Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  My old friend, who used to clash with schoolmistresses. Who had brought me to the Stray Dog Café that night, made me walk down those stairs. In Petrograd, you go down into heaven…The nights I had slept with her in her sagging bed on Rubinshteyna, her face in my nape, her arms around me. If I hadn’t known her, I might be in England now, with all my family, studying at Oxford. If I hadn’t known her, I might already be dead. Our braided fates, mine and hers, twisted and bloody.

  “Well?” she prompted me, blowing on her hands, rubbing them.

  I forced myself to look at her, shook my head.

  The excitement drained, the smile died. “Don’t tell me you’re backing out. Out of some misguided liberal conscience, after all this time?”

  I let her examine my face, feature by feature. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can’t.” Small angry patches of red appeared on her sallow cheeks. “That wasn’t the tune you were singing the other night. You couldn’t thank me enough. Now, suddenly, you can’t? What if I just throw him into the Neva, is that all right? Tie his hands and feet and throw him in? I could make you watch.”

  “Varvara.” I reached out for her, an old reflex, and she flinched as if I would burn her. “In your world, it’s everything for the cause. That’s not my world.”

  She laughed, and then snatched a fistful of my hair, making me bend back my head, baring my throat, my eyes watering. “Where do you think you’re living, Marina? It’s everybody’s world now,” she hissed in my ear. “Everybody’s a part of it, even weaselly little poets like you. Don’t try to be a hero.”

  I didn’t try to free myself. “I’ve done enough,” I said, though my tears were flowing. “I sat up in a sniper’s nest the week I buried my baby. I’ve written slogans, filled sandbags. I was on the Red October. What more do I have to do to prove my loyalty?”

  “Give me what I want. That’s what we need, not your bourgeois adventurism—riding the Red October like a parade float. You think I’ll give you a pass, because we…used to know each other?” Because of my feelings for you. “You think you don’t live in this world?” She yanked my hair. “You think for a second I’ll spare him? I’ll turn him on a spit, all Petrograd will hear the screaming.” Her face, narrow and sharp chinned, glittered like a bayonet. She turned to glare at a man who dared glance in our direction. He stumbled as if from a blow, immediately turned his gaze to the river. She finally let go. Her hands opened and closed with frustration, her face burning with humiliation that she couldn’t control me as she wanted to.

  She stood gripping the rail of the bridge, gazing downriver toward Kronstadt, as if there was an answer there. Somehow I had made an unthinkable move—sacrificing the king. She could pretend to be as cold-blooded a spaceman as she liked, all theory and ideology and black leather, but this was not about ideology. This was the dark cave of what she didn’t know about herself. Her hatred of her father, her mother, her class, families, men, tenderness, anyone who had ever rejected her, judged her, belittled her. Those early years had forged her as proud and savage as Achilles.

  I turned away and continued walking toward the Palace Embankment. What would she do, shoot me in the back?

  “Marina!” she barked.

  Overhead, the gulls screamed, wheeling. Lost, like me, like her, like all of us. My back itched as I waited for a bullet to pierce me like a letter on a spindle. I walked past the third tram stanchion without a shot. Then the second. I could feel her fury like a house burning. The heat of it singed the back of my hair. She could never stand losing. I knew I would pay, if not today, two days from now or next month or next year.

  But for now, I walked across the Troitsky Bridge, and down the Swan Canal, along the Field of Mars, a lonely procession of one.

  40 The Spacemen

  I sat cross-legged on my bed, the window open to the warming day, translating The Valley of the Moon by Jack London. How good to have something to do besides chew on my own raw nerves. It came through Anton, the same afternoon I’d refused Varvara her devil’s due. A note inside from Korney Chukovsky said: I’ve heard your English is good. Universal Literature is publishing all of London’s work. See what you can do with this. KC. I knew it was Gorky’s apology. If it met with Chukovsky’s satisfaction I would get more translation work. It would be a way out from under Varvara’s thumb. I’d returned to the telephone exchange for my ration cards and received them. They must not have been informed of my defection. But if I persisted, I knew my rations would stop. Chukovsky was giving me a lifeline. Clearly news of my misfortune had spread among the upper echelons of the house. I wondered who else knew about me.

