Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “And keep an eye on Moura Budberg,” she said. “That one’s a British spy, I’ll give you twenty to one.” She wanted to know about visiting foreigners, foreign writers. “Even if you’ve heard of them. The Brits love to use their writers as spies. They’ve done it for a hundred years. I want to know who they meet, where they go. Make yourself useful. Foreigners need guides and translators. Especially a pretty girl, and a poet—”

  “I already have a job.” Who had the time to play Mata Hari? It was hard enough to sneak out for Anton’s Wednesday poetry studio.

  “Not anymore. You’re working for us now.”

  O Holy Theotokos, help me, a poor sinner. “How will I get my rations?” Grasping at straws.

  “They’ll keep you on the books at the telephone exchange. Or maybe old Gorky can cough up a job. We’ll think of something.”

  And I had thought myself safe after Arkady’s death. I hadn’t realized who my true enemy was going to be. Varvara was building a case against Gorky—why? Because he was there, the only independent voice in Russia. The Bolsheviks couldn’t tolerate a man who was still respected, Lenin’s close friend, the one man in the country who was allowed to go his own way.

  Having sold my soul, suddenly I found myself free. I woke in the mornings, and the day was mine. My rations prepaid, I was a ghost at the telephone exchange. Anyone not knowing the price would have envied me. But Father was in the Troubeskoy Bastion, and what I’d agreed to do was a filthy rag stuffed in my mouth. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t sleep. I paced, I stared out the window. A dim light glowed in the one window across the courtyard…Another soul lies restless there. / I will not put out my light. I could only imagine the horror my sixteen-year-old self would feel at the predicament I’d been put in.

  The very idea that Varvara wanted me to be a rat in the walls at Gorky’s, listening at doors, riffling through his papers and Moura’s dressing table. I turned the problem around in my head like a nanny turning the facets of a thermometer, trying to get another reading, but I could see no other outcome. If I wanted to help my father, there was no way out, only ahead, into the next turn of the labyrinth.

  I had the time to write, but all I heard was the roaring silence. Blok had stopped writing poetry after “The Scythians,” because there were no more sounds. This was what he meant. You couldn’t say anything real or true when there was an immense lie sucking up all the air. Instead, I turned to the streets of my beautiful, crumbling city, walking, hour after hour. Here was the garbage, the dead horses, the broken pavers, the sins of winter exposed in all their horror—as I might be exposed for the hideous thing I would soon become.

  Everything around me—the familiar buildings with their pilasters and caryatids, the ice sheeting off the canals—seemed heavy, hiding malevolence, danger, and betrayal. The sky itself untrustworthy. No forgiveness, no hiding place. The flowing water just a good place to dump a body. Everyone I passed seemed to be watching me. I could feel the wolfpack moving silently through the trees. Only the vaulted sky was untouched by it. It would see our deaths with the same vast unconcern as it would see a scythe cutting through a bird’s nest hidden in the wheat. Each building stared defensively out at all the others. There could be a murder in every flat.

  She’d planned this for a year. Narrowed the paths, hung the snares—while I was still in Udmurtia. Worse than mad Arkady and his drugged children, for this was cold calculation. Her love had turned to hatred, her joy was only the chess player’s joy, seeing her opponent beaten long before the fatal move. It was my fault, for thinking I could live out in the open like other people, and possess my own face. For thinking I had nothing to lose.

  Thank you for saving him, I’d said to her. I cringed to remember it. And now I was to be a tool of the Cheka, to bring down Maxim Gorky, that heroic, generous soul. I clung to the idea that I could feed her garbage, but even as I grasped at that straw, I knew she would not be satisfied. She was clever and ambitious. And if I didn’t cooperate…

  I lay on my narrow cot on the kitchen hall on Shpalernaya Street, watching the lit window across the yard, imagining him in his cell—Papa, I’m sorry. But what would you have me do? This old room might be small, but I could still open the window. I could go out into the street. But if I didn’t give her what she wanted, she would kill him, and I would be the one in the cell. Even thinking of it made me feel as if I were suffocating. Or she’d send me to a camp in the north, where I would starve to death or freeze. And I’d given my father my sheepskin…

  At eight o’clock that Tuesday night, I presented myself at the Gorky flat, my woolen scarf wrapped about me like a shawl, Klavdia’s tattered jacket in place of my sheepskin, my fur hat back on my head. How happy Aura was to see me, hugging me, engulfing me in her strength and warmth. I drank in the golden spicy smell of her.

