, with great metal bands and studded hasps. Mstinsky knocked and the grate opened. A man with deeply set eyes and a prominent brow bone appeared.

  “Number thirty-two,” said my Virgil.

  The guard opened the door and Mstinsky walked me through. It swung shut behind us with a bang, and I found myself in a low-ceilinged hall, a wide brick arch dotted with bare light fixtures. Doors punctuated the hall on either side. The whole thing was terrifyingly medieval. So many doors, it could easily be a monastery, but for the fact that each door had a slit in it at waist level, and a peephole with a disk over it. The guard stopped before one door cut into the stone, swung the little cover open and peered in, nodded to my guide, and unlocked it. The door opened and Mstinsky shoved me inside. I heard the bolt run home.

  There was a man in the cell, in torn trousers and a dirty singlet, a bloody bandage on his head covering one eye. He rose to his feet.

  My father. Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov.

  He looked nothing like he had the last time I’d seen him in that cabin in the snow, when he told his friends I was a Bolshevik spy. Now he was a starved, beaten prisoner—long, ragged beard, his feet bare on the cold stone. They were absolutely blue, with heavy uncut nails. He had no coat, no jacket, in this ice chest of a cell. His blanket lay crumpled on the bed, I imagine he’d been wearing it as a shawl but had dropped it when he stood. I noted—he had all ten toes.

  “Marina.” His voice, a harsh whisper from between his cracked lips.

  I took off my sheepskin and put it around his shoulders. I knew the warmth from my body would feel good to him. I didn’t know what else to do—hug him? Too much had transpired between us. It was unbearable. I sat on his bed. He came to me, limping, stiff, and favoring his right leg, gingerly lowering himself down. The bucket in the corner stank. I told myself I didn’t smell it, didn’t smell him. He smelled like the grave. I took his thin hand. It didn’t feel like his. It was an old man’s hand, nothing but bone. How many times I had held that hand, walking across the street with him, my whole hand wrapped around a single finger? Papa…I didn’t know where to begin. There was nowhere to get a foothold. He had been willing to suffer my death for his cause—and I had betrayed him to the Bolsheviks when still a schoolgirl. I had named his mistress to the Cheka. Seryozha was dead, and he had caused it. Maryino was gone. My mother, his wife—abandoned, now unrecognizable. His country was lost. His cause was over. He was a prisoner. Which of us had suffered more? We had both lost children. But I was free, and my country was in the future. I was young, an artist. I had work and friends. He had only a past.

  And me.

  He patted my hand, covered it with his own. He had terrible sores and bruises. “Marina.” His voice was a grated whisper, like a rusty hinge.

  I let my tears fall. I was surprised to find that I didn’t hate him anymore. We’d both been caught in this terrible trap.

  “Papa…”

  He searched my face with brown eyes that were the same as mine, but haunted, uncertain, yellow with jaundice. “Are you really here?” He touch
ed my cheek, so gently with his horny split fingernails. “Is this real?”

  I nodded, making no attempt to conceal tears. I let them water his hand. His dear sweet hands.

  “I dream of you. About that night—” he began, but I didn’t let him go on.

  “It’s a long time ago. Don’t think about it.”

  “No. It isn’t.” He shook his head, as if shaking the vagueness from it. He lifted my hand to his lips. He was weeping like an old woman. “I was a fool. Mad, vain…The things I’ve done…Forgive me.”

  “Let’s not talk. Let’s just sit together.” I wished I could have brought him some cherry tobacco, a pipe. Maybe Gorky could help me. Maybe they would let me bring him food, some clothes…

  He put my coat around the two of us, around both our shoulders, and we sat that way for the longest time. He kissed my hair. “Still red. Where did you get that red?” It’s what he always used to say. Where’d you get that red, Little Red Riding Hood?

  I wanted to tell him about Iskra, but I couldn’t. One more tragedy—how would that help him now? “Guess what—I’m a poet now. I had a reading at the House of Arts. Blok was there. He said it made him like poetry again.” I heard my babbling. It sounded ridiculous. “What happened to your eye, Papa?”