  The Valley of the Moon was a story of love and proletarian struggle. A laundress, specializing in fancy starch, meets her young man, a teamster, at a village dance in rural California, and in the midst of labor unrest, they decide to go find their own land and grow their own Paradise. It wasn’t Shakespeare, God knows, but the simple language was vivid—sizzle, swinging, whitewashed, a tremor of money loss—and I was happy to be in Jack London’s world of agrarian California instead of 1920 Petrograd with my father in the Troubetskoy Bastion. But I would need to locate an English dictionary soon.

  A soft knock on the door.

  “Who is it?”

  No answer. I set my book down and went to see who it was. Someone had left a small package, brown paper bound up with twine. I untied it. The oily paper unfolded by itself.

  Inside lay an ear, crusted with blood.

  Mole on the outside rim. The breath froze in my lungs.

  She had done this.

  The ear like a lotus, like a lily. So you can hear the screams across the Neva.

  I folded the ear back into the paper and put it in the pocket of my summer dress. I had to get out of here. I put on my boots and Aura’s coat and locked my room. Outside, I was barely aware of where I wandered. I bumped into a woman carrying a cuckoo clock. Suddenly I was on the Field of Mars. A brisk wind swept the empty space. The Field of Mars, where I had watched Volodya’s regiment disappear into the sun. Grass shivered between the stones. I remembered my father’s tears. Papa, tell me what you want me to do.

  I heard his voice so clear in my head, Don’t fall for the trap. It will never stop.

  I was trying to be brave—but what might be next? His thumbs? His eyes, his hands? Would he be nailed to a crucifix? I could hear him begging me not to succumb.

  How brave are you, Marina?

  I tried to breathe, and pictured the Five in their precincts on the hill. I thought about the universe, how vast it was, how old. From the point of view of the stars, how little any of this mattered. A boy had died in the grass of cholera. A man’s ear was cut off. A girl might slide into the river from the Troitsky Bridge and it was all the same.

  I walked up to the Neva and watched the river flow, sparkling and swift, waiting for me to join it. Are you sure you want to refuse us? I imagined the drop, the water closing over my head, the deep cold, my breath leaving, water coming in. The fortress across the river stood waiting. Are you going to submit now? said the fortress. We’ll never let you go. You will be nothing. There will be no pity for either of you.

  In the river’s depths, Varvara could not follow me. I would have peace among the fishes, and the spires of drowned cathedrals. Without guilt, suffering, or responsibility.

  But in the end, I did not climb the parapet, did not offer myself to the young queen, grown mad and staring into windows, her purple raiment in tatters. I had not done it when I held Iskra’s broken body in my arms, which had been a far greater shock, a far purer sorrow. If I had not done it then, I would not do it now. Just go about your business, he had said. If I died today they would kill my father anyway. Then there would be nothing left of either of us. The important thing was to live, not long perhaps, but as honestly as one could, and leave something behind. Not to disappear and let the waters erase us from the story of time.

  I took out the package with his ear, and let it fall between my
fingers into the water, where it could listen to the chimes.

  I stayed away from Gorky’s flat on Kronverksky. I didn’t blame him for what had befallen me, but I didn’t want to see him, his broad pocked face, his drooping moustache. The sight of him would be a painful reminder that I’d chosen to protect him, and everything he did, at the price of my father’s suffering.

  Alexei Maximovich pitied me, but he could not carry my burden. There would be no solace in his company.

  On May Day, that traditional day of proletarian celebration, Molecule came to my room to fetch me for Andreeva’s theatrical spectacular, The Mystery of Liberated Labor, which had been in the works for almost a year.

  “He sent me to collect you,” she said. Her kind eyes studied my tiny room, all the papers spread out. “We miss you.” Gorky once again extending his hand. I was in no mood for celebration, but what other family did I have? If I stayed it would not help my father grow another ear. Jack London’s young idealists could wait. Molecule broke into a smile when I pulled on my boots and donned Aura’s green coat. She held out my red kerchief, which I had knotted to my bedframe. That too? I sighed and tied it carelessly around my unbrushed hair.

