Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Gorky glanced up from his writing, laughed softly. “You came here in this storm to ask after Anna Andreevna?” He flicked ash toward his ashtray.

  “You never hear about her. Did she die?”

  “She’s still here,” he said, resting his face on his hand, his green eyes watching me. He saw everything. “Larisa Reisner was over there the other day. They were completely out of food. She brought a bag of rice—which our Akhmatova promptly gave to the neighbors.” Larisa Reisner, a leading Bolshevik, married to the commissar of the Baltic Fleet, ironically called Raskolnikov. For some reason it surprised me that she knew Akhmatova. I thought the poet had refused to have anything to do with the revolution. But perhaps even Akhmatova had her Varvara—though evidently a less vindictive one than mine.

  “She’s not writing anymore. Her new husband doesn’t like her poetry. He’s forbidden it, evidently.”

  A husband forbidding the High Priestess her throne? My Akhmatova would never allow anyone to stop her writing. “She permits that?”

  “Why women put up with men, I have no idea,” he chuckled. “He’s not even attractive, though he’s a forceful personality, let’s say. Shileiko. Translated the Gilgamesh into Russian.” He studied me, smoothing his big moustache. “Our Anna Andreeva is a great poet, but if you ask me she’s a martyr looking for a cross. You’d think there would be enough to choose from, she wouldn’t have to go out and find this particular one.” The skritching of his pen. “At least Gumilev understood her.”

  He loved three things…“He once told me he made her as a poet.”

  Gorky snorted. “What makes you think of Anna Andreeva?”

  Down in the little park across from Gorky’s building, I watched a man alone walking among the bare trees, his hands in his pockets. I wished he had a dog. A black dog, who could run around sniffing. He looked so terribly alone. “It makes you think of her poem, ‘The dark road twisted / the rain was drizzling / someone asked / to walk with me a little way.’” The weight of time seemed so heavy, so thick with the dead. “I have this awful feeling that something terrible’s about to happen. It’s like that all the time.” I was shaking again, my teeth clattering like a child’s tin windup toy. And what exactly did I think Gorky could do about it? But here I was laying my burdens on his shoulders like everybody else did. When he was just a writer. Just a friend.

  He put his pen down and came away from the desk, put his arm around my shoulder, the plaid blanket wrapped about me. “Sit down for a moment.” He led me to the old leather armchair in the corner. A miracle, nobody had yet cut it up for shoes. He settled me there, pulled Moura’s stenographer’s chair out from her little table and sat down before me, knee to knee, his dear pockmarked face, his clear eyes. “Tell me, what are you afraid of, Marina? Hasn’t the worst already happened?”

  “Maybe being the one left behind is worse. I was standing on the Strelka just now, looking down into the water. I just wanted to slip and fall in.”

  He sighed, crossed his long legs, bumping my knees. “I once tried to shoot myself, did you know that? When I was nineteen. I’d been denied admission to university. And my grandmother had died. The one who raised me, the only one who’d been good to me. Of course, I botched it, shot myself in the lung. The despair you’re feeling is not unfamiliar to me.”

  Gorky had felt this. I should not have been surprised. He’d been through more in his long life than any ten men. He had written an entire book just about his childhood. “Is it ever going to get any better?” I asked through my chattering teeth. “I can’t see the future anymore. I’m afraid that it’s just going to be like this from now on, only worse.”

  “You can see the future?” he joked.

  “Once I could.” I wiped at my tears.

  “You mean your own future?” He wasn’t joking anymore. “Or ours?”

  “Both,” I whispered. I didn’t dare say it out loud. I could feel the awful panic rising, just speaking of it. “What if this is all for nothing? What if we’re all riding in the dark, toward a cliff?”

  “You’re not crazy to be afraid,” he said. “Anybody in his right mind would be.”

