Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  I translated, wishing that he would keep his thoughts to himself. For his own sake.

  He leaned forward again, pressing his fist to his temple. “If you had been here last November, you’d understand. When the Whites attacked Petrograd, a city of a million souls under his command, our friend lay curled on his couch at Smolny like a Victorian missy. Everyone knows it. He’d already surrendered. People were in a panic. If Trotsky hadn’t arrived, we’d have been hanged from the tram wires on the Troitsky Bridge. Our friend is brave when the road is open and the footing’s fair, but God forbid there’s a whiff of danger, the man’s utterly paralyzed.”

  There it was. What I could give Varvara. Gorky’s verbal attack on the most powerful man in Petrograd. If what Molecule said was true, Zinoviev was using the Cheka to torment Gorky and perhaps worse. To convey what Gorky said in private could be essential ammunition for the Zinoviev camp, building their case against him. I was starting to see the larger game being played—not just the one Varvara set for me but the one being played against Gorky, the greater game.

  I stayed late, later than I’d planned, drank some vodka someone had hidden away, and heard much too much about things I should never know anything about. Gorky and Moura finally retired, but the younger people, and Clyde Emory, stayed up. Records were produced, a gramophone, and we danced, a regular party! I danced with Emory—the tango. He was a surprisingly good dancer, and I could forget that Varvara was probably waiting for me on Kronverksky, ready to leap on me the moment I walked outside. As long as I stayed, everyone would be safe. So I stayed, later and later, playing charades. Aura sang a number of Russian songs she’d learned, including “Oh, Moroz, Moroz!”—a famous drinking song. She got it perfectly, just the right loping pace. Emory—Call me Clyde—sat with his arm casually across the back of my chair. “I could use a translator,” he said. “I’m hopeless. And I need to see the real Red Russia, not just the model factories and Potemkin villages. Will you do that for me?”

  Foreigners need guides and translators…the walls closing in. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  Eventually, the party broke up. It couldn’t last forever. Emory kept trying to kiss me, lure me into his room with promises of the poet Eliot. Was I also to whore myself to the English, was that next? Aura noticed my hesitation, the reluctance with which I wrapped my shawl around Klavdia’s shredded jacket. “You’re not leaving! Lord, it’s two in the morning. Absolutely not. There’s a divan in my room. One mugging’s enough, don’t you think?”

  She didn’t have to convince me.

  38 Gorky

  I woke up very early, Aura still sound asleep in the dark across the squarish room that smelled of her clothes, her perfume, the menthol she sprayed on her throat. A crack of dim light showed between heavy drapes. I was beyond exhausted, but my dreams would not let me rest. No way to know the time. Could Varvara still be standing down there, waiting to descend upon me like an owl on a mouse? If she was, I hoped she was cold and miserable. She would have to wait a little longer to crunch my bones and vomit my remains, a clump of fur and teeth.

  I’d been dreaming of an abandoned factory, the floor full of water that lay in stinking puddles between the rotting boards. I was waiting for a guide to get me out of there, out of the city, with other people who were gathering there too, but we were afraid to speak to one another, all hiding in the shadows. Then someone tried the doors and found we were locked inside. It was a trap. There were no guides. We had been lured there to die.

  I lay on the divan, and couldn’t help thinking that if I died now, I wouldn’t have to go through with this. It would be a relief. Who would care about someone like me? Why didn’t I just jump out that window? She couldn’t hold that against Father. Perhaps she would be ashamed of what she’d driven me to and leave him alone. I went to the window, heavy velvet drapes cutting the light for our opera singer. No early riser, she wore a silk mask over her eyes. I peered through the slit. Out on Kronverksky, the sun was just straggling up, the Troitsky Bridge looked newly polished with its tram stantions, from which we would have hung…The river shone like a new bride.

  I heard a toilet flush. Clearly someone else was up. I dressed and stole down the corridor toward the dining room. The samovar was hot, and the door to Gorky’s office lay open. I could see him at his desk—just him, no Moura. I knocked quietly and he looked up. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Can I talk to you, Alexei Maximovich?”

