Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  A plain little woman read aloud from her typewriter carriage. “News from abroad shows that, simultaneous with the events in Kronstadt, the enemies of Soviet Russia are spreading the most fantastic fabrications—saying that there are disorders in Russia—”

  “There aren’t disorders in Russia?” I asked Genya.

  The woman glared at me.

  “That’s enough,” he said sharply.

  “They say the Soviet government has supposedly fled to the Crimea. That Moscow is in the hands of the rebels. That blood pours in torrents through the streets of Petrograd. There is no doubt that the actions taking place on the Petropavlovsk are part of a greater plan…to shatter Soviet international standing at the very moment when a new administration is coming in America, and is considering entering into trade relations with Soviet Russia.”

  Gospodi bozhe moi. This is what ROSTA was going to say about the rebellion? “You don’t really believe that. This is a joke, right?”

  “Who is this, Kuriakin, your anarchist sister?” said the unshaven man at the typewriter. “Get her out of here. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Please, Marina,” Genya said. “We have fifteen minutes until the broadcast. We’ll talk later. I’ll explain. Keep going, Raika.”

  The woman tugged at the hair on the nape of her neck as she read: “The spread of provocative rumors and rigging of disorders in Kronstadt clearly works toward influencing the new American president, preventing change in American policy relative to Russia.”

  “Don’t forget the London Conference,” said the man at the typewriter.

  “I’ve got SRs manipulating the stock markets, getting ready to dump tsarist stocks,” said an older man, looking through his notes. He had the rough skin of one who’d had terrible acne as a boy.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe what these people were doing, what Genya was allowing. They could hear with their own ears what was really going on, and in response they were fabricating something so bizarre even Lewis Carroll would hesitate. And my husband, my good Genya, was at the heart of it. This was why he was in Petrograd. He’d come up from Moscow just for this bit of dangerous propaganda, yes, like the kursanty. And he’d wanted me to come to Moscow with him, be part of this?

  The artist was sketching Red soldiers and workers clambering onto a battleship, and the sailors—white outlines, the familiar stripes of their jerseys—fleeing out the other side, climbing into boats labeled ENTENTE and FINLAND.

  The boy at the typewriter was pounding away. He rolled the sheet up to read: “Before us is the provocation work of Entente stockbrokers, and of agents of counterintelligence agencies working by their orders. In Russia, the main figures carrying out these policies are a tsarist general and former officers, whose activities are supported by Mensheviks.”

  “That’s good,” Genya said, “but you’ve said work twice, and agents twice. Just provocation. Also that last sentence, see if you can straighten the syntax. “Just, carrying out their sabotage are the tsarist general Kozlovsky and several former officers, supported by Menshevik…” He frowned, trying to think of a good word.

  “Treachery,” said the boy. Genya considered it, weighing it with his mouth.

  I could not stay silent one more moment. “No one in the world will believe this. People will see through you like a pane of glass.”

  Genya’s face turned to stone. I knew that face. It was the face he’d worn when he’d smashed Avdokia’s Virgin of Tikhvin. “You’d be surprised who’ll believe it,” he said through clenched teeth. “You think this is a joke? This is not a joke. This is a war.”

  The unshaven man pressed on. “We’ve got ten minutes. What about those stocks?”

  “But it’s a lie,” I said. Didn’t anybody care about that?

  Genya squatted down on his haunches. He took my hands. “Marina, this isn’t the House of Arts. This is war, you understand? It’s got to be done.”

  “We did agitprop,” I whispered, hard and fast through my knuckled throat. “But we never lied! What’s happened to you? You used to know the difference.”

  His face was dark with emotion. Black fury, and what I could only hope was shame. “This is not the time.” He stood. Everyone was watching him. “Your overconcern with the ‘truth’ is petty bourgeois. We don’t have that luxury.” Playing to the room.

  I stood up. “Now I put on my costume / GREAT RUS.”

  I could see his lips tremble. Or maybe it was just that I knew him.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “We can talk about it then.”

  The bile in my mouth, the hot tears in my eyes. I wanted to spit. “I understand everything, petit bourgeois though I am. Don’t come. You can’t justify this.”

