Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  I was in the clouds, standing with bearded Anton and round-faced Nikolai Chukovsky, the translator’s son, bravely dressed in lederhosen in the unheated ballroom, and Valentina Khodasevich as a playing-card queen, as they discussed the season’s offerings, Anton’s ideas for the Squared Circle, when we were joined by a slight, intense man of about thirty, dark haired, with a high forehead and deep, clever dark eyes. It was the poet Osip Mandelstam. He’d just moved to the House of Arts. And the weather changed in our little group, a slight realignment of atoms, like air before a lightning storm. How strange it must be to have people know so much about you, while you know nothing of them. To have this effect on people everywhere you go. Of course I’d read his collection, Stone. I was dying to talk to him about it. I also knew he’d been Tsvetaeva’s lover before the revolution, and tried not to scrutinize him. He wore an open shirt and a jabot made of a napkin under a burgundy bathrobe that looked like he’d borrowed it from Gumilev—who else at the House of Arts would own such a thing? “And who are you supposed to be?” I asked. Flirting—yes, I was.

  “I was trying for Schiller,” he said, striking a pose. He recited, “Lebe mit deinem Jahrhundert…” The German sounded like music from his lips. I could see Anton roll his one visible eye.

  “Live with your century,” I said, “but don’t be its…something…” German was my worst language, but I remembered this much from German class.

  “Live with your century, but don’t be its creature,” he said. “Give your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise.” And he was taking Schiller’s advice to heart, this little man with his curling hair and elfin ears and receding hairline, who looked nothing like Schiller and yet was his very incarnation. Mandelstam, who had written, Brothers, let us celebrate liberty’s twilight, / The great and gloomy year…

  “Dance?” he asked, offering me his hand. I would not look at Anton as I let him lead me away but caught a glimpse of my self-mortifying lover burning holes in the back of Mandelstam’s precious head. This was the man about whom Tsvetaeva had said, Where does this tenderness come from? / And what shall I do with it, young / sly singer, just passing by? / Your lashes are—longer than anyone’s.

  And they were.

  We stepped out into a polka, a brisk gallop. “I’ve seen you before,” I said over the music. “But you wouldn’t remember.”

  “I remember everything,” he said. His eyes were as bright as a blackbird’s.

  “It was in 1915, at the Stray Dog Café. You were with Akhmatova and Kuzmin.”

  He laughed, scrutinized me again. Such a merry soul, a surprise after reading his poetry. He was shorter than I but sure of himself, not in an arrogant way but simply knowing what he knew, knowing his value. I liked the way he led me, securely, his steps as nimble as his mind. “And where were you, in your pram?”

  “With my brother and my girlfriends…We hid behind the coats. I was trying to get a look at Akhmatova.”

  “The cult of Anna the Great.” He took me galloping, my cottony braids whirling about my shoulders. “Come to think of it, I do remember something like that. Schoolgirls. But I don’t remember the plaits.” He nodded toward the yellow yarn skeins attached to my crown.

  “You don’t remember any such thing.” Flirting with him quite baldly. As we whirled, I could feel Anton’s one-eyed glare, accusing me, tugging at me. God, what did he want me to do, join a nunnery? I had told him who I was. This was my life, and I would do as I pleased. Pushkin said that a poet’s freedom was accountable to no man.

  “I remember you quite well. Big dark eyes under a fringe of chestnut red. Like the future, peering out from the coats of the past. You had a tall friend, a brunette, and a plump blonde. And a beautiful boy who spent the whole time drawing.”

  “My brother Seryozha.”

  Mandelstam smiled, triumphant. “And a very young Gennady Kuriakin, dying for a chance to impress us.”

  I was a little afraid of him. He wasn’t just brilliant, he was uncanny. “Do you know him?” I asked warily.

  “We’ve met a few times. The golden mouthpiece of the Left. I believe he’s nipping at Mayakovsky’s heels. He should be careful. He’s a decent poet, but someone should tell him, once you’ve sold your soul to the devil, he never lets you have it back.”

