Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  I lay on my back and gazed out at the streetlight. The storm still howled, but that was all. What had happened? Had the army retreated? I felt the urge to cross myself, but resisted. It would have alarmed Anton. “Trotsky’s killed them.” I could feel hysteria rise up in me like an uncoiling snake. “Oh God, please let it not be so.” Such bravery, these Saint Georges, slashing at the dragon’s breast with a hero’s short knife, only to be struck by its tail.

  Anton held me, tight. “You don’t know. All we know is that the shooting’s stopped,” he whispered into my hair. “They could be reloading. They could be negotiating. Lenin could have radioed in. They might have seen Christ in snowshoes. You just don’t know.”

  But what if they’d lost? All the Argonauts. Their bright summer sails. Everything that was good and clean and strong. The pain sat in my chest like a sharp-toothed rat. Around dawn, I fell into an exhausted sleep. Anton never let go of my hand.

  We woke at about noon. Now I thought maybe I’d been wrong. These days, I always expected the worst. It was possible it was just as Anton had said. A cease-fire. Negotiations. I got out of bed and rearranged my clothing, my coat, donned my hat. The blizzard raged. “Someone knows what’s happened. Someone’s got to.” I went out into the corridor. “Anybody know what happened? Did they take Kronstadt?”

  Slezin shook his head. Grin, the old eccentric who roamed the corridors to escape the cold of his room, didn’t know. Anton appeared, dressed, his hair in every direction, and we went down to the canteen, where the residents looked grim and haggard from the night’s bombardment. Here was Gumilev, alone at a table by the wall. He crossed his legs and went on reading a manuscript, making marks in the margins, avoiding looking at me.

  “Does anybody know whether they took Kronstadt?” Anton asked.

  Kuzmin regarded me pityingly. “Nothing but threats,” he said. “But wouldn’t there be a parade if the Bolsheviks won? We’d know, I’m sure.”

  We sat with our mugs of tea. I took my last bread from my pocket, gnawed on the corner, choking on my tears. I smacked the hard heel on the table, trying to crack it. “Somebody’s got to know.”

  Gumilev shot me a warning look.

  “We’ll go ask Genya,” Anton volunteered. “He’s got to know something by now.”

  Ask Genya whether Kronstadt had held? “Why would he tell us? He’s working for them.”

  Anton shrugged. “That’s why he’d know.”

  It was true—Genya was working at ROSTA. And he was living at the Astoria, the First House of the Soviet, the very nostrils of the dragon. Across the room, Gumilev turned the pages of his paper, pretending that the fate of the Kronstadters was nothing to him. That strange man.

  55 ROSTA

  We hurried along Bolshaya Morskaya, steeling ourselves before we were hit by the full force of the blizzard in St. Isaac’s Square. I could barely see the lights from the Astoria glowing through the swirling white, fortified by a new machine-gun outpost manned by grim, no doubt miserable sentries. A picture that illustrated better than anything the isolation of the Bolsheviks from the people of Petrograd. As propaganda, it failed completely.

  We leaned into the wind, clutching tightly to each other, heaving ourselves forward, fighting for each step. Only the vaguest outline of St. Isaac’s vast dome impressed itself through the snowstorm. I felt the presence of the besprizorniki, huddled even now on the porch of the cathedral. God help them, or someone. But today I could do nothing but press on.

  It was a relief to enter the relative shelter of narrow Pochtamtskaya Street. So much snow fell you couldn’t see the post office arch connecting one building to the next. Here was ROSTA: a three-story stone edifice housing the Bolshevik propaganda machine, the indefatigable supplier of posters that filled the windows of a hundred empty shops with cleverly stenciled figures in folk fashion or futurist boldness, with short chastushki couplets telling us to brush our teeth, or showing how Lenin would sweep the globe of capitalists and imperialists.

  Now the windows exhorted,

  Do you want—

  To fight cold?

  Fight hunger?

  You want to eat?

  Want to drink?

  Hurry, to a strike group of

  exemplary labor!