  And we left him there, with his sulfur and his guilt and the hollow clatter of Bolshevik typewriters.

  56 The Kronstadt Card Is Covered!

  The bombardment resumed the following day, continued the day after. A weak sun appeared, trying to break through the clouds, trying to melt the ice and free Kronstadt. Without ice, there would be nothing for the Red Army to cross upon. The fortress would be impregnable, and the ice-locked ships would be able to move out. They could come right up the Neva, shell the Astoria, and all the rats would come streaming out.

  Meanwhile the streets teemed with new soldiers. I watched them with increasing dread, flooding in from the train stations, coming from all corners of the country. Not just impassioned kursanty from Moscow but provincial soldiers from far-flung regions, Uhlans and Bashkirs, the troops we’d seen in 1919. It was a familiar Bolshevik tactic—to bring in men who’d had little contact with those they were charged to subdue, in this case the fierce fighters of the Baltic Fleet. They were men with no allegiance to Petrograd and little understanding of our revolutionary past, no associations with our workers—all the less likely to be tempted by fraternization.

  But they still hadn’t won. People went about their business, jumpy from the sound of the guns’ steady pungPUNGpungPUNG. The sun vanished again, and it began to snow. I headed for a talk at the House of Writers when I passed what had been Levine’s dress shop, empty since 1918. In the window, a ROSTA poster, quite attractive. It depicted a playing card, a black spade, with the simplified rendition of a Cossack soldier, knout over one shoulder. And in reverse, connected at the waist, a Kronstadt sailor with a little curly moustache and striped jersey, holding a small SR flag. Boldly stenciled, top and bottom: THE KRONSTADT CARD IS COVERED! And across it all, an enormous red RSFSR—RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATED SOCIALIST REPUBLIC. Canceling the card. I slipped on the icy pavement, falling to my knees and hands. Nobody stopped to help me up. Perhaps afraid they would fall themselves.

  I got to my feet and, gasping, breathless, scrambled back toward the House of Arts. I couldn’t bear the lies. And that Genya was part of it. Those letters should have read VRKP—the All-Russian Communist Party. It wasn’t the revolution, nor Soviet Russia, but the Bolshevik prison camp. And that was the point they were making, in bright red letters—that Soviet Russia and the Communist Party were now not only inseparable but identical. No God but God.

  If I were a simple proletarian, without any information from any other source, would I believe its message? That the sailors were a new iteration of the tsar’s guards? The terrible thing was, I might. That’s the way it was when public lies were repeated often enough—you crossed to the other side of the looking glass without even knowing it. And there was no other way to know what was happening. What did we have? Either the official channels or the rumor factory of the bread queue. The approaches to the factory districts were still closed. No way for information to spread, even from district to district. No way to know what was happening anywhere.

  But until there were official parades down Nevsky Prospect saying the sailors had been defeated, I would not give up hope that Kronstadt could triumph. If they could just hold out until the ice melted—then it would be our parade. The final victory of the revolution.

  Watc
h the soldiers, Kolya had said.

  I stood on the curb watching a group of new soldiers being herded up Nevsky. How young they were, how confused. Mutiny, I prayed. You’re fighting against the will of the workers, against the peasant in the field, against your own brothers. I itched to know what the workers were doing. The papers said they were going back to their factories—that meat and flour had been distributed among them. Meat, flour! Didn’t that tell them something—that the Bolsheviks could come up with goods if they wanted to? If they absolutely had to? I missed the newspaper of the breadline, now that I got my rations at the House of Scholars. They knew no more there than I did. Was it working? That’s what I wanted to know. The workers’ political demands were born of desperation, and there were no parties left to fan the flame of revolt. No mass demonstrations, no organization, only the shrinking of the people back into the mist.

  Mutiny was Kronstadt’s only hope. If these soldiers refused to fire…if they went over, as had happened in February 1917. Soldiers in the barracks talked. Surely they could make common cause with the strikers and sailors against the Bolsheviks. If only it weren’t Trotsky waging war against them. I knew what an orator he was. I’d read in Pravda that three hundred delegates attending the All-Russian Tenth Party Congress—experienced commissars—had left Moscow for Petrograd to stiffen the troops.