  The maniacal orchestra sped up by degrees, the wheezing accordion, the sinister oboe. “By the way, I appreciated your poem, ‘The Trees at Kambarka.’ Always a relief to hear a single voice and not a hundred and fifty million. I don’t even want to hear fifty, speaking quietly.” He danced me past Anton, an unkind thing to do, before he swept me away again. “So you’re with Chernikov. How did that happen?” The glance he gave me was a mixture of amusement and puzzlement. “He’s staring at us right now. Hoping I’ll trip over my own feet.”

  “We lived together for a while in 1917. The Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now. Genya Kuriakin, and Anton and me. Zina Ostrovskaya, Gigo Gelashvili, some others.” Should I tell him about my husband? Some mischief was afoot tonight. I bit my tongue.

  “Sounds like fun,” he said. “Look, there’s Gumilev.” He turned me so I could see. “Some people don’t even try to live in this century.”

  It beat all the rest. Gumilev made his grand entrance in a tuxedo he’d somehow managed to preserve, and snow-white linen, as if it were 1910. I could only imagine the hours of labor it must have taken him to wash and iron that shirt, clean and mend and press the formal suit. And on his arm came one of his students in a bare-shouldered gown of blue satin that someone must have lent her. Given that the only heat in the ballroom was in our minds, it was a triumph of will.

  The polka ended, the orchestra took a break. Mandelstam kissed my hand—not at all properly, on the knuckles. And left me to join some friends. “Don’t leave without me,” he said over his shoulder. “And don’t hide behind the coats.”

  I chatted with Sasha and Dunya, dressed in elaborate papier-mâché masks, he a cubo-futurist Janus, she the moon in its phases. We were joined by others from the Squared Circle—Oksana and Petya, Nikita and Arseny. I didn’t listen very hard, my heart still romping from my dance with Osip Emilevich. Anton joined us a few minutes later, scowling, refusing to look at me. He was mounting a boycott, smoking fiendishly, and I could smell the scorched hair of his fake moustache. “I hate these things,” he snarled. “Yackety yack. As if music drained the human mind of the least function.” He drank off his tea in a gulp. “What’s the point of dancing, I ask you? This strange pointless movement, using up valuable calories and turning sensible people into idiots. I wonder how it came into being. Maybe someone stepped on a coal.”

  When the musicians returned from their break, they struck up a tango. It cut me. The tango was Kolya, the music of that first night, St. Basil’s Eve…and the song of that lost afternoon on the Catherine Canal. The olive and gold apartment, my hairpins falling, snowflakes twirling above the ice on the canal like little fish in a reef. I didn’t want to dance it with anyone else. I wandered away to stand by myself at a frozen window, where I scratched a circle with my thumbnail. The music went on and on. God, would they never stop? Kolya, where are you? Loving somebody else. Making love. Oh, this was crazy—hadn’t I just danced with Osip Mandelstam? And Blok and Bely? Would he always be there, the music in the very back of my mind? “Mi Noche Triste”?

  Mandelstam found me there, my forehead to the glass. He’d brought me some tea, and I shoved Kolya back into the box where he lived, down deep in the waters of my silent self, and turned to the pleasure of the moment, talking to the poet with the long eyelashes. We spoke about Akhmatova, who he said was writing again, and Tsvetaeva…I had to ask very gingerly, I didn’t know him well, didn’t know how he would react if I mentioned her, I only knew the poems in which they’d said their farewells. “Do you see her anymore?”

  “No,” he said. “Not for a long time.” He dusted something off my face, showed it to me. An eyelash on the tip of his finger. I made a wish,
the one I always made—inspiration. And blew it away.

  We talked about Clyde Emory, about whom Osip was in agreement with Anton—that mediocrity—talked about the poet H.D., and her Greek verses so much like ones Osip Emilevich would write if he were a woman. We both liked her. And this new writer Eliot whose book Emory had sent along with the dozen tins of sardines in oil and ten of sweetened condensed milk that I’d finally collected from Moura. I’d stuffed myself on them both.

  Mandelstam was dying to see the Eliot, and I was dying to see more of Mandelstam. So we slipped away from the party together.

  Did I think of Anton? Yes, I did, but Mandelstam stirred me in a way not even Pasha had. He made me feel alive, not just as a woman but as a poet. Someone like him could see you entire. I felt exciting and smart and real. His bright eyes, his lashes longer than anyone’s. I was dying to ask more about that other Marina. What was it like to enter a relationship with someone so incandescent? Why did you abandon her after such an affair?