  I could see the delight of starving workers, hurrying to work longer shifts for no extra pay or rations. But I knew the artists who’d screened these posters, week after week, Sasha and his friends. And they did liven up the empty shops, selling revolutionary hopes, though people would have preferred bread. But all the cheerful cartoons in the world wouldn’t stir one starving worker to join a strike group of exemplary labor.

  ROSTA: Rossiskoye Telegrafnoye Agentstvo. I was tired of acronyms, which to others seemed the height of modernity. Life was so swift now, no one had time for full words. Narkompros. Sovnarkom. We had ours too—Disk. But I never used it. The House of Arts seemed the last mountain ridge, representing a geological formation underneath it, so different from a rampant weed like ROSTA or a fast-moving train like Proletcult. You didn’t want a sanctuary with an acronym. You didn’t want a lover with a number.

  Anton pushed the doors open—outer, inner. The lobby seethed with noise, with purpose, hornets buzzing angrily, the feel of the telephone exchange but even more frenzied, more important, it was half telegraph, half news agency. I could not imagine what it was like in calmer times. But then again, when had there been calmer times? Not since 1914. Typewriters beat out staccato rhythms, telephones jangled, people rushed around with papers in their hands—“people” the way Blok had described them, self-important, impatient, without a moment for humanity, their own or anyone else’s. Soviet young ladies, official-looking Bolsheviks, clerks and more clerks. The glances they cast us would have suited horses or lampposts. While our factories were as empty as tombs, the great machinery still, the furnaces cold, tended by a few silent ghosts, a real skeleton crew, the feverish business of Soviet news hummed like the Ford Motor Company.

  All I wanted to know was what were they saying about Kronstadt, and, if I could learn it, what was actually happening on that ice-bound island. I mourned the closure of the Vikzhel club. It made me sick to be here, trespassing into the cavern of the dragon and its treasures. I could smell its stink, its sulfurous breath, but I had to know about the silence of the guns. Had the sailors survived? Had they won? I could not read the faces—they only looked sharp and professional. How could we ever find Genya in a hive like this?

  Anton walked to a high counter where a long-chinned woman scanned a newspaper, circling with a blue pencil. “Excuse us,” he said. “We’re looking for the poet Gennady Kuriakin.”

  She didn’t even look up.

  “He told us to meet him here.”

  She glanced at him, reluctantly. Saw him, saw me, and went back to her paper. He bent over the counter like a giraffe over the fence of a zoo. “What do I need to do, send a telegram?” he persevered. Down the counter, two Soviet young ladies giggled, watching him try to engage the newspaper marker. I slid down to my Soviet sisters, one a bleachy blonde, the other a brunette with makeup as thick as a fresco. “You’re not hiding him under the counter are you? Big handsome poet, about twenty-three? Just up from Moscow?”

  “Sure.” The brunette pretended to search under the counter. “Come out, handsome. We need you to rearrange the furniture.”

  The blonde giggled, hid her mouth. They reminded me of the girls at the telephone exchange. The tragedy of last night seemed not to have touched them. Men fighting for the fate of the revolution were hardly as interesting as the arrival of an attractive man from Moscow. “What floor’s he on?” I asked the brunette. She seemed the leader. “Or wouldn’t you know, stuck down here with the babas?”

  Anton was getting nowhere with the supervisor.

  The brunette glanced toward the hall on the right. “In the radio room. Tell him to come out when he’s done. Valya wants him to move something for her.”

  “Shut up,” sai
d the blonde and they had another giggle.

  I linked my arm into Anton’s, pulling him away from his unfulfilling negotiations with the sour-faced woman. “He’s in the radio room.”

  “Hey, thanks for the help,” he told the woman, and was treated to a sneer worthy of Anton himself.

  We asked a comrade copyboy the way, found the stairs, where we had to watch our step, dodging people coming down—so strange, their feverish energy. I imagined Moscow was like this all the time, like a consulate of the future. We passed a vast room of clattering telegraph operators, finally finding the radio room. It was jammed with men and women, standing, arms crossed, faces grim and straining, listening to a crackling broadcast through a tarnished gramophone horn while a radioist with headphones adjusted dials on a wireless.