  He rested his head on my hair. “I’ve got another.” A joke. He could still joke.

  “How did they catch you?”

  “It was last summer. At Krasnaya Gorka.” The mouth of the Gulf of Finland. The British sank a Soviet battleship there before they were routed. “The sailors mutinied, Marina,” he whispered. “Your sailors. They came over to us. They’re sick of the Bolsheviks. The Reds are going to have their hands full soon.” He broke off in a fit of coughing, the coat sliding from his shoulders. I wrapped it around him again. “What I didn’t understand…”—he resumed his former voice—“was why they didn’t shoot me when they shot everybody else.” His brown eyes with their yellowed whites, reddened from lack of sleep. “Then your horrible friend came to call.”

  I still remember the two of them, facing off in the parlor at Furshtatskaya Street when she told him I’d been spying for the Bolsheviks. And he sent me into the night, the gunfire and the storm. But he wasn’t the same, and neither was I.

  I tried not to stare at the sores on his hands as he held the coat around him. “She said the only reason I was still alive was because of her friendship with you. Said she was keeping me alive in your honor.”

  Could that be true? “I thought you’d gone east, after Kolchak fell.”

  “I did. It was hideous there. Worse than anything the Bolsheviks could have done.” He drooped, gazing down at the floor, down at his toes, the long, yellow, broken nails. Next time I came, if I could, I’d bring scissors and cut them. He couldn’t have worn a pair of boots if he’d had them. “Do you ever see your mother?”

  I had to stop looking at his feet. “She was out at Maryino.” How could he stand to be in this cell? You could reach out and touch both walls at the same time. Their surfaces oozed water. How was it he hadn’t gone mad? “She found a spiritual leader, a man named Ukashin. They turned Maryino into a commune. She thinks she’s Sophia, Mother of the World. But they’re gone. My guess is they headed for Persia.”

  “When was that?”

  “A year ago March.”

  He rubbed his forehead, and I realized he was having trouble taking in so much information after sitting alone in this cell since Krasnaya Gorka. There was no way to note the passing of time—though I assumed they must turn off the lights at night. Or he could have noted the changing of shifts. He was not a stupid man. I wanted to say something that would be worthy of the occasion. Any second that door could open and end this precious visit. But all I could do was say, “Papa…I’m so sorry. About everything.”

  He sighed and kissed my temple, his arm around me. “Are you still with…that boy? That big clodhopper?”

  “He’s a famous poet now. We married in 1918. We’re separated, but I use his name for my papers. Kuriakina.” He nodded. It never would have occurred to him that marrying that big clodhopper might have been the only thing that saved his bourgeois daughter. “But I’m writing under my own name.”

  “That’s how she found you.”

  I nodded. “I got tired of being someone else.”

  “What does she want from us?” he asked. “Your so-called friend.”

  Of course, this wouldn’t come free of charge. She would extract her pound. The thick stone walls, the high window, the tiny cot. “She wants to know what’s going on inside Gorky’s flat. He’s befriended me. She wants to know who comes there, what they say. Foreigners visit him. I just met Emma Goldman.”

  “Don’t do it,” he said. “She’ll hold it over your head forever. You know she will.”

  “But maybe I can come see you. Help you.” I took his hand, but too hard—the pressure made him wince. I brought my head closer to his. I could smell him, unwashed, he who was always so fastidious. “I could bring you food. Maybe even medicine. Get you out of here—who knows?”

  He looked at me so sadly, ran his palm over his stubbly hair. So much gray, and in his beard. “They’re not going to let me out, Marina. She’s only keeping me alive so she has something to hold over you. It’s all very clear to me now.” His wrists were so thin, I could see all the veins and sinews, bruises.

  I didn’t want to argue about Varvara. I would deal with her in my own way. “Did you see Kolya? In his cloak-and-dagger for the English?”

  “With the English,” he corrected me, and his hand came away from mine. “For Russia, Marina. Always for Russia. Kolya helped set up that meeting at Pulkovo.” That debacle in the woods. Conspiring to bankroll the Czech Legions against Red Russia.

