by Janet Fitch
“I’ve never taught poetry,” I admitted, nevertheless taking the ticket. I was afraid. I didn’t want to leave the house on the Moika Embankment. The only safety was here.
Her kind, young face. “Perfect. You’ll learn together. Don’t count on much in the way of extra rations. They’re as poor as gravediggers down there.”
I sat at the table in Anton’s room, turning over the ticket. Who was I to teach anyone? I was afraid to even look people in the eye these days. I could feel the demons circling my head like smoke. “Blok doesn’t think poetry can be taught.” I sipped my carrot-peel tea.
“He means you can’t teach sheep to be lions,” Anton said, paring a pencil with a penknife, letting the shavings drop where they would, table, floor, manuscripts. “But of course you can teach poetry, at least enough so these shoe women will know it when it hits them in the face. And if it’s a disaster, so what? You have to go outside eventually.”
And I thought I was the one who hated walls.
What a great, ugly place it was, Skorokhod, where all those women I’d dug with made their living. Down on the Obvodny Canal in the ugliness and stink, the heat of summer making it worse, chemicals pouring straight into the water. The factory was cavernous, half empty, the bulk of its workers gone—drafted, dead, or out scouring the countryside for a bit of grain. It took me a while, hunting through the dusty rooms, the silent tables, the assembly lines, to find the committee room, where twelve women waited for a poet to show them some beauty, to pull back the curtain on Poetry, catch her naked in the bath. Twelve ragged women. But no Anya. I supposed she had better things to think about.
They had no books, so I recited for them—Pushkin, Tyutchev, Tsvetaeva. Taught them the essentials, the simple rhymes and meters. We clapped hands to beat out the metric feet. They knew few poems but scores of songs. “Songs are poems set to music,” I explained, “and poems are songs without music.” And taught them the balladic form, abab.
This committee room, surrounded by chain-link, was the true revolution. Not the bloody, airless cells of the Cheka, not The Mystery of Liberated Labor. These women, these human skeletons with hands like leather, their own boots in shreds, for the first time discovering the flexibility of their own language. I set them to write a poem about shoes, or the factory, but most couldn’t do much with it. I feared the class would be a dead loss—when a black-haired girl with pale blue eyes brought a shoe to life, delighting us all with its tongue flapping saucy talk at a male supervisor.
Comrade, how’d you get so many hands?
Did your mother marry an octopus?
After that, the chains fell. Though few could emulate the girl’s humor—the women mostly wrote poems about roses and Grandma’s sweet smile, poems homesick for distant villages, for Mama’s weaving, for husbands lost to the war. Babies and drunks. And love of all kinds: young love, unrequited love, a meaningful glance at a factory dance. Girls drowned themselves in the Obvodny Canal or drank solvents for love. Solvents—I hadn’t thought of that. They wrote about youth, and growing older. And paid me with precious bread from their own children’s mouths. I loved them all, even the barely literate ones who could only rhyme June and moon. Maybe them most of all. There was no need to defend literature here. I had only to earn my bread and give them the feeling of belonging to the world, of creating something that had never existed before—and maybe a glimpse of something within themselves.
A few weeks later, I picked up a second class at the Vikzhel club. Vikzhel—what a tangled past we had. An experienced poet, Vasily Sabitov, had been teaching them but he’d recently quit, unable to teach those idiots. They liked simple ballads, chastushki, a good laugh and a churning rhythm, and I let them stick to it. Poems about trains and parodies of officialese. Their clubroom was tucked into the ground floor of a house off Znamenskaya Square near the Nikolaevsky station. They paid with a whole pound of bread, and promised coal in the winter.
“Little comrade, what’s another rhyme for zhit’ besides pit’?” To live, to drink.
“How about kurit’?” To smoke a cigarette.
I was surprised how attached I became to them—my shoe ladies, my railwaymen. And I fell in love with that moment of magic, when a poem was born into those humble hands. With them I had no expectations, anything they produced was a God-given miracle. There was no way to disappoint me unless someone’s seat was empty—gone on a food detachment, or ill, or just mysteriously vanished. I rejoiced that there were still humans who wanted to learn something more soulful than The ABC of Communism.