  The Gorky contingent had gathered on the bleachers set aside for the elite on the Palace Embankment. What irony, on a workers’ holiday to be seated among commissars and their families in comfort, separated from the sea of Petrograd’s gaunt, hungry workers filling the riverfront in anticipation of the performance. Maria Andreeva sat up front next to Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment, whose Scottie-dog looks I recognized from the first anniversary of the revolution. The day I left with Kolya, and soured my relationship with Mina, the day I fled Varvara. And here was Ravich, Varvara’s heroine, and Zinoviev shaking hands and pretending he wasn’t playing his treacherous game with Gorky, chatting just a few steps away. I felt an urge to protect Gorky, even now, with my father’s ear listening from the bottom of the river, and him bleeding, right there, in the Peter and Paul Fortress. I didn’t know how long I could sit here and pretend to have a good time.

  Molecule and I sat with Aura and Clyde Emory, Aura the brightest thing on the embankment in a yellow suit and red turban. My American friend flung her arms around me, kissing me, tucked my windswept hair inside my kerchief. “Marina, honey, where have you been? You just disappeared. Have you been ill?”

  “A little cold, I think.” We took our seats on a bleacher bench, and Molecule squeezed my hand. I suspected she’d been informed as to what I was enduring, and I was grateful for it. Out on the Strelka in the middle of the Neva, a giant assembly of tiny human beings moved into position. The Mystery of Liberated Labor was about to begin.

  “I’m singing Zemfira tonight,” Aura said under her breath. “Chaliapin’s singing too. You have to come. Clyde’ll bring you, won’t you, baby?”

  “It would be my pleasure,” said the Englishman, his untamed eyebrows shading his bright blue eyes.

  Aura took my hand in her warm one. Who was I to say no to her? I was wearing her coat.

  Now the play began. Thousands of actors swarmed the Strelka, and from this distance, I could see they represented the toiling masses. Slaves being whipped by overseers, peasants at the plow. You had to give it to Andreeva, it was a vast, astonishing tableau. The actors moved through their paces like an army on maneuvers. Lunacharsky, in the front row, beamed as if the performance was the finest thing he’d ever seen. Clyde Emory took a few notes in a small book he kept in his breast pocket. The extravaganza unfolded beneath the Rostral Columns, from which I’d watched the first anniversary naval parade with two hooligans. I couldn’t help comparing the genuine joy of that day to this lumbering spectacle. Though I tried to keep in mind that it represented work for thousands of actors, artists, designers, writers and directors, carpenters and painters and dancers, how could I keep my anger to myself? It was a bloated piece of collective absurdity, a stilted, simplistic tableau that wasn’t so much performed as occupied. No scrap of dialogue could possibly carry across the river to the packed embankments, so the whole thing depended on shouted choruses, with music and drums. Witnessing the movement of all that humanity was like watching ants building a dam. First, moaning slaves toiled about the base of the Stock Exchange. Then the gentry and clerics and demimonde arrived to ascend its broad steps to the “Paradise” of its neoclassical porch, where they commenced the requisite feasting and showered themselves in coins.

  As the hours dragged on, the history of the proletarian struggle was illustrated, epoch by epoch—billed the Pageant of Labor. Subsequent waves of uprisings showed the downtrodden assaulting the stairs—you could tell them apart by their costumes and banners, the music. Spartacus: short togas. Stenka Razin: Cossack dress. Pugachov: serfs. Jacobins: red, white, and blue, “La Marseillaise” reaching us over the water. Aura burst into applause each time they attempted to rush Paradise, and groaned when they were forced back. Emory scribbled and sketched. I thought of my father, having to hear all this through his one ear.

  As we endured the extravaganza out in the river, the actual workers around us shifted, squinted, sullen—women standing on swollen legs and aching feet. It made me suspect this was an obligatory appearance, like a food brigade or sanitation detail. They probably would have preferred the day off. So this was what Lunacharsky’s Revolutionary Carnival had come to—another aspect of forced labor. Death by theatricals.