  “She feeds you to her fire,” he said. “She prefers to burn on the page. I didn’t wait until she’d eaten me.”

  We sat on my sagging bed and I showed him Prufrock and Other Observations by T. S. Eliot. He kicked off his shoes and lay down, his hands folded on his chest under the ruffled jabot. “Read it to me,” he said, and closed his eyes. I began to read the first poem to him, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” doing my best with the Italian epigraph, which, to my astonishment, Osip Emilevich recited without even looking. “It’s Dante. The Comedy. Don’t be so impressed, or we won’t be able to be friends.”

  I read the poem through, slowly, finding the cadence of the English, and Mandelstam listened with his eyelids fluttering, his long lashes against his cheeks. When I got to the end—wake us, and we drown—I let the sound drift and fade. “Read it again,” he said.

  Some of the stanzas he now recited along with me. His English pronunciation better than mine. He was already memorizing it.

  I read it two more times, until it had settled into our bones. Then I wanted to make love. “Let us go, then, you and I,” I said, removing my crown and braids.

  Osip Emilevich had had innumerable women, and I was sure every one of them found him as delightful as I. He was playful and passionate, understood the music of love. I hadn’t had a lover like that since Kolya. And I had the strangest sensation I was also Tsvetaeva, as if I kissed him with her lips, held him with her arms.

  Afterward, we lay together in my narrow bed and he asked if I would recite some of my own poems. He liked the new one about blackbirds—it had become much better. I’d never forgive Anton for being such a shit about it. Osip liked them all, had some interesting critiques. He recited portions of a new poem of his for me: “Who can know this word called separation / What kind of parting the coming days mean…” Sometime during the recitation, I heard footsteps in the hall, but no knock on the door, only the sound of their retreat. I felt a pang of guilt, but I was tired of guilt. I would never have another night like this. Whatever happened in life, this would be mine forever.

  The day the slanderous poem appeared in Krasnaya Gazeta, Gorky was still in Moscow. A nasty little ditty penned by an unnamed poet, Browning No. 215,745—an obvious reference to 150 Million. It was called “The Masquerade on the Garbage Dump.” A little joke. Pomoika, the garbage dump, was also po Moike, along the Moika—a reference to the location of the House of Arts.

  House of high art, fat with rations,

  Dinner jackets adorned with asters, amazing pants…

  And so he characterized our ragged masque. Whoever the poet was, he had clearly waited until Gorky was gone, retaliating for that Smerdyakov remark Gorky had made about the ultra-Left poets. Once again, we were cast as the last sanctuary of the bourgeoisie, holding our fancy soiree at the expense of the masses, as if we were Marie Antoinette’s courtiers. Just because some of us had clean hair. We were hardly well fed—even the slandering poet had cast us as dining on rations instead of market beef. Any commissar’s girlfriend or Soviet young lady ate better than we did. Our ball was one of any number of amateur theatricals occurring all over the city—though the people who read Krasnaya Gazeta would hardly be expected to know that. Who could have penned this? Who would have it out for us like that? The poets analyzed the work, trying to detect the Judas. The poem was a little too good. It had to be one of the Proletcultists, perhaps even Mayakovsky himself.

  Anton was as worried as anyone. Though he had little guilt in the fiddling-while-Rome-burned category, he knew the charge went deeper. As a formalist—someone who valued form above content—his glass house was more exposed than most. To his credit, he never once mentioned my night with Mandelstam, or how he had suffered. He felt such shame about his love for me, such anguish that he needed something from another person, and had it and yet not. He hated and loved me both. And the more he loved, the more he hated. The closer he got to what he wanted, the more sharply he felt what he could never have.