  Although he carried the fate of every intellectual in Petrograd on his shoulders, he smiled and waved me in. “Close the door.”

  I did, took a great breath, and sat down in one of the chairs facing his desk, my hands shaking so violently I had to sit on them. He was writing something, a letter, maybe a new short story. What was I going to do? I did not know how to proceed past this moment. “I want to tell you about myself,” I began. “May I?”

  His face brightened, and he leaned back in his chair, a man who clearly loved to hear someone’s story. “Yes, please do. You’re a bit of a mystery around here, you know. No one can figure you out.”

  I told him everything. Who we were. Who my father had been. What had happened to us. Varvara, Kolya, Genya, my mother, my brothers. Arkady, Pulkovo, and Gorokhovaya 2. My wanderings in the countryside, the death of Iskra. And the meeting on the bridge. What I’d found in the cell at the Peter and Paul Fortress. My deal with the devil. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t ask questions, didn’t say a word. But his pleasure at hearing my story faded as I spoke, when he began to see the shape of things, the great storm gathering.

  I didn’t know how it would feel to finally unburden myself as I’d never been able to do. I held nothing back, didn’t try to paint myself a victim or a hero. I was exposed, without a skin, like Arkady’s book of saints. “I’m in the trap and don’t know how to gnaw my leg free. I’ve seen foxes do it. Tell me how. You know I’d rather die than inform on you.”

  He sighed, shook his head. “It’s a terrible time.”

  “I just don’t know what to do.” I lifted my ugly, teary, snotty face. “I know her. She’s not going to let me feed her a bunch of straw. But I can’t be a tool. Hurt other people, send them into the trap. I’m going mad.”

  He rose and went out. Was he going to wake Moura? I waited, without hope, grateful that there was finally someone to whom I could confess. I felt shaky, emptied, like finally vomiting after being nauseated all night, and ashamed of seeing it in a puddle on a figured rug right in the middle of Gorky’s study, in the middle of his heroic life.

  He shuffled back to his office, tea glasses in hand, and shut the door with his heel. He wore a pair of old felt slippers. They made such a homey sound, the soft scuffle. He sat at his desk, rubbed his face in one downward gesture, lit another cigarette, sipped his tea, nodded toward the other glass. “What have you told her already? Only about Emma Goldman?”

  I picked up the tea, held it between my hands. “She said I needed to make friends with Goldman. She’s interested in knowing more about the movements and plans of the anarchists. Also she wants me to get close to the foreigners—tell her where they go, who they see. She’s sure they’re all spies.”

  He coughed deep and wet into a large handkerchief.

  “It’s Zinoviev, isn’t it?” I said. “Behind all this.”

  He leaned back in his chair, which groaned with his weight, the hand holding the cigarette shading his eyes. “I would never have said all that. But someone I know, a commissar and an old friend, was recently arrested. A completely trumped-up charge. I was trying to get him out, but they’d already shot him. Before they heard from Moscow. He was to be released, but they shot him first.” He sighed, a long shuddering breath.

  I sat as meekly as a prisoner with her head in the cradle of the guillotine.

  He got up and turned to the window, opened the drapes onto a shining new day. “I have terrible insomnia,” he said. “I can’t sleep past dawn.” He gazed down at the park, the greening trees. “It u
sed to be I could hear animals at the zoo from here. But they’re all gone. The deer, the camels, the elephants. Do you like animals, Marina Dmitrievna?”

  Who didn’t like animals? But there were none left, not even rats. Only the birds that children tried to trap and sell.

  Still gazing down at the park, hearing the cries of animals long dead. “I’ve been a Bolshevik since 1903. I turned over my earnings from my writings to fund their operations. But they’re like a child who grows up so differently than you’d imagined. So headstrong, so violent. But good. Basically good. Right now, I’m just trying to neutralize some of their worst aspects.”

