Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Genya kept on, not even noticing the ellipsis. “Doesn’t he know what century this is? I’m not going to ask you, of course. You’re still praising the tsar and crossing yourself. Yeah, I know who you are. God knows why you’re still even here.”

  “God does know,” Gumilev said and turned on his crisp, monarchist heel.

  Anton glowed. There was nothing he loved better than a fight in which he wasn’t directly involved, and Shklovsky beamed at the futurist rough justice. The futurist brats settled back down in their chairs. A cloud of laughter rose from their table. I stared down at my soup and my tea and finished quickly. I didn’t want to be associated with him. I didn’t even know why Genya was here and not with his propagandists and liars back at ROSTA, or feasting on double rations at the Astoria. But I was done. I excused myself and hurried out, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone. Genya Kuriakin and catfights in the canteen—I was embarrassed to be associated with him.

  I lay in my bed, wrapped in my sheepskin, trying to read a copy of Leaves of Grass that Korney Chukovsky had lent me, while the shell blasts kept up their steady distant percussion. Pung. Pung. Pung. Pung. Pungpung Pung. The barrage had resumed after our visit to ROSTA, it had been going on for seven days around the clock. At night you could see the flashes from Kronstadt. The sailors weren’t getting a second to sleep. I imagined them on their icebound ships, making their brave pronouncements on the wireless, the last bit of unfiltered truth in all of Russia.

  I got up, paced, stared into Bolshaya Morskaya Street—empty. Nestled into the jamb, I watched the snow fall, fall, fall. Would it ever be spring? Would it come soon enough?

  A knock on the door. Fais dodo. I ignored him.

  Again.

  “Go away.”

  But he opened the unlocked door, and the cold came in with him from the hall. His bulky presence filled the small room. He was still wearing that suit, though with a wool turtleneck and a cap now, an overcoat. Anton was tall but skinny, and Pasha lively but compact, a man who could live in the narrow confines of a ship. But Genya was a fact that you could not get around.

  “Marina,” he said, closing the door. “It wasn’t my fault. You saw how he attacked me.”

  Always so warm, he raised the temperature in the room just standing there. I remembered what it was to lie next to him, skin to skin. But now that I knew his purpose in coming to Petrograd, he was as appealing as rotting garbage. I could never forgive THE KRONSTADT CARD IS COVERED! These weren’t cartoons, little sailors with curled moustaches and rosy cheeks—they were lives. Pasha with his crinkly blond hair and his quiet hands. Slava, who had pulled me up atop the Red October. The revolutionary sailors, fighting for the future of Russia. I could cut his throat right now. “I’m surprised you’d trouble to announce your association with a petit bourgeois anarchist like me.”

  “Don’t be mad about that,” he said, leaning against the door, as if he was going to try to keep me from running out. “What was I supposed to say? You can’t just stand in the middle of ROSTA and shout, Liar, liar, liar.”

  “What should I call you, then? Savior of the Revolution?”

  He swallowed, came a little closer. “You know what’s going on. It’s how the game is played. You were on the agit-train.”

  “But you weren’t a liar then.” I leaned against the window, looking out at the snow, remembering how it fell after I’d seen the note from Seryozha’s commander. “You’ve gone through the looking glass, Genya.” A vicious series of artillery concussions bruised the fading afternoon. “You’re disappearing. You’re not even here. I can see right through you.”

  “Don’t be like that. We’re not on opposite sides here.”

  The snow changed directions, it began blowing to the west. Was it a sign?

  He began sniffing about, examining the pictures, the books, hands behind his back like a man in a museum. How he had changed since 1916. No longer the yearning boy waiting his chance to show Mayakovsky his poems. No longer the hooligan, the dreamer who had given me the rings of Saturn. His awkwardness was gone. He was a statesman now, a politician, a man polished by the approval of others. Looking at him, I could feel how much I’d changed as well. We’d grown up. Layers of experience and beauty and loss had saddened that bright girl I’d once been.

  “Remember that boy, who defended the thief in Haymarket Square? That brave boy, unafraid to tell the truth to the mob?” I said. “What would he have thought of the apparatchik wearing his face?”