  What did they need stiffening for if they weren’t softening? I tried to cheer myself as I watched the soldiers march past. Their faces betrayed a grim and haggard fatalism.

  A boy on the street corner hawked the most recent edition of Pravda. I recognized him—the little cardsharp from Orphanage No. 6. So he’d become a biznissman. “Makar, do you remember me?” Either he didn’t or he was too busy selling a paper to a man wearing a woman’s coat, a tragic but not uncommon sight. His wife had died, and her coat was warmer than his.

  “Makar, it’s Comrade Marina. Remember me?” The man moved away with his newspaper tucked under his arm. “With the baby?”

  He looked at me now, his shiny eyes like black plums. “Sure. I remember.” He glanced away. Guilt. He couldn’t look me in the face. As if he had pushed them off that roof, instead of being one of the children gathered on the sidewalk below.

  “It’s good to see you,” I said.

  He glanced back at me, unsure. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You look well.” He was a clever boy, quick. I wondered…“Do you ever sell things to the soldiers? Preservativy?” Rubbers. “Marafet? Samogon?”

  He brightened. “Sure. Want something? I can get just about anything if you give me ten minutes.” Oh ho, big man!

  “What’s their spirit, do you think? The soldiers. Think they’re going to win?”

  It felt odd, asking a child such things, but he’d never been a child really, and probably would never be an adult either, not that you’d recognize. He was something in between, a wild little beast. He looked at me cannily, gauging my intent. “Well. Let’s just say they ain’t singing, Lalalala, we get to go fight Kronstadt. Whaddya think—they’re shittin’ in their pants! Trade’s booming. Marafet gets their dicks up.”

  “Any signs of mutiny?” Thank God there was no way this kid would run off and tell someone I was asking questions like that.

  He wagged his head, ear to shoulder, maybe yes, maybe no. “Between you and me? I hear some of ’ems refusing to fight. There’ve been arrests. Keep your eyes open, you’ll see ’em marchin’ through here.”

  Let it be true. “So they’re siding with the sailors?”

  “They don’t give a shit about the sailors.” He stood up straighter—clearly having his opinion asked made him feel important indeed. “It’s the ice. They’re scared of the ice. They see their mates go under—the shells break it up, and then it’s like a whole raft turning over. Under they go, in the dark, and no one comes up once they’re down. Pffshht.” He imitated soldiers sliding off the ice into the sea. “Scared off their nuts. That’s what they talk about, how they ain’t going out there and they don’t care who shoots ’em for it. It’s so bad, the Cheka troops gotta follow ’em up with machine guns, so if anybody turns around, pow-pow-pow-POW!”

  The terror of those troops. I felt pity for them as well. Scylla or Charybdis. I could see why they would take cocaine, drink, whatever might give them the courage. “What about the strikers?”

  He screwed his face up, as if he’d eaten something rotten. “They ain’t got shit. Maybe they take some samogon. Want some? We’re making it in the basement of the orphanage. The janitor’s in on it.”

  I could only imagine its contents. “What does Matron think of that?”

  “Who’s going to tell her?” Now he was smirking. You?

  “I’ll just take a newspaper.” Though the marafet sounded tempting. I folded his Pravda under my arm, broke a bit of bread off my loaf and handed it to him. “Thanks for the insight.”

  “Any time.” He ate like a wolf, not even chewing. “Got any chinar?” A butt, tobacco.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Listen, you hear anything interesting, any real news, come see me. I’m at the House of Arts. You know where that is?”

  “On Moika. All the pinheads.”

  I squeezed him softly on the arm, pipe thin under his ragged coat. “Stay well, Makar.” I began walking away.

  “Listen!” He called out. “Sorry about the baby. I still think about her. He shouldn’t of done that.”

  He wasn’t as hard as he pretended to be. “Let me know if anything happens.”