And I resumed work on The Valley of the Moon. Work, the great solace.
Though I still jumped when anyone knocked on the door.
My students’ pleasure in the word brought back my own, and I began to craft new poems in our stuffy, hot little room. I wrote one about the Vladimirka, the bitter lane that crossed all of Russia, the long road to Siberia. I took the point of view of a Decembrist wife following her husband into exile, walking the five thousand miles behind the convicted men. These days a poem like that could be read ambiguously, for who was the tsar and who the convict?
A bang on our door. We both leaped out of our chairs, Anton spilling carrot tea over his lecture. “It’s open, you idiot!” he shouted, mopping up pale gold tea with the tail of his shirt.
The door opened slowly, and in the passage stood Gumilev. Very straight, very cool, and clearly offended at being so rudely addressed. “Marina Dmitrievna, may I speak to you a moment?” He considered our room with his fishy gaze, taking in our domestic arrangement. I could see him making assumptions. There was only one bed. Though what I did with Anton was none of his business, I was grateful to him for being the fifth signatory necessary for acceptance into the house. He pushed the door open farther—and gestured that he wanted to speak to me in the hall. What could he want of me that couldn’t be said in front of Anton?
I joined him in the hallway. He was erect and correct, parted and shaved, wearing a clean shirt, brushed jacket, and tie—but he stood too close for my liking. “It’s the sailors’ club on the Admiralty Embankment. Thursday evening.” He was holding out a ticket. “I would do it myself, but I’m at the Poets’ Guild.” His night holding court at our sister organization. He was doing me a favor—the fleet received category 1 rations, and Anton and I needed every scrap of bread we could forage. Yet why me, and not someone more established? Because he felt sorry for me? Because he wanted me to join his circle? I felt I was jumping the queue.
His walleye stared up the hall, the other fixed me with purpose, flicking the ticket. “A bit of advice—these won’t be your factory women. Don’t let them lead you around by the nose. You have to let them know you’re boss, or they’ll wipe the decks with you. No chastushki or nursery rhymes. They’re bright boys. Put them through their paces.”
I tried to imagine why I’d been singled out for such an honor, why he trusted me to represent the House of Arts there, but I could understand nothing. “I’ll do my best, Nikolai Stepanovich. Thank you.” Nikolai Stepanovich, just like Kolya. But could two men be any less like one another? I didn’t think so.
Early evening but still bright as noon in July, the wide Neva lay fresh and empty. Boats clattered gently against the wharf of the Admiralty Embankment. In the clubhouse on the shore, thirty men, the pride of the Red Fleet, well fed, impatient, awaited me in their classroom, their caps printed with the names of their ships across the bands. I felt like a rusty old scow pulling up among white-sailed yachts. The weight of their stares brought blood to my face. This underfed scrap of a girl with dark circles staining her eyes, her ragged dress, this was what the House of Arts decided to send them? What an insult! They could break me in two. It reminded me of Gorky’s famed story “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl.”
The protests began. “Where’s Gumilev?” “We sent for a real poet, not a schoolgirl.” “Though if you want a date, stick around.” What a handsome breed they were, as pampered as racehorses, the proud Red heart of th
is red, red land, aware of their power and my powerlessness. I decided to decline the blindfold, the last cigarette.
I stood at the head of their clubroom and, using all the rhetorical tricks I’d learned at the House of Arts, all the experience of street-corner readings and Genya’s spellbinding recitations on the Red October, gave them three of my own poems: “The Oxen of the Sun,” the old seaman in his bed; “The Trees at Kambarka,” for Iskra; and the new one, “Vladimirka,” which no one had heard yet. They’d either toss me out into the Admiralty Canal or accept me as I was. Be careful…I heard Blok’s warning. But I was through being careful. Courage was the tenor of the day.
By the time I’d finished the third poem—and the road bore no more trace of us than the sky—there were no more catcalls. I might have been twenty, skinny and ragged, but I was a poet and they were just sailors. Was this what Gumilev wanted to give me? Restoring a bit of myself to myself?