  I was shocked. Gorky, who’d been a Bolshevik since the beginning. Gorky, who basically funded the party in the early days on the sales of his work. Yet, he’d never been one to put his head in the sand. I’d read his stories—he told the bitter truth. Gorky—the name he’d chosen for himself—meant bitter. “You thought this would be easy?” he said. “That revolution would be something that happened, like a great earthquake, or a lightning storm? And then the clouds would clear and the sun would come out?” He patted his pockets, looking for something. “And now you see what it is. A dangerous beast. An opportunistic leadership riding the vengeance of the underclass—disorganized, dangerously ideological.”

  How could he be so supportive of the revolution if he felt that way?

  He touched my blanket-clad arm. “Have I shocked you?”

  “But you’re a Bolshevik…”

  “I’m a writer first. We must see things clearly, and never lie to ourselves about what we see.”

  I thought so too. I’d thought so since Grivtsova Alley.

  He leaned over his desk to extract a fresh handkerchief from the drawer, handed it to me. He plucked his smoldering cigarette from the ashtray. “Think of the work you’re doing. You’re teaching at the shoe factory, aren’t you?”

  I wiped my face with the clean cloth. The heat of the room was causing my dress to steam, but my teeth stopped chattering so badly.

  He leaned forward, speaking calmingly, the way you talked to a panicked dog. “It’s mostly women, isn’t it? Can you picture your students?”

  It wasn’t hard to do. Young women’s faces already lined, teeth falling out—they covered their mouths with their hands when they laughed. Older women, their nails split from the work. Their swollen ankles. I thought of the way they shuffled into my class after work—like cabmen covered with snow, shaking themselves off and coming to life over food and drink.

  “Imagine them five years ago. In the same factory.” Smoke wreathed his head, wove its patterns into the lamp’s light. Water beaded on the windows, trickled down like tears. “Imagine going in and telling them that in the year 1920, they’d be studying poetry. That they’d have a workers’ committee, a voice in the shoe factory. That there would be no more owner, no landlord, no tsar.” He rose and opened the fortochka, gazing out. “Imagine telling them that in five years they’d have won themselves domestic rights. Birth control. Free housing. That they’d be taken seriously by the courts, and their children could attend university. What do you think they would have told you?”

  “That I was dreaming.” Even now I could see their pride, a little bewilderment even, that all this had changed in so short a time.

  “It’s easy to forget that when the bread runs out. When there’s no firewood and they forbid you to cut it yourself.” He sat back down into his worn desk chair, leaned back, launching into a coughing fit. Rumor had it that he had tuberculosis, but it was that damaged lung. “The revolution’s not an event, Marina. It’s a creature. A young, proud boy, say, who fights with everyone, breaking the windows, shoving his father, realizing his strength. He thinks he knows everything. But he knows nothing, and it’s up to us—me and you, the artists, the scholars—to humanize him before he breaks up the house. So something good can come of all that raw energy.”

  “You think poetry can do that?”

  He smiled. “Think about your women at the shoe factory. Like flowers, drinking you in. The mere fact of you is some kind of proof to them.”

  I thought of the way one of my women might close a book and give the cover an affectionate pat—my gesture, my father’s gesture when he had finished reading. And the way they laughed and clapped their hands when someone wrote a good line, an apt metaphor. I had touched their lives. I, me, this nothing.

  “For them, you are the future.” He leaned forward, his cigarette in it
s black holder sending up a wending plume of smoke. “You remind them that there will be a time when they’ll write poetry and speak proper Russian and notice the color of the sky. We need that more than bread now. You’re the emissary from the future.”

  The plants on the windowsill peered out from the steamy panes, but there would be little light for them today. I unwrapped my blanket, finally warm enough.

  “Rousseau once said, ‘Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.’” He flicked his ashes toward the ashtray, a dented brass bowl with a monkey on the rim. “I’m convinced it’s just the opposite. I think natural man is a terrified brute.” He took another draw and crushed it out. “Have you ever seen a pogrom, Marina?”

  I had not but had heard plenty about its terrors from Matvei on the Red October.

