Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  My heart was leaping around in my chest. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. “Why is it so smoky in here?” I said. The bourgeoika, as usual, was leaking. I pretended that was why I’d come, and picked my way through the people, hardly noticing where I was or who was there, what I was doing. Genya, Anton, and Mandelstam in one room—like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.

  “Marina!” Genya shouted. “Are you real? What are you doing with this nest of reprobates?”

  I struggled for breath. “I live here. Didn’t you know?”

  “No one told me.”

  We both turned to Anton, sitting on a box next to Shklovsky, his lap full of papers, trying not to catch our eyes. His face was white with guilt. He hadn’t told Genya anything, all these months? Not about my arrival at the House, our love affair, none of it? People were staring. Our fellow members of the House of Arts always had a nose for a good drama brewing, a story that might be shared for days, or years.

  “Please. Not now,” I said, under my breath. “Finish your story. We’ll talk later.” I would not cry in front of these people, make a scene. I was already a two-headed calf here. “Please.”

  He gave me a wounded look and turned to Anton, who was busying himself stacking pages—sweating and pale, his expression like a cornered fugitive’s. Had he been betting I wouldn’t come see him tonight? That I was too wrapped up with my sailor’s fate to venture out of my room? Or perhaps Genya’s visit had been a surprise to him as well.

  “Tell us about Moscow,” I said to Genya as I squatted by the stove, peeling off bits of kindling with my pocketknife. “You look good. It suits you.”

  But right now, Genya looked more like a man riding in a cart that had just overturned, leaving him sitting in the road among the rutabagas and cabbages. I opened the door of the belching bourgeoika and started tending to its needs—like old times—while Anton pretended to read the manuscript. I could tell he wasn’t even seeing the pages, his cigarette clamped between his lips. How long did he think he could hide our affair? Pretend he didn’t see me every day, read my verse, make love with me on that very bed?

  I poked at the fire. True to form, Anton had thrown an account book in there without wadding it up. We’d found a whole cache of them behind a wall at the far end of the Monkey House. Everyone was writing on them, burning them, wiping themselves—it was quite a treasure trove. I plucked out what I could and began twisting sheets into burnable form, returning them to their little queen, coaxing the flames.

  “Mayakovsky was here. He read 150 Million,” Tereshenko told Genya. “What a piece of pompous shit.” Seeing if he could start a fight. He envied Genya, with three collections behind him now, and his boxer’s aggressiveness tended to surface at times like this. “Lenin said it was posturing twaddle.”

  “Politicians aren’t the best judges of poetry,” Genya said, standing up, walking to the bed, squeezing himself between Sasha and Dunya, putting his arms around them. “I wouldn’t want Comrade Lenin picking out a girl for me either.” Everyone laughed. What was Genya doing here in the first place? He didn’t even know about Iskra. That she had been born. That she had died.

  “You wouldn’t trust Vladimir Ilyich to pick out a nice girl for you?” teased Inna Gants, perching on the edge of the desk, flirting. She was fifty if she was a day, but she knew an attractive man when she saw one.

  My husband flexed his eyebrows in a filmic pantomime of surprise. “Yes, I told him, ‘Ilyich, you run the country and let me take care of the poetry. And my girl.’” He glanced at me again.

  My lover became very interested in sharpening his pencil with his little penknife.

  “He’s actually said as much. He doesn’t like futurism, cubism, rayonism, zaum, or anything that doesn’t have a doily and a vase on it, but thinks the artists should be in charge of the art, no matter his opinion.”

  I finished with the stove, brushed my hands on my black stockings, and stood.

  “The leadership looks at all modern art the same way,” said Shklovsky, balanced precariously on a three-legged stool. “Exactly the way a horse looks at a piece of sculpture. As something to scratch itself on.” I wondered if he had any idea of the forest fire that was roaring between his two favorite poets, whether he cared. Thank God for theorists. “Or like a housewife—‘Where’s the handle? Which end sweeps?’”