  A tinny voice emerged from the phonograph bell: “The result, however, was the creation of a still greater enslavement of the human personality. The power of police-gendarme monarchism passed into the hands of usurpers, the Communists, who brought to the laborers, instead of freedom, the fear every minute of falling into the torture chambers of the Cheka…”

  It was Kronstadt, radioing the mainland! Haranguing the Bolsheviks. They’d survived! No wonder these apparatchiks were seething. These “people.” Free men were speaking to them in the voice of unconquered Kronstadt! I struggled to keep my face a mask. I wanted to burst out laughing, I wanted to dance a pirouette! They would have torn me to shreds. As it was they shouted taunts and curses at the disembodied voice rising like fragrance from the flower of the bell. “They have done this for the sake of preserving a calm, unsaddened life—for the new bureaucracy of Communist commissars and bureaucrats! With the aid of bureaucratic trade unions, they have tied the workers to their benches, made labor not a joy but a new serfdom. The protests by peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings—”

  “Spontaneous, my wrinkled pants,” said a man with cropped gray hair.

  “Ask General Kozlovsky, you White swine,” shouted a slender woman, mopping her face with a red handkerchief. Flaunting the symbol of revolution without the thing itself. Sausages painted on wood.

  “I can’t listen to this tripe,” said a small bald man. “I need some air.”

  He left, and two more clerks pressed in, avid to hear. But I was the only one rejoicing. Free Kronstadt stands firm! I wanted to shout from the roof. Wake up, Petrograd! The moment is now!

  Anton glanced about us with barely disguised panic, sweating. We were so much more ragged than the rest of these comrades, surely we would be discovered forthwith. He lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of emergency, indicating the door with his head. But I was savoring every word that emerged from the brass horn of the radio. This was history. I was going to drink it in to the last drop.

  I imagined the sailors on their ships, gathered together, writing these words. Pasha and his mates. Laughing, hunching over their papers. I prayed that the people of Petrograd could hear this. Somewhere there must be secret wireless receivers in basements and back rooms. How dangerous it must be for them. If they were caught, the Chekists would say they were transmitting to the Whites, forming a counterrevolutionary cabal inside the city.

  “Let’s go,” Anton said under his breath.

  But I was not budging. I wouldn’t miss this for a tsar’s ransom. I stood mesmerized by the boldness of the broadcast. We hadn’t heard anyone speak out like this since October 1917. “They pretend to make concessions: in Petrograd Province they remove the antiprofiteer roadblock detachment. Assign ten million in gold for purchase of produce abroad.”

  I’d heard this rumor, that the Bolsheviks were making concessions to the workers in exchange for a return to work. But ten million rubles? That could purchase a lot of food. Would starving workers hold out, or could they take it and still stand their ground?

  “And how much are you getting from the Entente?” a man with bags under his eyes shouted at the speaker. “From the émigrés?”

  I couldn’t look at him, I might scream in his face. How could anyone think the Kronstadt sailors were on the payroll of the Whites? How could they think this was coming from anyone but the beautiful red heart of the Baltic Fleet? Krasniy, krasiviy. Red and beautiful, one and the same. Anton stared at me, his eyes rounded like railway warning lights.

  “Who the hell are you?” The man in leather suddenly noticed us. “Do you have permission to be in this room?” He narrowed his piggy eyes. People turned to stare. “I don’t know you.”

  Before I could find words, Anton leapt in. “We’re looking for Gennady Kuriakin. Hero of the agit-train Red October. For an interview in the Art of the Commune. The comrades downstairs told us he was here.” He’d always been quick on his feet.

  “Moskovsky poet,” said one of the intellectual-looking men, thick glasses, frizzy hair. “The big one.”

  “I know, I know,” said the leather-clad man irritably. “But you see him here?”

  “He’s in Propaganda, working on a broadcast,” said the bespectacled apparatchik.

  Now a different voice came through the radio’s megaphone like a tarnished morning glory, a younger voice, hearty and brash. “Greetings to the International Women of the World!”

  It was International Women’s Day! March 8. Four years to the day from when the revolution began. How could I have forgotten? Because there were no parades, no speeches. They didn’t dare, the symbolism was too strong. “We the people of Kronstadt, under the thunder of cannons, under the explosions of shells sent at us by the enemies of the laboring people—” I liked that under the thunder…Poetic. Perhaps it was one of my students, or Gumilev’s. “We send our fraternal greetings to you, working women of the world!”