They took a simple vote, show of hands, whether to keep me or throw me back to the sea, and it was done. We negotiated in Soviet fashion, as the students told me what and how they wanted to be taught. Each week I would read a few poems, which they would discuss, me pointing out nuances they might not have caught. Then they’d read in a circle, the way poets do, and discuss their work.
While it was hard to find even scratch paper and stubs of pencils for the Skorokhod women, all of the sailors came with notebooks and pens, and books of poetry they had of their own. I pushed them. I took them through binary meters and ternary meters, the five-foot trochaic line, Pushkin’s iambic tetrameter—the Onegin stanza, with examples. I showed them Blok’s accentual verse. Their poems were full of sea and sky, foreign lands, great storms and guns and brotherhood under the smokestacks. The women they’d left and their own weeping mothers, the winds of the revolution. Realistic deaths—so many deaths. They admired Mayakovsky and Gumilev—strange bedfellows—and, surprisingly, me.
They didn’t care about: Tyutchev, Lermontov, Akhmatova. They wanted only the most modern with
EX:P:LOSIONS!!! and great unfurling
B A N N E R S
like the sails
on four-masted ships
RiSING AND pLUNging
in heavy seas.
One evening I sent greetings to Slava through a sailor from the Petropavlovsk. “Tell him Kuriakina hopes his acting goes well.”
“Kuriakina? As in Gennady Kuriakin?” They all knew his poetry, had already memorized verses from On the Red October. How impressed they were that we were married, that I had ridden on the agit-train. Now I was not just Marina Makarova, the scarecrow poet, but Kuriakina. The name drenched me with a glamour I hadn’t had before. “Why aren’t you with him?” they asked, imagining some awful betrayal. “Did he dump you?”
Glamour is best maintained by silence.
After classes, my students insisted on walking me back from the Admiralty Canal along the sparkling Neva in the twilight of ten p.m., a brace of handsome young men, white blouses glowing in a night bright enough to read the names of their ships on their hatbands. Their precious bread was tucked into my carpetbag, as well as a new notebook, courtesy of the Red Navy. Each time we passed the yellow mansion on the English Embankment, I recalled Kolya, and how he’d left me there. I could still sense our ghosts watching from an upper window. Wondering at the girl walking with all these beautiful men. Petrograd, Petersburg, city and dream, past and present folded together, into each other, like a map.
The men talked at once, trying to entertain me. Oh, the battles they’d fought, the Whites they’d killed, shipwrecks and snowstorms and fifty-foot seas. None of them willing to let any of the others have more of a chance with me, they laughed at each other’s exaggerations and disputed the facts. One in particular could have easily been at home among the Argonauts, with his blue-green Aegean eyes and blond cropped hair. Another boy, a sensitive one with liquid brown eyes, was like a seafaring Maxim. But they were killers all. I had to remember that. Killers. I’d seen them with their machine guns on the agit-train. They had fought against Yudenich and the English, against Gaida and Wrangel, against the Poles. They might have been the ones to capture my father. They were without guilt. They still believed in the ABCs.
The evening smelled of the sea, or maybe it was they who did. Light glowed from them, as if they were the source of it, like certain fish. I admired their confidence, the depth when they laughed, their guiltlessness and pride—while I still walked on nails, glancing over my shoulder. No demons whispered into their ears. They sauntered with a rolling sailor’s walk, as if still on deck. While I could see shadows scurrying around us, the whispery rustle of disaster in the blue passageways. But nothing could touch the gods of the Soviet Fleet.
I lay on my sheepskin by the odd window that came down to meet the floor, looking out. Nevsky Prospect was still illuminated by the milky midnight of summer and stirred with its secret life. I could see it all from here. The scene resembled the way I’d always imagined death: that strange half-light, a starless Blokian shadow world. Down in the street, a girl and a man kissed in a boarded-up doorway they had no idea was once the entry to Pushkin’s Literary Café, where the poets of his day would gather and trade gossip and insults, and challenge one another to duels. The Stray Dog had been that for the last generation. And now, in our impoverished time, it was the House of Arts.