  Sasha wiped his face in his hand. As a founding member of Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now, he had been there since I first appeared that horrible night my father had put me out. He and Dunya understood exactly the awfulness of the situation unfolding before them, and did their best to keep the conversational balloon afloat. “I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind designing brooms,” Sasha jumped in. “Popova’s designing textiles, even china. It’s all culture in the end, isn’t it?”

  “Or the end of culture,” Mandelstam quipped. His brown eyes taking in our details, sorting. I couldn’t look at him, he’d read me like a theater’s marquee.

  Dunya leaned forward across Genya. “I can’t wait to see your broom, Sashenka. A cubo-futurist sweeping machine.” I wondered if Genya recognized her as Mina’s little sister. She’d been just a girl in the days of the Poverty Artel.

  “You should give us a poem,” said Inna Gants. “From the Red October. It sounded thrilling.” Did I note a slight edge of sarcasm?

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll hear plenty,” Genya said.

  “Chernikov read one when Mayakovsky was here,” she persevered, smelling blood in the water.

  I tried to escape. But as I passed, Genya caught my arm. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since summer,” I said, trying for a noncommittal voice. Anton stacked the pages one more time and abandoned his place by Shklovsky. “What do you think of Petrograd these days? Have we changed much?” Nonchalantly.

  “I don’t know yet. I just got in,” he said. “I’ve had meetings all morning at ROSTA.” The Soviet news agency. “This afternoon, we were up at IZO.” All the avant-gardists collected there, ever looking for an opportunity to undermine the House of Arts, questioning our revolutionary credentials, itching to get control of all the arts institutions, tear down the museums. Shklovsky was part of that group, Sasha worked in their studios with the wonderful artist Petrov-Vodkin. How I wished artists could stop dividing into combatants—couldn’t we have Petrov-Vodkin and Dobuzhinsky? Couldn’t we have Genya and Mandelstam? How we artists loved to define ourselves in opposition to others, separate into camps.

  “And how do they find us at IZO?” Inna Gants asked. “Are we hopeless creaky antiques, becalmed in the wake of the great modernist ship?”

  Genya began talking about Petrograd and relations with Narkompros, but he didn’t take his eyes off me. I couldn’t very well leave now. I found a place to lean against the wall and listened to them talk about the rejection of narrative poetry in Moscow circles, the death of the ballad. I thought of his poem to me as I held my newborn baby, “Funeral for Myself on the Tracks at Kambarka.” Who would have dreamed / I would / drop / my own heart / from the gallows / pull the rope myself.

  Anton was fiddling at his desk. He wouldn’t look at either of us. His world was crashing in. Now Genya knew he’d been lying all this time, though my husband still had no idea why. How would Genya react if he knew we were lovers? Had Anton been thinking that if his beloved Genya just stayed in Moscow he could have us both? As long as we didn’t meet. I went to the desk, leaned over to him. “I think that pencil’s sharp enough.” I picked up some of the pages he was pretending to sort. A new manuscript from Gennady Kuriakin.

  Anton blew on the pencil, now sharp enough for surgery, tested the point with his thumb. Was he going to jab it into his jugular? Death by graphite? “I didn’t know he was coming until yesterday, I swear,” he whispered. “It was Shklovsky’s idea. I tried to talk him out of it. The curfew…I said that he’d have to sleep on the floor instead of on a swan at the Astoria, but he insisted on coming. Said
he wanted to see Gumilev in his dinner jacket.”

  But Gumilev had been making himself scarce since the Kronstadt “situation” broke loose. Maybe he’d gone off to wherever he’d stuck his wife. Though martial law meant no one in or out of the city…except for certain Bolshevik poets traveling here from Moscow. Perhaps Genya had been sent. Just being in the room with him exhausted me. So much unsaid, and how could I say it now? My head hurt, my eyes hurt. I edged out into the hall, hoping to make a clean getaway.