  His eyes followed something down below, someone passing by in the park perhaps. Light filled his tired face. The study smelled of stale cigarettes. “I’ll tell you a secret—I don’t like reality all that much. We artists, we want to dream a new world into being. But someone has to protect this—it’s the only way advances can ever happen. Enlightenment, culture. Science. Man—as he is—will continue to wreak chaos. I have no illusions about the masses.” He touched the old velvet drapes with a loving hand. “Blok despises the intelligentsia, as only a real intelligent can. Me, I worship them. I joined them only by the skin of my teeth. Alexander Alexandrovich doesn’t know how the village respects the schoolmaster. A literate man’s a magician to them. Only enlightened men will produce an enlightened world. Not the dictatorship of the proletariat. The transformation of the proletariat into men.”

  That was the reason for Universal Literature, and the House of Arts, the House of Scholars. Why he woke up before dawn, to smoke and worry in this room.

  He opened the fortochka, stood breathing in the freshness of the morning. After a time, he tore himself from the scene of the awakening city and sank back down into his big worn chair. “So now you find your leg in a trap.” He took a pencil in his broad hand, turned it end over end, thoughtfully, like a baton. “It might make you feel better if I tell you you’re probably not the first person who has taken notes at my dinner table for the sake of our friends at Cheka headquarters. You’re just the first to have confessed it.”

  I felt the house shift under us, the fragility of what he had built here. “Tell me what I should do.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “But as a writer, I can help you consider the various ways the story could go.” He sat back in his big chair, as if thinking of a novel’s plot. “What happens, for example, if you go ahead with the plan and tell your friend everything you heard last night?”

  I knew that answer immediately. “My father will be fed and clothed, and receive medical care. And the authorities will be more sure you are in opposition to them.”

  “And what happens to you?”

  A question not so easily answered. I gazed into his kind, snub-nosed face, the pale eyes. “I get to live.”

  “Go further.”

  I thought of the next room of the nightmare. “She’ll want more.”

  “Exactly. You’ll dig yourself in deeper. You’ll have to put yourself in a false position with everyone and everything, knowing you’re a fraud. A dangerous fraud. It leaves you alone, except for your friend.” The house was so silent, I could hear the tick of the clock on the bookcase behind me. “She took away your job. You’ll depend more and more on her. There’s no escape.”

  Claustrophobia descended. I had hoped he could see a way out, not confirm what I already knew.

  “Either you’ll find a way to rationalize it or you’ll take your own life. And your father’s still in prison.” His face, so sad, so gentle. “I’ve been in that cell, I know what I’m talking about. I don’t say this cavalierly. In these times, the scarcest commodity is not bread but courage. The way you’ve described him, it seems that your father is a courageous man, a man of principle. You might not like his principles, but he chose his path. The question is, what are you going to do with your own life? Where are your principles?”

  My principles. Did anybody have the luxury of principles these days? But Gorky had been in that cell, maybe the same one my father now occupied. Gorky’s principles were no luxury. We all depended upon them to shield us from the roaring furnace of Bolshevik power. What were my principles? Not Genya’s, with his perfect faith in the future, his poems about blood and fire, the Red Dawn. Certainly not Varvara’s and the other spacemen’s: the forcible perfection of mankind through ideology, regimentation, and terror. What then?

  I knew that I believed in more than just saving my own skin, myself and my family’s. I was not Mina—I could not slam the door in the face of a friend. There was Gorky, there was the House of Arts, all those scholars and artists. There was the truth. I was no Kolya, just seeing what he could get away with, no sense of how his choices reverberated in the world around him. I was uncomfortably stretched between many realities, but if a poet had no compulsion toward truth, he should go drive a tram.

  “And if I decide not to go along, then what?”

  Gorky screwed another cigarette into the black holder. “It would be a very grave thing.” He lit it and sank back into the chair again. Into himself. His voice was very low. “Your father goes to his fate. Which I imagine he is prepared to do.” He met my gaze. “He told you so himself. He doesn’t want you to cooperate. He knows what that means. Imagine his agony if he discovered you’d become a tool of the Cheka because of him. Of all the terrible reversals of fortune. The very thing he falsely accused you of that night, in that snowy cabin, becomes true because of him.”

