by Janet Fitch
I ate the little meat pies, but they tasted like dust to me. Aura entered to applause a half hour later, holding a bouquet of monstrous yellow chrysanthemums, accepting everyone’s congratulations and praise. I was afraid to go to her, afraid I would burst out weeping or babbling nonsense and be forever after remembered that way. But she saw me, exhausted and tremulous by the windows, and came to me, pulling me aside. She led me down to her room.
Another shock. Big trunks stood open in the center of the room, and clothes were strewn on the bed and the armchair, over the silk screen.
She was leaving. For the West. Na zapad. In five days. Leaving Russia for good. West—that word, sweeter than honey on the tongue. The world was emptying out, and I would be left alone. “You can’t do this,” I said. The shaking had started again.
“I can’t stand another winter, baby.” She sat down on the edge of her bed and kicked off her shoes. “It’s just not what I thought it would be.”
I sat next to her.
“I thought I’d be free, you know? But it’s like I’m a prisoner here. You understand me, don’t you?”
More than she could ever know. But a real prisoner can’t just decide to leave, throw a few things in a suitcase, and be off. “The war will be over soon,” I said, taking her big hand, the rough-cut stone in the big ring. My fingers looked like birch twigs twined with hers. “Everyone says so. They say it’ll get better then.” But I didn’t believe it. I drank in the warmth of her sensuous perfume. The war with Poland was dragging to a close. The last battles with Wrangel in the Crimea. Maybe the revolution would finally prove itself, at last unfold its luminous wings.
But Aura wasn’t waiting. She’d secured her permissions. She glanced at the piles of clothes on the bed, the nightgowns, the dresses. She could leave, and I couldn’t. “Will you go to Finland?”
“I’ll drive to Estonia, then take the ship to Stockholm.” In Sweden she would give some concerts before making her way to Berlin, Prague. “Paris by Christmas.” The war was over, but not for us. She stroked my cheek. “You always said I should go to Paris.”
Christmas in Paris. We sat on her bed, holding hands as I fought for my equilibrium, fought for a smile. She gazed into my eyes—I could see the flecks of gold, flecks of green, like a forest floor. “If you ever come west…” she began, but let it trail off. Now she was crying. We both knew I wasn’t coming west. She was going to leave and I would be trapped, my foot caught in the snare of my country. She straightened the collar of my dress. Her hands were big and dry. “You won’t always be here. Look me up. I’m never hard to find.”
“Do me one favor,” I said.
“Just name it,” she said.
My last hope, a message in a bottle thrown into the sea. Into the West. But how to address it, and to whom? I could ask Moura. She was Estonian, but I thought she’d discourage it. If you were trying to contact a White speculator and saboteur, smuggler and traitor, said to be working out of Estonia, how would you go about finding him? Where would you look? She was kind, but first and foremost protective of Gorky. She already didn’t trust the extra measure of peril I represented, I didn’t think she would do anything to advance my cause. Whereas I believed in this woman, Aura Cady Sands, a woman who had renounced her own country in search of freedom. I knew she would do what she could. “Could you get something into the newspaper at Reval for me? The biggest one they have.”
“You know I will. There’s some paper over there in my desk.”
I pushed aside perfumes and knickknacks, dishes with jewelry, and composed my note as she went back to the party. After working a while, I got this:
The river’s so empty nowadays.
All the gray horses are gone.
I try to remember the tango.
But one can’t dance it alone.
Regret is a bell, a secret,
An island carved in the mind.
Brave words once said in a station.
Their chimes never have ceased.
I sat at the desk, looking at the clothes she’d already packed, gowns and day dresses, crammed in every which way. In Paris she would have a maid for such things. In Paris, there would be flowers and hairdressers, rooms with heat and a private bath. I should be ashamed to envy such trivial things. I lived in the most modern country in the world, didn’t I? This broken wreck of a land, this prison, this torment. Clyde Emory was already gone, returned to England to print his analysis of the triumphs of Bolshevism, the Buddhalike wisdom of Vladimir Ilyich. I’d seen him off at the docks. How startling it had been to see a ship there, flying a foreign flag.