  “Wait. Marina!” Genya called from the doorway. “Where are you going?”

  “A stroll in the moonlight?” I said over my shoulder. “Ah, these balmy Petrograd nights…”

  “Wait.” And I waited, my back to the party and all their wondering eyes.

  His hand, so gentle, on my sleeve. His shock of hair like rye hanging down in a forelock, his body solid and strong in his new suit. “I’ve been thinking about you for so long. I assumed you were still in the country, or…God, what happened to you? I can’t believe Anton didn’t say anything. Why didn’t you write? Why didn’t you let me know you were back in Petrograd?”

  I could only stare at him, hoping he could read tragedy in my eyes and leave it at that.

  “I’m sorry I had to leave you there.” He was twisting with guilt. “Did you get my poem?”

  I nodded. I didn’t dare even speak. I could feel my mouth, trembling.

  “Do you blame me?”

  I shook my head, bit my lip.

  “Where’s the baby? I thought about you so much, thinking you’d died in the village.”

  I led him farther down the hallway, away from our audience hanging in the doorway of Anton’s room. “It was a girl. I called her Iskra.”

  He sighed, leaned against the wall, his eyes closed. A little laugh, and then a shudder. “We were always going to call our child Iskra.”

  I could feel his great body, warm and familiar, and resisted the urge to melt into him. Life was complicated enough. He was waiting for me to tell him the rest. He gazed at me when I told him, his tender face unmasked, then he turned to the wall, laid his forehead against it. “It was that damned baba, wasn’t it? With her Christ and her spells. I should never have let you go with her.”

  “That woman saved my life.” What could he know of Praskovia, and his threat to burn her village. “The baby came, and she was so beautiful, Genya.” I clutched his sleeve, laid my cheek against the wool, breathing in his scent, so familiar. My feelings for him trickling back. “She had red hair, and green eyes.” But they were Kolya’s eyes, not his. “I helped bring in the harvest to pay off my debt. It was just as well. All of their men were gone.”

  He stared at the ceiling. “I never even thought…How could I have been so stupid?”

  Yes, we were quite the pair. What we hadn’t thought would fill an ocean. He’d sent me a poem, but left me without any money. He was in such a hurry to move on, save his train, slip across the Urals through the opening in the fighting.

  “They’d wanted to adopt her. But I brought her back. The comrades in Izhevsk helped us.”

  He moaned and rolled his head against the wall. “Forgive me, Marina. I didn’t know.”

  How much of this to keep in, what to leave out. Certainly the face of the Chekist on the train, that stinking toilet. The besprizorniki helping me get rid of the body. “She was brilliant, Genya. So funny. I never knew a baby could be funny.” I was finding it hard to breathe. Don’t look at me, Genya. Let me finish.

  “Do you have a picture of her?”

  “No. Just a curl of her hair.” Cut from her head just before I buried her.

  “I want to see it.”

  “It’ll wait. But I need to tell you, when we got back I found a job in an orphanage, so I could take her to work with me.”

  He nodded. How to finish this story. Arkady, the black thread running through my life. “There was a man, a criminal. Someone who felt he owned me. I was taking a chance to come back. He found me.”

  He stood facing the wall like a boy being punished in class.

  “I was kidnapped…And one of the orphans jumped off the roof with her.”

  He winced. “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “He didn’t want her to be an orphan. He didn’t want that life for her. Can you understand that?”

  He pounded his big fist on the wall. “I don’t understand anything!” Now he was shouting. I could see people staring from Anton’s doorway. “I’m an idiot and I don’t understand the simplest thing!”

  I turned away, so the poets couldn’t see my face. “You don’t have to understand. I understand. Every day, I think of her. Every day, I see something and think, Iskra would love this! I see a redheaded girl and can’t stop staring, thinking, How old would she be now…”

  Suddenly Genya’s fury melted and he threw those arms around me. “Come to the Astoria with me,” he said. “There’s decent food, hot water. You could wash up, wash your clothes.”