  “I saw one in Nizhny when I was a young man, and it’s something you never forget. It’s why art is my religion. Science. Knowledge. I have no illusions about the common man, because I am the common man and it’s repulsive what he’s capable of. I want him to get a glimpse of what it would be like to be fully human. What you do with those shoe factory women, that’s the most important thing. We can’t have you trying to fall into the Neva.”

  “But there’s got to be more than just being useful,” I said. “What becomes of us—you and me—our art? They keep saying Akhmatova’s dead, with her mourning and her lovers. We’re all supposed to write about drumbeats and bayonets now, Onward brothers! I don’t mind being useful, but is that the poet’s only job?” The debate had raged from the Krestovsky apartment in 1918 to the halls of the House of Arts and all its detractors. The question of whether the personal had any place in a revolution.

  “Mourning and lovers are as important as bayonets,” Gorky said. “More so, because they’re human and universal. We don’t need more bayonets. Getting people to listen, to think, to feel something, that’s where the work is. I’ll tell you something. The poetry of Anna Andreevna will never disappear. Whatever trash Mayakovsky and your husband, forgive me for saying so, espouse, all of their drumbeats will not supplant one tear, the petal of one Akhmatovian rose.” He screwed another cigarette into the black holder and lit it with a match—skritch—from the match stand, coughed.

  As he spoke, I felt the panic ebbing. Maybe he was right. Maybe I still had a place in the world, a reason for being. I wished I’d known him in the months after Iskra died. He had somehow given me a moment of sanity, or at least shared his with me, like sharing a warm coat on a cold night.

  “Don’t lose heart, Marina Dmitrievna. If you lose heart, all is lost. We don’t need any more revolutionaries, we’ve had our revolution. Now we need human beings. The river will wait. It will always be there if you change your mind.”

  I wanted to stay here forever, but I could hear lunch being prepared, and I couldn’t very well lie under Gorky’s desk like a dog and have him feed me by hand like Ukashin did his pets. I had to preserve this feeling of carrying something essential, and learn it like a poem, condensed and easily memorized, to recite in the dead of night when the ghosts came thick and fast.

  I forced myself to rise. My hands no longer trembled, my clothes were drying. I was ready to face the rain and the city, bearing this precious gift like a basket of eggs. “Thank you.” I shook his big hand.

  “And be careful on the embankments,” he said.

  46 The Argonaut

  It took the great Neva a long time to put itself to sleep. I stayed off its wide bridges and away from its icy embankments, kept to the interior streets and peaceful canals hardening, filling with the white breath of winter. I wrote, taught my dwindling classes, and no longer ran from the phantoms sidling after me along the streets, lingering in doorways of broken facades, moving past empty windows. The ghosts were more at home in the city than the living—why shouldn’t they walk as freely? I no longer startled if something moved in the corner of my eye with the liquid motion of a cat. Perhaps it wasn’t madness but simple starvation. If it weren’t for the bread my students gave me, I wouldn’t have the strength to walk as far as the bakery to redeem my own ration cards. Up ahead on the Moika Embankment, I spied a little girl, about four, in a hand-knitted cap and green coat. Not in line but obviously with someone—she couldn’t be alone, could she? That green coat…Hadn’t I had a coat like that? She gazed at me directly, her green eyes…

  Iskra!

  But then a woman got in the way, and when she’d passed, the girl had vanished.

  People walked past me on the pavement as if I were a lamppost. Just another hungry citizen, holding her pitiful quarter pound of bread, gazing at nothing. The ghosts were on parade. I’d seen Avdokia this week, even spied Arkady ducking into the loggia at Gostinny Dvor. It made a certain sense, the dead were the permanent residents. The empty houses gawped with their busted eyes. Perhaps they would come to life once this endless war was over, their windows reglazed, their floors rebuilt, their plumbing restored to working order. I liked to picture that. Furniture carried in, the rugs we’d cut into shoes replaced. On the other hand, perhaps the city would empty out completely and sail on in legend, into the mist, leaving behind only the swamp from which it came.