Ghosts, I thought, watching the figures pass. We were all ghosts, sowing our ectoplasm, creating shimmering memories with which we too would haunt the world.
We would die and drift along the streets of our youth, this whole city was nothing but a necropolis. I thanked God for Anton, just across the room in his bed, which I’d relinquished for the month of July. “You asleep?”
I heard the bedsprings creak. “Yes,” he said. “You?”
Down in the street, a woman and a man turned the corner, she in white, he in black. Who in the world wore white now? How could you resist wiping your hands on her?
I returned to the young people in the doorway. I remembered desire like that, my lips throbbing, my breasts reaching, my thighs. But my blood had jelled in my veins, I was as sexless as a piece of waterlogged wood, a mourner sewn into her shroud. “Anton, do you ever think you’re going to start screaming and never stop?”
He lit a cigarette, the scratch, the flare. “People think I’m crazy as it is,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “When I’m just sensitive.”
I laughed. When I was younger I couldn’t have imagined how I would come to appreciate Anton. “So sensitive. But it’s getting to be a problem. I’m afraid to sit in lectures. The other night when Dobuzhinsky was talking about contemporary Petrograd art, I thought I was going to start screaming.” I traced along the window the curb, the Police Bridge, the cupola of the Dutch church.
“I think we’re all about there,” he said. “It’s a good start for something. I’m about to scream…”
“Inside the sweltering hall…”
“A straitened silence stains us all…But you should go ahead and scream if you like. It won’t bother me.”
“I feel like a character in Bely’s book.”
“Everyone feels like that,” he said.
“Not Gumilev.” In his clean white shirt, the picture of self-restraint.
“Especially Gumilev,” Anton said. “If anybody was sitting on a scream the size of Russia, it’s Nikolai Stepanovich. His scream would blow down St. Isaac’s. The statues would take wing like sparrows.”
It made me feel better to think of Gumilev screaming, fists tight to his sides like an enraged five-year-old. I thought of Blok:
Suddenly the clown twists in the lights
Screaming…
And the merry circus slams its doors.
The weight we were living under, we humans. I had to let go of that scream somehow.
44 Zapad
By summer’s end my nerves were failing. I was given a room of my own in the House of Arts, on a newly opened corridor they called the Monkey
House, though I still crept back at night to the safety of Anton’s room. Things had started moving along the edges of my vision, like a cat brushing your leg. The feeling was like the night terrors of children, but this was worse—it could occur in the flat banal light of noon. My classes gave me some relief, the Skorokhod women, the sailors. But I found myself panic-stricken at the least convenient times. During a student reading at the Poets’ Guild. In the canteen at the House of Arts, having a glass of tea with Inna Gants. During a recital at the House of the People, near the Gorky apartment, to which I had been invited by Molecule. Just as Aura lifted that glorious voice into “Un Bel Dí Vedremo”—the fear descended. I felt like my mother before Red Terror. Something awful was about to happen and I had to get out before it did—the ceiling falling, fire breaking out—or I would start screaming. I climbed over scores of people to walk outside the old wooden theater. I stood trembling in the autumn afternoon, smoking—hanging on to a cigarette like it was a railing, my new habit—until I calmed enough to return to the hall.
I remained standing in the back in case another spell overcame me, and I wept for this impossible loveliness and for myself at the end of my rope. For I was clearly going mad. Before too long, I too would be one of those poor creatures wandering around Petrograd, arguing with invisible entities, shrinking from devils, spitting and crossing myself.
Soon they emerged from the hall, the whole Gorky entourage—Molecule and Didi and Valentina, Moura and Gorky and their friends, even Maria Andreeva and her assistant. We walked together the short two blocks under the white sky of early autumn. Moura joined me, took my arm. “Are you all right, dear?” I nodded, afraid to speak, afraid it would happen again. Crows cawed in the trees. A relief to enter their homey apartment, solid as it always was. I prayed that the devils pursuing me wouldn’t find me here.