  “What happened to your warm coat?” she asked.

  “Stolen,” I said. Lies already streaming behind me.

  “Poor kid,” she said, her big hand on my arm. “You can’t be without a coat. Wait, I’ll find you something.”

  As she led me down the corridor, I was busy memorizing things, things I hadn’t paid attention to before. The number of doors on the corridor. The first door was open—the old front parlor, a room facing the street, where a commanding woman stood with a group of people around a table, going over notes and sketches. “Andreeva?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  Maria Andreeva’s office—the old parlor. “She still lives here? With Moura?”

  Aura laughed, her laughter rich and full of music. What glorious teeth she had. Big and square and even. No one had such teeth in all of Petrograd, not even before the war. “They don’t step on each other’s toes as much as you’d think.” She led me toward the dining room, eight doors, four and four. “Andreeva’s the queen, she’s got her own life, her own assistant.” She arched an expressive eyebrow. “Moura organizes the cook, types Gorky’s letters, does the fussing. Andreeva’s not doing any of that. She’s got the May Day extravaganza to worry about, not what kind of soup we’re having for supper.”

  At the L of the large flat, the dining room—the arena where the lions would be loosed and the Christians torn to pieces—was already full of people. I could feel my face hot with shame as they greeted me warmly. A girl called Molecule, a friend of the ménage. The artists Didi and Valentina. Moura’s greeting was cool, as if she already suspected me, but Gorky was pleased to see me. He seemed tired, overburdened, as if every care in the world lay on those stooped shoulders—it tore my heart to shreds.

  “Somebody stole her coat,” Aura told him.

  “Call me Akaky Akakievich,” I joked. Gogol’s pathetic hero in “The Overcoat.”

  “We’ll find you one,” he said. “Moura?”

  “Of course we will,” she purred, patting him on the shoulder.

  There were some new faces at the table, the two publishing colleagues of Gorky’s from Universal Literature and a middle-aged man in rugged good health with a sharp narrow face and bushy eyebrows. He wore a broad beard like a man of the last century—the English playwright Clyde Emory. Spy? Even I knew who he was. I’d been taken to one of his plays in Drury Lane when we were living at Oxford. He was also a famous socialist, scandalous in England for supporting Irish nationhood and female suffrage. He sat next to Harris, the British union man. Anyone from the trade unions…They seemed to know each other. I wished I could tell my father that I was sitting here at a table with Clyde Emory! While spying for the Cheka. To meet great men only to betray them…My blood turned to vinegar as Gorky introduced me as “our most promising young poet.” I might have been, before Varvara stuffed clay down my throat.

  “Tell her she should come to England,” Emory said to Moura, while gazing at me with frank interest—not strictly literary. “We’ve got a crop of the most marvelous new poets.”

  “Marina Dmitrievna speaks perfect English, Mr. Emory.” Moura gestured to me with her chin. Talk to him. />
  Those piercing blue eyes, the pale face with the red cheeks. A still-handsome man. “And do you read our English poets, Miss Markova?” he asked me.

  “Ma-KAR-ova,” I corrected him. “Like a car. Yes, though we have been out of touch since the war.” Hearing my poor pronunciation. Vor. My father hated that. Ouar. “But what is happening in poetry now, Mr. Emory? Before, we read Yeats, and your imagists—Pound, Aldington. Rather like our Acmeists, Akhmatova and Mandelstam.”

  “Pound and Aldington? Not Masefield and Gibson?”

  Masefield and Gibson? Awful, sentimental poets who took working-class life as their subject matter. I tried to think of some diplomatic reply. “I think sentimentality about the working class is as bad as any other sentimentality.” Down the table, Moura was translating our conversation for Gorky. He smiled and sucked on the black holder of his cigarette. “For the English workingman, I prefer Hardy, or Lawrence.” I didn’t want to insult him, but God!