  My Red Fleet escort flotilla had thinned somewhat over the autumn, the men drifting off in search of likelier objects for romance. There was no end of available women in the hungry city. But one sailor stood out among the others. A bit of a troublemaker, blond and wiry, in his early twenties. I’d dubbed him the Argonaut. Everything about him spoke of warmer climes and white sails. At rest, his face wore a quizzical look, his sandy eyebrows curling over his narrow blue-green Aegean eyes in a permanent squint, but he broke into a quick smile if anything interesting was going on, flashing his good white teeth. As he did now, when I asked him to walk me home.

  “You have a home?” he teased. “I thought you slept on the wing, like a gull.”

  We walked from the Pryazhka wharf past spooky, deserted New Holland—Peter the Great’s brick shipyards. I took his arm. I could feel his muscles through his heavy coat. Who could blame me for craving the touch of the living? He was so animated and lively in his wool coat and sailor’s cap. I was used to the writers’ melancholia. His sailor’s good cheer and physical ease were a balm. His blond cropped hair was coarse and dense—I wondered if it would curl if it were longer. His name was Pasha Kislov.

  I could well imagine him on the Argo, having just killed the oxen of the sun…Pasha wouldn’t have cared which gods he’d offended. Pashol, the men called him. I’d accidentally given him that nickname. It meant He went. I’d come back from a break one night and noticed his empty chair, asked the men where he’d gone. Pashol, they’d said, and then realized how funny they’d been, after which he was baptized.

  We meandered along, talking lightly about rations, poets, conditions in the city. I talked about the knitting artel, and the telephone exchange. He grabbed the metalwork of a lamppost and pulled himself up, like a boy showing off. He jumped onto one of the granite posts on the Moika Embankment, and posed like a cupid, and then flipped himself into the air, landing on his feet, making me laugh. Why hadn’t we met long ago, when I still had that kind of energy? I would have walked atop the balustrade and performed ronds de jambe, pirouettes.

  Standing before the door of the House of Arts, with its fancy plasterwork and fanlight, he grew suddenly shy. His eyes were a question mark. What am I doing here? Do you really want me? This was unexpected. He was normally the brashest one of an entitled lot, full of confidence in his role in the national destiny. For my part, I didn’t know what the others would think of me bringing a sailor home. But I knew enough about the world to know that such things were best done with elegant confidence.

  There were a few stares as we moved through the gallery, past buzzing participants leaving Chukovsky’s translation studio. I met no one’s eye, but looked past them, as normal as could be. And who wouldn’t stare, seeing the wiry beauty of my Argonaut? Surely not
Inna Gants, whom we met coming down the stairs from Anton’s floor. She practically missed her step. Alla Tvorcheskaya, a painter on my hall, looked at him carefully from boots to cap. Pasha was touchingly intimidated. He tucked himself behind me, as if my starveling self in sheepskin coat and fox hat could conceal the pride of the Red Navy.

  Seeing the decaying halls through his eyes lent them a glamour I’d forgotten—the mystery of all those doors, the brotherhood of literature—though the double line of close-set rooms must have seemed very familiar, like a third-class ocean liner. My room, narrow and tall, with its touches of ornate plasterwork at the ceiling, my cobbled-together bourgeoika, the nudes on the walls, a red scarf on a hook. It all must’ve seemed very strange to a military man. Feminine. He picked up my hairbrush, he touched my books. I started a fire, feeding the stove as one fed a sick child, trying to tempt it.

  “And you all live here together?” he asked. “Gumilev? And Blok?” He’d taken off his cap but he couldn’t quite figure out what to do with the rest of himself.

  “Blok lives near your club. But Gumilev lives upstairs, in the Eliseevs’ personal bathroom. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

  “He lives in a bathroom?”

  “With his wife, of course.”

  He’d assumed we lived in monarchial splendor. I hated to disabuse him of the notion. But our splendor lay not in the lavishness of our surroundings but in the company we kept.