  He picked up the fox-fur hat that sat on my desk, keeping me company as I wrote, like a cat that crouches watching his mistress write a letter. He stroked the soft fur. “I remember this from the train. And that coat. You used to carry a revolver in it. You imagined yourself with crossed bandoliers, riding up on top of the train with the sailors.”

  That revolver. How human paths intersected, at random, inexorably changing one another’s fate. If I’d never met this man, I wouldn’t have been so angry at my father, I wouldn’t have agreed to spy for Varvara. Papa might not have been so rash. He might have brought us out of Russia. We might be in England now.

  He put my hat on, posed like a fashion model, trying to lighten the mood. “It’s all the rage in Moscow.” It looked like a small animal perched on the roof of a shed.

  “Very stylish.” I gazed back at the falling snow. I didn’t want to be so at odds with Genya. But I could never forgive him for feeding his poetic genius into the ROSTA machine like meat into the grinder.

  He continued his inspection of my little room—examined the shelf on which my few possessions lay, a comb, a bottle of kerosene, a sliver of soap from the Skorokhod women. My toothbrush, a gift from the sailors. He broke into a grin. “You still have this?” Chronicles of a Misspent Youth. I’d forgotten, I had borrowed it from Anton earlier that summer. The hand-cut wooden letters that Sasha had carved. I could never hate the boy who had written those poems, he was still in there somewhere, drunk with shame, a pillow over his head, knowing what the man was doing with the gift they shared. As Genya opened the yellow covers as if they would crumble to dust in his hands, I saw him again as he still was, under all this Bolshevik bluster. To think, he’d once been my conscience. He flicked through the poems as if playing with his firstborn child. “Pretty good. For a kid.”

  “You weren’t a liar then.”

  “And you were.” A jab, and it hurt. He’d never gotten over my leaving him for Kolya. He licked the corner of his lower lip, picked up the kettle, sloshed it. “Is this boiled? Can I at least have some tea?”

  “All right, but then you have to go.” I waited for him to move away from my desk, took down two glasses, or more accurately, the porcelain cup I bought from an old lady in Kolomna and a tin one I’d stolen from the canteen.

  Then he was studying my clothes, my summer dress on the hook, the wool dress from Aura, and her good wool coat—my entire wardrobe. He pressed his nose to my summer dress. Like a man smelling lilacs. “You hurt me more than I could imagine,” he said. “When I found out. About him.”

  “Imagine how Russia will feel.”

  He dropped the much-washed printed fabric. “What is it about these mutineers that has you so captivated? You were fine with agitprop on the Red October. Those agitkas, that wasn’t exactly the truth.”

  I took the can of pine needles, pried open the top. “They were cartoons, but about something true.”

  “What isn’t true? That it’s not a mutiny? That these sailors aren’t acting against the soviet, opening the door for the Whites?”

  “You know that’s not what they’re doing.” I fought to check the treble of frustration sounding in my voice.

  I knew the thrust of that stubborn jaw. “Oh, do I? Money’s pouring in from the émigrés, the Entente, earmarked for Kronstadt.”

  “They’d never take White money.”

  He slapped himself in the forehead. It sounded like a wet fish hitting a dock. “Wake up, Marina. Where else are they going to get it from? Can
they turn seawater into cannon shells and Swedish ham? They’ll need funds, and that’s what’s available to them. And it’ll come with its own agenda. The sailors won’t be able to resist.”

  He didn’t know them. “The people will support them. The strikers. A general strike.”

  “Oh, really.” Genya went over to the window looking out onto Bolshaya Morskaya, leaned forward, theatrically cupping his hand to his ear as he would have on stage with the Theater of the Future. “What’s that I hear? Is it the sound of marching workers? The clamor of thousands for a general strike?”

  The only sound was the pung of the big guns echoing off the building opposite, the shiver of the old glass in the windows, and Shafranskaya moving around in the next room, reciting a poem she was working on.