  The canteen at the House of Pinheads was warm and smelled of cabbage soup. When I entered, I saw Genya sitting with Shklovsky and Anton and some of the studio participants at a table by the windows. My stomach lurched. I really thought I would vomit. He saw me, but after I got my soup, I selected a seat as far from him as I could get, as if he were a stinking corpse. How could Anton sit there with him after what we had seen at ROSTA? I took a bench over by the wall where we hung the obituaries, next to Alla Tvorcheskaya, the painter. I took out my bread and spoon and ate, trying to ignore their conspicuously noisy conversation.

  “That Kuriakin, where do you ever see men like that anymore?” Alla sighed, her chin in her hand.

  “Go to ROSTA,” I said dryly. “Because that’s where he is, writing filthy propaganda.”

  “Well, I didn’t say he was an angel, darling, only that he looked like one.” And he did. It was as if a beam of light followed him around, even in this underlit room, even now. “Oh look, Poliatnikov’s on the move.”

  I watched as one of the older, lesser poets, a waspish, balding little terrier of a man, the very one who’d showed off his tattered linen for Wells and embarrassed Gorky so badly, rose to his feet and headed to Genya’s table, his face flushed with emotion. Everyone stopped talking to focus on what was sure to be an amusing interlude.

  They were not disappointed. “You have a nerve, coming here, showing your face among real poets. We don’t spend our days supporting the rabble. You have gall.” Spraying him with saliva. “Bolshevik lackey.”

  I might have told Poliatnikov he’d picked the wrong person to try to embarrass. This wasn’t an Englishman, a foreign dignitary. This was someone who’d spent a year on an agitprop train. Genya grabbed the little provocateur by the collar of his jacket—luckily, as his shirt would have torn—and drew him close. Seated, he was nose to nose with the furious wretch. “Listen, you sniveling shirker,” loud enough that everyone in the place could hear. “Where were you during the war? Sitting here safe, hoping for Kolchak and composing sonnets about the violets of yesteryear! If you believe so much in counterrevolution, why don’t you go do something about it? Find your local branch of the National Center. I’m sure they’re still around.”

  The man was writhing in his grip, his face red with fury and the hold around his neck. “You call yourself a poet? You’re nothing but a thug, like your masters. Where’s your rifle? I don’t see it. I see a suit and a well-fed Bolshevik lackey. Rabble,” he spat.

 
Genya pulled back his fist. Suddenly here was Gumilev, his hand on Genya’s arm. “Let him go, Kuriakin,” he said in his cool, commanding voice. “You’re making a scene.”

  Genya let the little poet go, shoving him backward. He fell against the next table, as the poets guarded their soup, and sat down hard on a bench.

  God. Don’t let this be happening. I sipped my tea, trying not to watch, but it was impossible not to, like two automobiles colliding in front of you. Genya had risen from his chair, and now it was him and Gumilev, taking one another’s measure. They were the same height, but what two men could be more different? Would my husband actually punch Nikolai Stepanovich, the helmsman of the House of Arts, founder of Acmeism? But when Genya was most in the wrong, that was when he was the most unreasonable, most dangerous. “Well, if it isn’t Mister Africa,” Genya said, his pose softening. “Gone on safari recently?” Referring to Gumilev’s wide travels and his poetry about them. How Genya hated everything Gumilev represented—as a man, as a poet. He despised his class, his erudition, his self-discipline, and his political affiliations.

  “Don’t underline your reputation as a fatuous boor,” said Gumilev.

  But Genya was not to be intimidated. He hadn’t been by my father, and he wouldn’t be now. “If I’d wanted to do that, Violets of Yesteryear would be picking up pieces of his nose.” He projected in a clear, deep voice that would have made a Shakespearean actor proud. Yes, it was Poliatnikov’s fault, the man was an unbearable gadfly, but Genya should have known where he was and how people would feel about him. “Who called who rabble? I just came in for a quiet conversation with my editor and my wife.” And to make matters worse, he gestured toward me across the room. The Acmeist’s gaze shot to where I sat cringing with Alla Tvorcheskaya, his well-shaven face registering surprise. He hadn’t known this little piece of the puzzle. Alla, too, was taking my measure, as if I’d been holding out on her, hoarding a cache of chocolates or tins of condensed milk.