You’ll always have a friend in me, Emory had said, and kissed me on the lips. I stood on the wharfside as he carried his suitcase up the plank, and wondered how long always might be.
I came out to the parlor, handed Aura the page. “Put it in the Lost and Found section. Or in Missing Persons.” Or perhaps I was the one who was lost. I was the missing person.
She folded the poem into her bosom. “What if they ask me what it says? Or if there’s no Russian paper?”
“They’ve been Russian for five hundred years,” I said. But she was right. With independence, who knew about national feeling. Kolya didn’t speak German, and neither of us had a scrap of Estonian. Even if they printed it, I imagined there would be rafts of spies sniffing around Reval. Well, good luck to anyone tracing me through Aura. I returned to her room and wrote it out again in French, just in case. It wasn’t half bad.
“It’s the baby’s daddy, isn’t it?” she said from the doorway. “You think he’s in Reval.”
“It’s possible.”
“Want me to stay on, try to find him?”
I embraced her. The woman who had opened her throat and spilled out that gold onto the vast stage of the House of the People. One of the few who had known Iskra. “If he doesn’t contact you, leave a Paris address. He doesn’t speak much English but his French is perfect.”
She gave me a wool dress, books, underwear, a pair of her boots. I put the boots on then and there. They were too big, but, like a heart, better too big than too small.
On the way home, I paused on the Troitsky Bridge, my arms full of undeserved gifts, gazing out at the ruffled mirror of the Neva, watching the gulls skim the empty river. Imagining sails here again, smokestacks. Barges laden with grain. That vanished maritime world. Oh, for a Finnish skiff with a single sail like the ones Uncle Vadim once piloted around the islands with us, even Seryozha and Tulku on board, landing us somewhere for a picnic, a bit of a swim. Papa usually stayed in the city, but one time, he was the one sailing the boat, in shirtsleeves rolled up, his pipe clamped between his teeth. Mama laughing. I leaned on the rail, pressed my face into the bundle of clothes, smelling Aura, and let myself weep.
Gazing west under the blank eye of heaven—how lonely it was. The empty palaces, the silent river, all that was left of Peter’s great dream. Like our lives, crumbling facades with God knows what festering rubbish curled inside. I wanted to sail away with her so badly I could taste it, soar toward that gleaming horizon. Zapad. Beautiful and melancholy, as the end of summer always is in the north. The tides pulled at me, reaching right into my blood. The moon, as faint as chalk, had risen, barely visible in the east. Was this the winter I would go mad for good, locked away in my head, jabbering about monsters and demons? I had a terrible feeling of something unseen on its way, as horses sense a coming storm.
The morning Aura was to leave for Reval, I hurried to the Kronverksky apartment, terrified I’d miss her, carrying a package wrapped in Pravda. I could see the big Lessner motorcar waiting in front of the building, men already loading her trunks onto its roof. By noon she would have crossed over, she’d be on the other side, unreachable. The entire Gorky ménage had come down to see her off with flowers and promises to write. I embraced her and thrust my burden into her hands. “Could you mail this for me, when you get to Sweden?” A manuscript, tied with twine. I’d been translating it myself for the last
five days. I’d written the address on top of the first page, Mr. Clyde Emory, 29 Fitzroy Square. My poems, in English. In case I perished this winter, or went completely mad, something should remain. Something had to.
I stood with the others as the big sedan pulled away. Aura leaned from the window in her gray traveling outfit, gray hat, waving a white handkerchief. I could still see the handkerchief as the car turned the corner and headed across the Troitsky Bridge.
45 On the Embankment
Autumn washed summer away, replacing warmth and dust with rain and the dankness of drains. The worst time of year, even worse than winter, the sky like a weeping wound. For the first time I could see no future. Just dread. Like waking up and finding the windowpanes painted over. It was a world drawn in watered ink and charcoal dust, where shadow people lived shadow lives in the sooty dampness, ate and slept, made their shadow love. I moved in a city under the city, through catacombs invisible to the naked eye.