  We both heard something in the hall rattling and fell silent, waiting to see if it was the guard coming to fetch me, but the sound moved on.

  “He’s established a reputation for a certain sort of business venture. Comings and goings, so to speak.”

  Smuggling. “In the West? Finland? Estonia?”

  He nodded.

  That meant he came to Petrograd, or at least close enough. I had not been expecting to hear good news! So the fox was still trotting across the ice, doubling back on his tracks. The clever fox was yet at large. “Moving…livestock?” People.

  “All sorts of…commodities. But it’s been a while—I haven’t spoken to anyone but your friend and Marley’s Ghost out there for a very long time.” He smiled and attempted a laugh. The saddest laugh I’d heard.

  “Did she ask about him?”

  Now he examined my face closely. He was never that observant before. He was someone for whom information generally went one way—from him to you. But experience had made him aware of other people. “Is that how it is? You and—?”

  “We had a child. He doesn’t know.”

  “Had?”

  I nodded.

  “God, this life.” Fingering the back of my hand, tracing the veins, then lacing his fingers into mine. “Yes, she asked about him. I said I’d seen him in Estonia, didn’t know his associates.” The trace of a smile, his old intelligence, keenness. Then his face grew bright. “Oh! And I heard from Volodya! He got a letter through before they closed the Estonian border. He’s in the Kuban with Denikin.”

  That was a year ago. “It’s Wrangel now. Denikin’s out of the picture. They’ve evacuated to Odessa.”

  The air left him in a rush. I shouldn’t have told him. “It’s almost over, then.”

  “We’ve just been attacked by Poland. They’re marching on Kiev.”

  “The Poles? What’s next, Brazilians? Hottentots?” He pressed the bandage to his eye, as if it was hurting him. “So tell me something else. You became a poet. Recite me a poem.” I recited “The Argonaut,” and “The Trees at Kambarka,” and “Alice in the Year One,” very quietly. He knew that concrete floor. After a while, we just sat together, holding hands, until Marley’s Ghost came to collect me.


  He handed me my sheepskin, but I wouldn’t take it. “It’s spring. Anyway, I’m an important poet now, I can’t run around looking like the village shepherd.”

  He kissed me three times, ceremonially, and held me as long as he could before the guard took me out, delivering me to Mstinsky in the hall, who returned me to Varvara.

  We walked out in silence into a beautiful night, Venus rising over St. Peter’s Gate.

  “Well?”

  I thought about what I could ask in exchange for what she wanted me to do. “I have three conditions,” I said. “First, I want to see him every week.”

  She nodded impatiently.

  “Second, I want him to have food. Shoes, linen, soap. Paper, books.”

  “It can be done,” she said.

  “Third, he needs medical treatment. His feet. His eye. If I see him well taken care of, I’ll tell you about the goings on at the Gorky tea table.” I knew my father would be angry with me, but I had to try to help him. I could figure out what to do about Gorky later. Surely I could find some bits and pieces that wouldn’t be too incriminating. I was a tightrope walker, wasn’t I?

  We walked in the dark back to St. Peter’s Gate, avoiding the puddles now shining with moonlight. Yet even in the quiet, I could still hear the sound of keys and slamming doors in the Troubetskoy Bastion. I shuddered. The evening had turned cold, and certainly Varvara would have noticed that I’d left without my coat. “Thank you,” I said. “For saving him.”

  “I thought you’d appreciate it,” she said. “It’ll be like old times.”

  No, it wouldn’t be. But I would let her think so.

  37 The Spy

  A couple of lovers, tattered, half-starved, passed us on the street, arm in arm, their heads pressed together. Soon it would be May, and June, the White Nights. But no romance for me. Only betrayal. It was at that moment I understood how completely the trap had snapped shut on me. Varvara walked me as far as Shpalernaya Street, offering to let me wear her Chekist’s leather coat. I was horrified at the idea of wearing such a thing, preferring to huddle against the wind as she enumerated the information she wanted about the Gorky milieu. His contacts with people from opposition parties. Anyone from the trade unions, anyone espousing anti-Bolshevik statements. Emma Goldman particularly.