  Part IV

  The Kronstadt Revolt

  (February–March 1921)

  50 Soviets Without Communists

  Like a patient having endured a long siege of illness, growing ever weaker, Petrograd was finally dying. It was undeniable. Its death was not surprising, but no less terrible for its prolongation. The factories closed—those giants that had made it through the war, the ones we’d thought were ironclad—Dinamo, Putilov, Ericsson. Gone. Their workers—stranded—struck. The misery in the city had never been so bad. Our rations were cut by a third again, and we poets at the House of Arts existed on the lowest rung, hanging on to our right to a scholar’s pittance by our fingernails. I prayed my classes wouldn’t be cancelled as so many had been—the little donations my students made, an extra chunk of bread or small piece of leathery fish, made the difference between producing new poems or just staring at words moving around on a piece of paper as my stomach digested itself. At the House of Arts, our oldsters stayed in bed all day, living on thin soup and hot water. I saw an elderly woman go mad in front of an abandoned butcher shop on Sadovaya Street. A small crowd gathered to watch her try to claw the pictures of sausages off the shutters, her mouth up against the wood.

  I tried to pry her away—“Babushka, please, let it alone”—but she fought me off. “I want that sausage. Don’t you take it from me!” Some of the onlookers jeered, as stupid as oxen, while others squinted with pity, knowing we were all just a few missed scraps of food short of the same condition. We would all be poets eventually, and try to eat the symbol for the thing itself. The distinction between reality and poetry was already terrifyingly blurred, as when the anonymous Browning No. 215,745 mistook our pitiful masquerade for an embassy ball. What a fever dream. Gumilev had captured the unreal feeling of the times perfectly in his poem “The Lost Tram.”

  I was walking down an unfamiliar street

  And suddenly I heard the caw of crows,

  And distant thunder, and a ringing lute;

  A tram flew by before my eyes.

  Just how I ran onto its running board

  remains a mystery.

  The tail it trailed, even in daylight,

  was firebird-fiery.

  Anything could happen now, clocks might talk, trams leap their rails and whirl off to the Neva or the Nile or the land of the dead. We were all edging closer to the cliff’s precipice.

  A sign…It announces in blood-swollen letters:

  “Greengrocer.” I know that instead

  of cabbage heads, swedes, and rutabagas

  They sell the heads of the dead.

  The executioner, with a face like an udder,

  red-shirted, stout as an ox,

  has chopped off my head…

  As hunger rippled through our vision of the city, it grew as weird and distorted as any poem, insubstantial, full of grotesquerie. My hands shook, my legs wobbled. The cold was especially piercing as I trudged through the gloom to my class at Skorokhod, hoping that the women would stil
l be there, that the factory wouldn’t have vanished and in its place, a mountain of imaginary sausages or four-headed hedgehogs singing “Fais Dodo, Colin.” Was this the future? Had we arrived? It was more a lunatic asylum where the keepers had simply abandoned the patients to their fate. I slogged through the uncleared snow past the deserted buildings, the frost furring their facades. The war had ended, Kolchak had fallen, Denikin was gone, Wrangel had sailed off to Paris. All our enemies melted away. Even the blockade had lifted. But the last six years had broken the back of the Future. We were futurists and yet there wasn’t a scrap of future left, not even its bones. We’d eaten them all. What was left—today. This hour, the next meal, the condition of our boots and our coats, the price of oil, the scarcity of firewood. Surrounded by forests, we were tearing up the dead houses with our bare hands.

  Every week the House lost another irreplaceable writer to starvation. Each death seemed like one more door to the future slamming shut, the key turning in the lock. Why are writers and scholars more important than any working man? I could hear Varvara say. But to see these ancients fall—what they knew, what they were, could never be recovered, like giant trees that would never grow to that size again. The Bolsheviks couldn’t plaster that over with anonymous Browning poems and Proletcult. Who could create a Blok out of this poverty? In these poets and writers were the seeds—a whole world could be sown anew from their depth of culture, just as Gorky envisioned. Their deaths were the deaths of worlds. Maria Andreeva was taking our Russian art treasures to sell off in the West, but what about our real treasures, starving under their blankets at the House of Arts, just trying to make it through until spring? I couldn’t help thinking of the package of tinned sardines and condensed milk that blessed Clyde Emory had sent from England at Christmastime. That sweet, thick ambrosia, the salty, oily sardines. I gave a can of milk to each of my elderly neighbors, and two to Chukovsky for his children. The tears in his round dark eyes…The rest we drank ourselves, me and Anton and the Squared Circle. I still dreamed of punching a hole in the lid of a can with a nail and drinking that heady, thick sweetness, gulp after gulp. I’d had a hard time stopping, though I knew it would make me sick, which it did. But so glorious. Someday I imagined bathing in condensed milk.