  I didn’t give a damn about my comfort, about my clothes. “I buried her at Novodevichy Cemetery. Next to someone else’s grave.”

  “Come with me to Moscow,” he said, taking my hand. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Marina.”

  I remembered how Anton had wept in my room. I’m moving to Moscow. Anton, who had stayed with me through the terrible nights. Anton, who would not have ridden off on the Red October. “I’m living with Anton now,” I said. I moved away from him. Such a fantasy, to think that we could be together again. We’d been through too much, both of us.

  He laughed, once, then realized I wasn’t joking.

  I couldn’t leave Anton. I had found a home here. I began to recite:

  She slept all the winter

  covered with white eiderdown…

  He leaned against the wall listening, hung his head. “Forgive me.” I put my hand on his shoulder, to say farewell, and left him there, as I disappeared into the labyrinth of the House.

  54 Sea Ice

  Pung. Pung. The windows shook. The sound rolled through, the echoes lasting until the next shock arrived. A thunder more thunderous than anything I’d heard from Pulkovo Heights that night in the sniper’s nest on Moskovsky Prospect. It sounded like dinosaurs pounding the earth. I kept thinking it would stop, but it kept going. Pung PungpugnpungPUNG.

  The battle for Kronstadt had begun. Anton came down to my room, lay next to me on the bed, and we listened, helpless. Trotsky, my Trotsky, our Trotsky, Flame of the Cirque Moderne, Savior of the Revolution, was bringing a message to revolutionary Kronstadt. Unconditional surrender.

  And the sailors were answering.

  We counted seconds the way Seryozha and I used to count thunderclaps, the seconds between the flash and the rumble. But tonight’s awful black blossoms of sound were too close to count. They overlapped like an evil bouquet and would not stop.

  All the night long we lay in bed listening to its dreadful music. How could anyone bear this, the force, the power? I tried to picture the battle as Pasha had painted it for me. Downy-faced boy cadets and Red soldiers marching over the ice, no cover except that of night and the storm. Shells the size of pigs weighing a ton apiece let loose from the Petropavlovsk, crashing into the ice as they crawled across. The deafening barrage, the crack of sea ice. Their terror as the Red soldiers broke through in the dark, the upturning floes delivering them to their deaths in a sea liquid and voracious under its deceptive crust.

  And on the island—the Kronstadt sailors. How alone they would be in the dark, firing on men they had fought beside during these long years, who returned their fire with guns dragged onto the ice, or perhaps firing from the shore. The awful loneliness of the ice-locked ships. Only the men and their guns were free, and free to die, as perhaps all of us would. If only spring would come in time, the ships would be free to move about. They could head to sea, and return for battle. The troops could not get close enough to attempt the island. I prayed for warm weather. It had happened before, in February 1917.
How long could they hold out like this—alone, with the full force of the Red Army pitted against them? The land forces could resupply, but Kronstadt had what it had.

  Red against Red. It sickened me like a boat in heavy seas, pitching and rolling. I could not lie still. Pung. Pung pung Pung. POMpompom. I blew out the lamp. Anton lay curled around me in the small bed. “Are you sleeping?”

  “No.”

  Between percussions, snow sizzled on the glass. A vicious night. I took his hand, laced my fingers into his. I could hear him breathing.

  POMpomPOM.

  “What did you say to Genya last night?”

  “I said we were together.” I rested my head on his shoulder.

  And that was enough for him.

  PungPungPungPung.

  Around five a.m., I sat up on one elbow. Anton had fallen asleep. He was snoring. Something had changed. I jostled him. “Anton, wake up.”

  “What.” He tried to rouse himself, rubbing his eyes.

  “Shh. Listen.” It was the sound of no sound. The snoring of Shafranskaya next door was the only thing that let me believe what I was not hearing. We waited. Five minutes. Ten.