  Of course. I had only felt such pity for him in his wretched condition. That cell. Torture and cold. I hadn’t thought of that other agony, the moral one.

  Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Was I a moral person? Or was this a ridiculous time to think of morality? It must not be or I would have blithely run to Varvara with my newfound treasure, and the hell with Gorky.

  “So what do I do? Try to find my way to Finland?”

  Gorky examined the burning tip of his cigarette. “You go and live your life. And wait for the knock on the door. It might come, it might not. Write your poetry, give your readings. I can talk to Korney Chukovsky about a translation job for you at Universal Literature. Maybe you teach poetry, a literacy class. It’s no small thing to teach a man to read. You have courage. You’ll live in the sunshine, though you might pay for it with your life.”

  I tried to force air into my lungs. “But what if she has me arrested? What if she has me shot?”

  “You go to prison. You go to the camp. But you won’t have fed the monster. You won’t have become a puppet. What is this life, Marina? We don’t live forever. We’re here to use our time, not simply exist.”

  “Just…live my life?” That was not something I’d considered. Walk out of here and say no, and continue.

  “Look at Gumilev,” Gorky said. “Much as I despise the man, you have to admit, he doesn’t bow his head. He doesn’t stuff his mouth with dirt. He lives like a man. And if necessary, he’ll die like a man. His courage gives courage to others. You should study him.”

  I heard a door close. The house was awakening. I would have to leave soon. Suddenly I was filled with terror again. As if nothing had been decided. It was still up to me. It was still in my hands.

  He smiled and came around the desk. He put his hands on my shoulders. “And if anything happens, you know I’ll do what I can,” he said. “The important thing is to live honestly and leave something behind. Not to disappear without a trace. How brave are you, Marina?”

  I didn’t know. But I had a feeling I would soon find out.

  39 This Transparent Hour

  No one loitered outside the house on Kronverksky in the early morning light. Walking toward the Neva in slow, measured steps, wearing Aura’s green coat, I felt as exposed as Andromeda on her rock. The grim fortress loomed on my right, its gold spire a lance, cruelly gleaming. The river ran fresh and swift, dotted with whitecaps and floes of ice. I could smell salt on the air. If only there was a ship, its white sails filling�
�Behind those cold stone walls, my father would be just waking up, or perhaps he didn’t sleep and had been up all night. He’d hear the clang of doors, a shift change. Light would filter into his small window, illuminating the narrow cell’s grim solitude. They would bring him food, maybe allow him to shave, surprising him with a basin of hot water, a change of clothes. I hoped he enjoyed the privilege of these last hours, these last few pleasures, before Varvara learned that I would not ransom him. Most likely, he would be too brokenhearted to enjoy them anyway, if he knew that they’d come at the cost of my moral freedom.

  Yet I knew too that he had been glad to find I was alive, that his outcry hadn’t put a bullet into my skull that night in the woods at Pulkovo. Oh, those few precious minutes when we’d sat side by side, when he’d held my hand, together at last. When the fine treatment stopped, he would know I had not betrayed him. Would he be happy, though it would mean his death? I would live with the decision of this morning for the rest of my life.

  White gulls sailed upriver in the light blue morning, flicking wings bright in the stillness, shrieking their plaintive calls. Could he see them through his tiny window, sunlight on white wings, could he hear their windswept cries? I stepped onto the Troitsky Bridge, that immense span, the end just a point, vanishing. The tram stanchions like so many gibbets. Beneath, the clean flow of icy water, inexorably seeking the sea. A figure in black stood at the opposite end. How brave are you, Marina? I didn’t slow down or speed up, just kept walking, step after step, toward my fate, as the river flowed toward the Gulf of Finland.

  Halfway across, our paths met. “You spent the night,” Varvara said. Her black eyes sparkled with excitement.