  “You’re not one of those art for art’s sake types, are you? Now? Here in Soviet Russia?” Emory lowered those expressive eyebrows with their quizzical points. “It seems you have an aesthete at your table,” he said to Gorky.

  Gorky stroked his great moustache, waiting to see how I would respond.

  This was not the way the evening was supposed to play out. I thought I would be able to sit quietly and let the others reveal their opinions and secrets. Not be under the spotlight and cross-examined by this nettlesome Englishman. “I don’t think there’s ever purely art for art’s sake,” I said, and waited for Moura to translate for the Russian speakers. “I don’t think it exists. We always create in the real world. We speak of this world. Our art comes from somewhere. On the other hand, whatever audience you imagine, and whatever your intent, you still have to create art. You can’t falsify that.”

  But then what did that say about me? This liar, this thief of lives, this spy who had been somehow tracked in on Aura’s shoe. What was I doing right now? Falsifying. In the worst way. Pretending I was a friend to these people. Pretending I cared about truth. Polluting everything.

  Emory made a cage of his fingers, small and thin and sensitive, tapping their tips together. “Since the war, a whole new literature’s emerged. This Irishman, James Joyce, has changed everything. And Eliot—he’s one of Pound’s boys, remarkable, really remarkable. It’s a whole new world out there.”

  So many writers I’d never heard of. Time had moved on in the world outside our borders—without us. “Unfortunately, we’ve been cut off—by the British blockade.”

  Gorky was amused. Emory’s blue eyes glittered. Oh, he was a provocateur, and seemed to relish the provocative in others.

  “That’s changing as we speak,” said the English writer. “That’s what I’m doing here. Investigating the current conditions. I’m planning a series of articles. People are very interested in Soviet Russia, Miss Ma-KAR-ova. Very interested indeed.” He was full of confidence. He reminded me of my father somehow. If this had been one of my parents’ soirees, he would be the man whose opinions mattered. Everyone stopped talking to listen when he spoke. “In the meantime, I’ve brought some books with me. I hope you might accept them as a bit of literary diplomacy.”

  The cook brought in the soup and the maid the piroshky, clearly the only dishes she knew how to make. The cook spooned up the borscht—it smelled ravishing—while we handed round the bowls, passed the platter of pies. It was a grand soup. I didn’t begrudge the old girl’s lack of culinary variety.

  I learned a number of things that night. The garrulous Englander spoke to the assembled company as if addressing a hall, working his eyebrows like oars. His mother had been a singer. His father was Irish, Aura explained, which was like being a Negro in America. During the war, Emory had been jailed for his pacifist views. How rightly proud he was of himself, I thought, to have been so strong, so determined, to have stood up against even his nation’s patriotic fervor. He would never have informed for the Cheka. Nor would Gorky, or the British trade union man, or even Aura Cady Sands. Moura was the only one at the table capable of understanding my predicament, if Varvara’s suspicions about her were even partially true. Yes, there was something about her—that wariness of someone who had been forced into things not to her liking, a cat on ice.

  Gorky looked exhausted. What on earth had they been talking about in his office off the dining room? Was it his publishing partners who made him look like that, or Mr. Emory, or something else entirely? He smoked and coughed and even suggested he might leave Russia, go to Switzerland or Italy for a rest. “Vladimir Ilyich is urging me. But I think he just wants to be rid of me.” Oh, you don’t know, Alexei Maximovich. Someone certainly wants it. I translated for Emory and the British labor man.

  “Well, perhaps it’s something to consider,” said Moura. “They all think that he has inexhaustible powers—Alexei Maximovich, I need ration cards. A pair of boots, a winter coat.” Was that a subtle jab? “A job. My mother’s in jail, my husband, my son. Talk to Vladimir Ilyich, he’ll listen to you.” How much did she know?

  “They don’t realize, sometimes it’s worse for them if I intervene,” Gorky said. “I’m no sorcerer. I’m not even much of a politician.” He held out his glass to his publishing partner, Grzhebin, a sturdy fellow with broad shoulders and round spectacles—he looked like a stevedore who’d been to university. Grzhebin refilled Gorky’s glass with wine that had somehow appeared at the table—maybe Clyde Emory had supplied it.