Zapad. If only I could flee this melancholy place, to where the sun still shone. I imagined Kolya in Reval, sitting in a café, reading my message, Kolya, come—it’s so close…But why would he return? It would never be anything but this, struggle, poverty, and the implacable, leather-clad arm. A jungle of propuski and queues and iron nights. My Skorokhod students grumbled about labor militarization. Henceforth, Trotsky vowed, the workforce would be run like the army. They would shoot deserters, people absent without leave. The dictatorship of the proletariat was rapidly dropping its prepositional phrase. How could one breathe? Where was our revolution, how had we lost it just as we were winning, the end almost in sight?
I could hardly bear to teach, to stand before my students’ trusting eyes and read their little poems—for what? Meaning drained from everything, no matter how hard I tried to stop the flow. It was like sugar dissolving in the rain. Was poetry merely a toy to distract the starving? Everything felt so heavy, I could hardly stand up.
I rose early one morning after a night of grim wakefulness—Anton still in a dead sleep, wedged against the wall. I dressed in the sheepskin in which my father had been murdered, a woolen scarf over my hat, and walked in the rain down to the roiling Neva. I followed the river past the Admiralty and St. Isaac’s, past the yellow mansion on the English Embankment. Children materialized out of the gloom, following me at a distance. Or maybe they weren’t children at all, only ghosts, wet and forsaken. Child ghosts. More huddled on the porch of the Stock Exchange. The Mystery of Liberated Labor.
I stood in the driving rain under a red pillar, by the statues of river gods, the column’s prows overhead full of water. Unbelievable that I’d once climbed this. These days I could barely lift my knees. I leaned against the railing, watching the watery tons arrive. I was so tired.
Once I’d strolled these banks with Genya, and he’d given me Saturn as a wedding ring. But the Cirque Moderne was closed now. No more discussions, no more arguing deep into the night, the excitement of those days. Now it was all gone, everyone leaving, or dead, or transparent with hunger. Ink running down a page. Say goodbye…
Beyond the point of the Strelka, the rivers massively converged in a surge of gray waters. I could barely see the blurry outline of the mansion from here, yellow gray in the rain. I walked down the little circular road right to the water’s edge. The river’s current sucked at me. I felt its desire. I moved along the very point, thinking, What if I just fell in? What if my foot just slipped? How fast would I sink and be carried out to Kronstadt, out to the West? To the West, at last. The relief to stop struggling and give myself over to the power of the tides. I had reached the end of my faith.
The water mesmerized me, liquid ton on ton. Leave this place, this time. Perhaps we returned, perhaps we didn’t. Perhaps I would find the city under the waves. On and on the river came and opened its terrible mouth. I tried to recall what Gorky had said that morning when I told him my shameful story, confessed the awful choice I’d been handed. And he told me why it was important to live. But I couldn’t remember…
God separated the land and the waters but the rain erased the line, and now I couldn’t tell my tears from the rain, the rain from the river. West, with all the great river’s rushing might. It felt inevitable, the pull of the water, the slant of the ground, this was what everything had been leading to from that night we’d read our fortunes in the wax. And here my story would end. It was as if the divine bard had wearied of it. It wasn’t death I wanted, stately and plumed, it was only death’s forgetting. There was nothing I knew that I would not want to unknow. Iskra’s unconscionable death. Father’s body, crumpled in the hall on Shpalernaya Street. Seryozha’s senseless passing. My own mother’s curse.
What had Gorky said? I tried to remember but the river was too loud, water streamed down my face, soaked my scarf, my sheepskin so full of water I would sink without stones. Once I could see the future, but now I saw no way out of a present that would just go on and on.
How brave are you?
The water swirled over the curbing. Just one more step…
The question is, what are you going to do with your own life? Where are your principles?
My father was dead, that was where my principles went. My revolution was dead. My brother was dead, my daughter was dead.
I came closer again, trying the freezing water with my boot’s toe. The sudden shock of the cold and the power of the river forced me to take a step back.
But life was unbearable. I couldn’t stand one more hour of it. How long would it take to drown, a minute or two?
Unbearable?
You can’t live one more hour? A half hour?
But then there would be another, and another after that. And there I’d be, back chained to the rock of existence. I was ready now.