  “Well, the working women say nuts to you, Kronstadt scum!” said a thin woman in a thin sweater.

  Kronstadt scum?! It was all I could do not to slap her face. I killed better men than myself and for what? Had these people been completely wiped clean of memory? The Kronstadt sailors were the midwives of the revolution, the soul of it. It made my heart swell with pride to hear: “We send greetings from Red Kronstadt, from the Kingdom of Liberty. We wish you fortune, to all the sooner win freedom from oppression and coercion. Long live the Free Revolutionary Working Woman! Long live the Worldwide Social Revolution!”

  For the first time in four years International Women’s Day had not been greeted by celebrations, factory holidays, parades. Kronstadt had shown us what had become of that revolution—their resistance had stripped the skin from the body of the state. Everything but power and the will to survive had been left by the side of the road. Anton was begging me. Let’s go!

  “Go back to your mother, you son of a whore,” spat the man in black leather at the grimy brass bell as we slipped toward the door. He turned around just in time to catch us leaving. “Hey! You! Art of the Commune. I want to talk to you.” But we were already gone.

  I was walking on air, following Anton down the long noisy hall. I trotted up and grabbed his arm. “I don’t need to find Genya. It’s okay, we can just go.” Glass-paned doors ranged on both sides of us, from which we heard typing, ringing telephones.

  “No, we do need to.” He glanced back and I followed his gaze—the man in black leather, like Bely’s brunet spy, was watching from the door of the radio room. A woman carrying a stack of papers passed us. “Comrade, we’re looking for Propaganda.”

  She shrugged, her tired eyes sliding from Anton to me in my provincial sheepskin. “This is ROSTA. I guess you’ve found it. Maybe you were looking for Pravda?” Her little joke. Pravda meant truth. “Keep going, you can smell the brimstone.”

  I didn’t need to see Genya now, but we required an alibi. I already knew what I wanted to know. Kronstadt had held. Congratulations to the Women Workers of the World—what cheek!

  A few more doors down, we heard someone reading in a deep, clear actor’s voice: “There is complete calm today in Petrograd. Even those factories where attacks on Soviet power occurred earlier are qu
iet. They’ve understood what the agents of the Entente and counterrevolution are pushing them to do—”

  Anton opened the door. Cigarette smoke billowed out like steam from a banya. A burst of typewriter clatter, then Genya’s familiar voice: “Add isolated attacks. And make them small factories. Microscopic. Manufacturers of flea underwear and galoshes for mice.” He emerged from the fug like a train arriving in a station. Head tilted back, picturing the words behind his forehead. Six or seven other writers sat at desks or perched on chairs turned wrong way round, smoking and drinking glasses of tea. A regular strike group of exemplary labor.

  An unshaven man at a typewriter was reading: “—an eight-thousand-person meeting of Petrograd dockworkers unanimously passed a resolution supporting Soviet power. The Petrograd garrison has not wavered…”

  “The Communist Party and the Workers Are One,” Genya said, leaning over an artist who was evidently sketching a poster. “No, bigger. Kronstadt Take Warning! Yes, like that.”

  “Demoralization,” said a young man whose sweater was unraveling. “Demoralization grows among the isolated sailors.” He was no older than the kursanty they’d sent against the workers. “The number of those deserting grows by the hour. General Kozlovsky is losing their trust.”

  It was as if we’d walked from one world to its mirror opposite. In that other world, the radio broadcasted the triumph of Kronstadt, proof of their survival, their integrity. In this room, they were demoralized and led by some General Kozlovsky, and the party and the workers were one. What was Genya doing here, creating these lies? Safe and warm and sitting around a ROSTA office making up news out of whole cloth, when there were men like Pasha and Slava out defending the revolution with the pledge of their own blood. Men he’d known!

  Now he saw us, his eyes dark with purpose. Was he ashamed of being caught at this evil work? Not at all. “Anton! Marina…Sorry but we’ve only got twenty minutes to finish this broadcast. Have a seat if you’d like. Speak up if you’ve got any ideas.”