  “Nobody’s coming to save Kronstadt,” he said quietly, approaching me, crouching to look into my eyes. I could smell him, his breath, his scent of hay and new wood, the same as ever. How could such a liar smell like that? His warmth, warmer than the bourgeoika. “Face it. The workers have hung them out to dry. The sailors’ll take the White money, all right. But why this sudden partisanship? Since when do you favor counterrevolutionary mutiny?” He studied me, scratching his underlip where he often found it hard to shave. There was a new opacity in his hazel-green eyes, which used to be as transparent as a sun-shot pool in a forest glade. I didn’t know what he was thinking anymore. He’d spent too long in Moscow.

  “It’s not counterrevolution,” I said. “You read the resolution. It’s all the things you and I believe.”

  “What we believed four years ago,” he said quietly, steadying himself, his hand on my chair. “That was a dream. Worker control. Soviet democracy. People didn’t even think the revolution would survive this long. But here we are.” He peered into my face with a slight rueful smile. “We’ve won. All we need is a chance to rebuild. And no, it’s not going to be what we’d dreamed. I’m prepared to accept that.”

  I wanted to claw my own face. I wanted to howl. “Your bosses are counterrevolutionaries. Not the sailors.”

  “It’s the only revolution there is.” He stood, shaking out his legs. “This is where it went. We built it ourselves. You did too. You’re as much a part of it as anybody.”

  I struggled against the sense of what he was saying. I felt myself scrambling. I wasn’t a part of it, not anymore. Not since that day on the bridge, when I said no to Varvara. “Just be a poet again. You don’t need to do this.”

  He studied me with his new eyes. “Varvara was right about you. You’re no revolutionary. You’re just a bourgeois girl with enthusiasms.”

  I didn’t want to hear that name, ever again. “And she’s a Savonarola. Don’t you dare quote her to me.” Pung pung. Pungpungpung. I imagined how loud that was out on the gulf. Men were losing their lives on both sides because of him and her, the spacemen and the liars.

  “But why the sailors, Marina? Things are always personal with you.”

  “Yes. I know those men. I don’t live at the Astoria, dining with commissars and party dignitaries. I teach poetry to workers. I taught at the sailors’ club on the Admiralty docks. Those men are the very soul of the revolution.”

  “The sailors’ club…” he repeated as if licking ice cream off a spoon, and I didn’t like the expression his broad face was wearing now—as if he had me all figured out. “There wouldn’t perhaps be one sailor in particular? Some handsome devil in a striped jersey?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I said.

  He burst out laughing. “You’re still you, aren’t you? Oh, the angelic saviors of the revolution, noble Kronstadt!” He laughed, ugly and harsh.

  “Stop it, Genya.”

  He held his hands up in the air, surrender, mocking me. “Oh, they’re not counterrevolutionaries, they’re preparing to die for our sins, they’re Blok’s goddamned Christ. Oh! Oh!” His arms outstretched, they almost reached from wall to wall.

  Now there was nothing at all attractive about him. I knew which side I was on. Pasha or no Pasha, I would feel the same. “You know them too. How dare you print those signs, saying they’re the same as Cossacks, saying it’s a White conspiracy. You parrot. You never used to be a mouthpiece.”

  “You’re incredible, you really are.” Wiping his eyes. “My God, Marina, is there nothing you wouldn’t do? I thought you were having an affair with Anton.”

  I turned my back to him. Steam was rising from the kettle. I took it off the stove and splashed water on the pine needles. The air filled with the smell of forest. “You didn’t think about him when you came up here. How he must be suffering, right now, thinking I’m betraying him with you.”

  That took the smile off his face.

  “And if you must know, I was with the sailor first. It was Anton who came to me. Said that he’d loved me since the beginning, and he was going to leave if I couldn’t love him back.” Moscow went out of his hazel eyes, as he pictured his best friend back on Grivtsova Alley, when we were living on top of each other.

  “You’re making this up. He couldn’t stand you.”

  I lingered over the open kettle. The scent of pine would always recall to me that long walk through the snow to Maryino, my night under the snow in a burrow of pine boughs. “I thought so too, but it was just the impossibility of competing with you. It was unbearable to him.” A huge explosion rattled the windows. I thought they might break. The snow changed direction again, hammering at the windowpanes, building up on the sills.

  “Loving you is a curse I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” His voice had lost its stentorian ring. “I know. I’ve tried to kill it, but I can’t. No matter how many times I mow the field, cornflowers keep coming back up.”