  Out on the point of the Strelka, real soldiers and real sailors were playing soldiers and sailors in this extravaganza, their guns real guns, and probably loaded. It suited the literality of our times, the death of poetry. What would come next? Would a play’s villains actually have to be slain onstage, run through with bayonets? Would we enact the execution of Marie Antoinette with a real guillotine? What happened to the imagination? There was no fun here, no wordplay, nothing clever, nothing stirring to the soul. It was all too big—vast and elephantine and as earnest as a piece of agricultural machinery. As art, Genya’s little play at the Miniature Theater had done it so much better, and he’d said it all with a handful of actors and some scaffolding.

  I tried to keep a pleasant look on my face, tried not to groan, or yawn, or weep, while time stalled and the revolts continued, and the Peter and Paul Fortress waited on the far side of the Troitsky Bridge, the ultimate literalism. At some point, Emory passed me a flask, tapping it against my knee. I gratefully took sips and concentrated on the meditative flow of the river.

  At last, the final onslaught. With a thunder of drums and the Red Army songs, led by actual Kronstadt sailors, the masses finally stormed Paradise. Even I stood and applauded.

  But then a new configuration of actors assembled on the Strelka, dressed in bright clothing. Oh, I’d forgotten. We must have the Utopia to come. My bitterness knew no bounds. “Let’s get out of here,” whispered Clyde Emory, shifting on the bench for the hundredth time. But it was impossible, we were jammed in too tightly and our departure would reflect poorly on Gorky. We remained through a choral Dance of All Nations, the soldiers and sailors laying down their arms and picking up hammers and scythes, and the Mounting of the Tree of Freedom.

  At last, the mass singing of “The Internationale” marked our own freedom. The sound reverberated from our side to the crowds on Vasilievsky Island. I thought of the millions who’d sung this song, what we had given, what we had lost. It was plain to see that the People’s Revolution had become a prisoner of the state. I felt like my heart was being cut from my chest and held aloft before being eaten, still pumping blood.

  “Quite the spectacle,” said Emory, helping me to my feet. I could barely feel them. “Sure there’s not time for a fourth act?”

  We edged down toward the crowd around Maria Andreeva where she was accepting bouquets and congratulations, Gorky shaking hands, embracing friends. Poor Gorky, he must know this Brobdingnagian event was an utter disgrace. Our eyes met. He smiled, sadly, but appeared relieved that I was still free and among the living. Moura, standing fait
hfully on his right, followed his gaze, and sent me a brief nod. They knew—it did make me feel better. Aura stood out in the crowd like a sunflower in a field of poppies as she made her way to Andreeva. “Remember, tonight at eight,” she called back.

  “I’ll be there.” Then to Emory, under my breath, “Get me out of here.”

  The streets were impassible for a good long time. Emory did his best to be amusing, though the effort of smiling was too much for me. “You’re being awfully mysterious today…” He reached to tuck a strand of my hair behind my ear. “The inscrutable Miss Makarova. Come to the Astoria, I’ll buy you some tea.”

  We pushed our way along the embankment. Why shouldn’t I have tea with the Englishman? Maybe I could pump him about his trade union connections or what he thought of Zinoviev. I would be happy to report on him. The worst they could do to him was kick him out. I was halfway to laughter and half to tears. He was talking about Shaw when we were interrupted by shouts from a gang of sailors. “Kuriakina!” I heard. “Hey! Comrade Marina!” A sailor was lifting his rifle over his head—Slava from the Red October! Slava, who’d pulled me onto the train’s roof when I asked, who’d cared for me better than my own husband had. I could still see him, lowering my things into the wagon as I went off with the midwife. His grinning, weathered face brought it all back. “Slava!” I waved.

  “I’m an actor now!” he shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Did you see me?”

  He had been in The Mystery of Liberated Labor. What would happen to the actors in this new world—would they have to become soldiers? Yet it made me happy to see how proud he was, glad that all surprises weren’t pure horror. “I’m Uncle Vanya! Kronshtadtsky MacBet.” So full of life. He radiated energy and good health—they fed the fleet well. He fought his way through the crowd, hopping and plowing through the workers the way a bather breaks the waves at the seaside. Emory scowled, jealous that I was more interested in this chance meeting with a sailor than in his analysis of contemporary British theater.