Marina! Someone called my name. Was it the storm, the river? The devils in my head?
If I could only forget. Forget burying my baby. Erase the picture of her on the pavement in Maxim’s arms. If I died, I would never again see an ear wrapped in brown paper. I would not have to know what became of all our beautiful dreams.
If you die, who will remember?
I stepped down into the river. Water immediately filled my boots. The swiftness threatened to pull me out into the current. It was deathly cold. I cried out and struggled back without thinking.
Marina!
Who was calling me? Mother? At this late date? “Mama?”
Reaching across space and time, was she seeing me from wherever she was, as she’d seen me in the forest that night on the way to Alekhovshchina? “She died, Mama. Just like you said she would. Papa’s dead too.”
You must remember.
And I wept, my hand clapped against my mouth. Iskra in her basket, her hands dancing above the edge, moving to her own music. What would happen to Iskra if I took that memory into the Neva with me? And Papa as he’d been when I was small, taking my hand, tying my skates. The way he’d looked that St. Basil’s Eve, standing next to my pile of books?
Perhaps I was brave enough to live another hour. Perhaps I did not need to die. I backed away from the water. Tomorrow was a buoy bell, so quiet, but I could hear it, and I let it guide me away from the river, off the Strelka, onto the Petrograd side.
The maid let me in, her soft wrinkled face a haven, a lighthouse. The hall smelled reassuringly of Gorky, cabbage and cigarettes. The woman helped me shed my wet sheepskin and scarf, my soaked boots, and put me into a pair of oversized felt slippers. The clock in the hall chimed noon. I stared at it as if I’d never seen one before. Everything resonated with significance. The hidden had become visible. Signs were everywhere. The maid, the guardian of the entry, led the way, deep, deep inside to the beating heart of the flat. My teeth chattered violently, I tried to stop them, clamping my jaws together in the effort, but to no avail. I could hear the clatter of the typewriter. The maid knocked, opened the door. “It’s Marina Dmitrievna,” she whispered and backed away.
Inside, Gorky and Moura were companionably at work, a
s they were every day—Gorky at his desk, the inevitable cigarette in its black holder between his fingers, Moura typing at a little side table. Before them lay petitions for imprisoned intelligenty, correspondence with writers all over the world, maybe a new book or play. The room was hot and close, the electric lamps were lit. Water wept down the windowpanes.
“Marina,” he said, standing, reaching out his hands to me, I could tell he was alarmed to see me standing there, teeth chattering, as wet and sordid as a canal rat. His hands, so large around mine, warm. I wept just to see him, as real as a bale of hay, tall and stooped with that snub nose and enormous moustache, the rumpled wool suit. Like seeing land after a shipwreck, a streetlamp on a dark night.
Moura cast me a penetrating look as she handed me a folded blanket draped over the back of a chair. I wrapped it around my shoulders, tried to keep my teeth from breaking. “Please, sit down,” Gorky said. “We were about to take a break.” I caught the glance he exchanged with Moura. Like an old couple—she understood him perfectly. Without saying anything, she stood and stacked her pages, placing them on top of the typewriter. She put a finger on Gorky’s desk. “Don’t forget you have an appointment at Smolny, quarter after one.” Her accented Russian. She always addressed him as vy, the formal way, as my own grandparents once had done. But to her credit she didn’t sneer or frown at my soggy appearance or my interruption of their workday. A small nod and a smile let me know her departure wasn’t from unfriendliness. She closed the door behind her.
“Please, sit down.”
But I could not sit. Still shivering, I went to the window where I could gaze down into the park and the bare treetops, half erased by the rain. It struck me that this was how the world would look just before it drowned. Someday the river would rise and cover the treetops. Shouldn’t we be building an ark? Find animals that had not been eaten and put them on board? Who among us would be righteous enough to be saved? Not I. Gorky, certainly. Blok. Akhmatova. And where was she now? Out there in the rain? Dead? Had she left? Na zapad? Nobody talked about her anymore, except to say she was over, that the personal was out of step with the times. I never saw her at the House of Arts, or the Poets’ Guild. “Whatever happened to Akhmatova? Is she still here?”