  Even now. What a mess, what an unholy mess. I poured the tea into the two mismatched cups. I handed him the tin one.

  “Come to Moscow with me. Both of you. We’ll get away from this mausoleum, the Gumilevs and Khodaseviches. This will be over soon, and we’ll be part of Russian literature—we’ll live forever.”

  “You won’t be part of it,” I said. “Look what it’s done to you. Come to Petrograd and be a poet again. Stop working for ROSTA before it kills what’s good about you.”

  “I can’t,” he said, stroking his hair back. “You think I’m just a mouthpiece? I’ve thought about this long and hard. I believe in what I’m doing.”

  Worse yet. “They’ve broken you,” I said. “You’re like a racehorse that’s been put to the plow. You’ll never be able to run again. Your knees are broken. What’s happened to that red horse, the red horse that was you?”

  “It doesn’t matter about me,” he said. “I’ll go on. Broken kneed or not.”

  “It hurts just to look at you.”

  He held the cup and gingerly took a sip. I knew it was biting, sour. He made a face. “What is this?”

  “Pine needles. For scurvy. The Bolsheviks take the real tea for themselves.”

  He sat on my cot, holding the cup by the rim, and drank, grimacing with every swallow. “Revolutions in the mind are perfect—so long as they stay there. Nobody’s selfish, nobody’s featherbedding. But real ones have a life of their own. They work through real men, with all their warts and bad breath and selfishness. Now that it’s here, we need to see it through.”

  His good suit, his handsome face. Who was the naive one? “No, we don’t. The emperor is naked, Genya. Don’t try to convince me about his suit’s sumptuous contours.”

  He held the cup with his fingertips, it looked like a piece of a little girl’s tea set in his oversized hand. “Look, say you had a child—”

  My eyes watered with the surprising blow.

  He blanched. “No, I mean…listen. Say there’s a child. And it’s playing near the stove. And the mother—the father—says, ‘Be careful, you’re going to get burned.’ But the kid doesn’t understand burned. So the father says, ‘There’s a devil in the stove. He’s going to eat you up.’ The kid’s afraid of devils, so he stays away fr
om the stove. That’s what I’m doing here, Marina. Keeping Russia away from the stove. Is that so bad? I could explain that the country’s about to go up in flames. There’s a peasant revolt in Tambov going on right now that’s going to make the Ukraine under Denikin look like Swan Lake. And that’s not the only mess on our hands.”

  There was a revolt in Tambov? This was the first I’d heard about it. I studied him, hunched on the edge of my small bed, his forehead knuckled with care, the hot cup on his knee.

  “Let’s say you did get your Soviets Without Communists. You know what that’s going to look like? Mealymouthed Mensheviks and speechifying SRs. Anarchist dreamers. They’re going to wring their hands and talk, talk, talk while the country burns down around them. Then in rides a strongman, some general—Kornilov’s still around, Wrangel, maybe Denikin himself. Urah! Someone has to restore order. This time there are no Bolsheviks around to do it. Oh, they’ll whip us back into line. Dissolve the soviets, massacre the socialists, string up the workers. They’ve got to keep the bad Bolsheviks from coming back, don’t they?”

  He set the cup on the desk and came to me where I was standing at the window, put his warm hand on the nape of my neck.

  “So, no, these sailors aren’t Whites. They’re every bit as noble as you think they are. But they’re opening the door. They’re going to have to take White money, the revolution will be lost, and everything we’ve done will have been for nothing. It will just be an interlude in a history book, like the Paris Commune. The four years of the socialist experiment in Russia.”

  No. No, I would not listen. I would put wax in my ears like the sailors on Odysseus’s ship. I turned away, but he held my shoulders, turned me back. He would force me to see his point of view.

  “I can’t let that happen, Marina. People get lost in the niceties. So for now there’s got to be a devil in the stove and Whites behind the Kronstadt revolt.”

  “Don’t touch me!” I shoved him off. The Genya I knew would never speak of devils in the stove. I remember how he once smashed an old woman’s icon. He hated priests and superstition, anything remotely fabricated. “What happens when your child finds out his father’s lied to him? That it’s all shit?”