  “Zinoviev wants to sink us. That’s the plain fact,” said Grzhebin. “He personally closed our paper.” Novaya Zhizn, Gorky’s newspaper, shuttered during the Terror after the assassination of Uritsky and the attempt on Lenin. “We were no opposition, unless you call simply having the gall to speak up opposition.”

  As I began to translate, Moura sent me out a telegraphed message with a glance and slight shake of her head. Don’t. I caught the words in my mouth. But the pale, lively girl called Molecule, studying medicine at the university, a distant family relation from Nizhny, tried to explain. Luckily, her English was abominable. “Zinoviev, he don’t like how friendship close with Alexei Maximovich to Vladimir Ilyich? Like little boy, Papa like brother better.”

  “Abel and Cain,” said Emory.

  “Yes, he want only one close to Ilyich. Poison to his mind.” She gave up and continued in Russian, and I let it go. It was clear Moura didn’t want this discussed at the table, but Gorky kept nodding, Yes, it’s the truth, sad to say. Looking at the burning tip of his cigarette. “He’s trying to poison Vladimir Ilyich’s mind against us,” Molecule went on. “He even dared order a Cheka search. In Gorky’s own apartment! They were here for hours, went through his papers, my medical books. Moura’s room was a disaster. Purposely humiliating him. Of course, they found nothing. They knew they wouldn’t. Zinoviev’s just trying to harass him.”

  “Oh, we don’t know that it’s…the person of whom you speak,” Moura said. The name that should not be spoken.

  But Gorky had clearly had enough of the person of whom you speak. Whatever had happened in the office before supper had lifted his normal reticence about revealing his personal opinions on such matters. “It’s a campaign, I have to say. Against the intelligentsia as a whole and me in particular. For example”—he leaned forward on the table, his hand wrapped around his wine glass, his cigarette curling smoke into the borscht-fragrant air, eyes fixed on Emory—“last winter I campaigned to get warm clothing for the scholars. You can’t believe how cold it was, and no firewood. It’s forbidden to cut it oneself. Here we’re surrounded by forest and we’re freezing!” He nodded for Moura to translate. “Well, after much negotiation—you can imagine, you’ve been here long enough—I win a firewood distribution for the scholars, and warm clothing.” He waited for Moura to catch up. “Then, just as we had everything cleared and on its way—at the last moment, our friend had it all commandeered. Diverted, redistributed. Just to spite me. He’d rather fling it on the railroa
d tracks than let it go to anyone on whose behalf I’ve appealed.”

  Now I understood the gray face, the exhaustion. He was being foiled at every attempt to respond to the needs of desperate people who had no one to turn to. He was one man fighting for the intellectual sector Zinoviev had long ago proclaimed should be annihilated. I heard it so often at the House of Arts: We’ll ask Gorky. Gorky can get it. Gorky can do it.

  “People come to me day and night, asking for my help. It breaks my heart. They think I’m a sorcerer, that I can make one phone call and prison gates swing wide. Galoshes fall from the sky. I do my best, but frankly, I think it goes the worse for them when my name appears on their papers. That son of a whore goes out of his way to foul it up.”

  Moura stood up, ostensibly to speak to the maid, but obviously to avoid having to convey such damning thoughts to the foreigners.

  Gorky turned to me. His color was up. “I’ve known Emory a long time. No need to mince words.” I translated succinctly, taking a bit of the bitterness from his speech as he continued. “I think our friends in the Extraordinary Commission go out of their way to bury people I’ve tried to help. And now Vladimir Ilyich keeps suggesting I go abroad—for my health.” He said it with a heavy layer of irony.

  It wasn’t a bad idea, though. He was coughing wetly, and he smoked like a stove with a bad flue. Clearly he wasn’t well. He shouldn’t be drinking. “It would certainly simplify his life,” he said. He tossed down the contents of his glass and held it out again to Grzhebin. “I’m his conscience. He knows me, knows I’ve been there from the start. It gives me the right to speak. With me gone, all he’ll have is that little dictator of the Northern Commune. A sorry day when he picked that weakling to head the region. Well, I’m not about to give him a clear field, sitting in a deck chair in Zurich while he plays out his ambitions over the bodies of the Russian intelligentsia.” He drew on his cigarette, flicked ash toward the ashtray, though it fell short, dusting the tabletop.