Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Genya’s voice, soft and deep in my ear. “He’ll be grateful that his father kept him safe when he was too young to understand. The grown man will understand why the father did it.”

  “No! He’ll wonder what else his father lied to him about.” I took his cup and opened the stove door, threw the remnants of the tea into the fire.

  “He’ll have been kept safe, and life will go on.”

  He sounded just like an old man. “Is that the son you want? A sheep? A gullible ignoramus? Superstitious, terrified of devils? Don’t you want your son to demand a say in his own life?”

  He sighed and sat down on the sagging bed, his long legs taking up much of the floor space, cradling his head in his big hands. “The people don’t care about politics. They just want to eat. They want boots, and fuel. They’ll get concessions too. They’ll be able to go out and bring food in. And, trust me, they’ll say, Ah, the Bolsheviks aren’t so bad after all. You better give up hope for your sailor. The days of anarchist communes are over.”

  How had we ended up on opposite sides of this thing? “Even in America they couldn’t get away with this.”

  How he hated even the name, America. “You don’t think capitalists have monopoly power in America? You don’t think when the workingman comes up against power in America they don’t crush him like a flea under their fingernails? You and I are living in the first workers’ state on earth. It’s already a miracle.”

  “It’s not a workers’ state. When a shipment of boots comes into the shops, it’s set aside for the Bolsheviks. Meat. Butter. Cloth, sugar, all of it. Is this what the civil war was fought for—corruption? Elitism? A new ruling class? They walk around like grand dukes. People hate them. They’re not workers. Do you see them at the lathe? Or gluing shoes?”

  He grabbed my hand as I passed, stopping me, pulling me to him. He craned his neck to peer into my face, like a child. Those hazel eyes I once loved. “But think what we do have. Yes, I hate their pushiness, too, and I hate what we have to say about the sailors. I know them too, better than you do. They’re good, brave, loyal—and wrong. They have no plan, they’re not thinking it through. I’m not going to let them play the piper and march the revolution off a cliff.”

  I yanked my hands away. “Why won’t the Bolsheviks listen to the people, then? Why are they surrounding themselves with a wall? They fire off pronouncements—Makhno and his anarchist troops, our brothers in the Ukraine! Then, once they’ve served their purpose, it’s Makhno! Traitor! Counterrevolutionary! Why can’t you be for the revolution and question the people at the top? Why can’t there be other voices?” Pung. Pungpung pung.

  “Why not free ice cream and puppet shows and carriage rides?” he shouted, picking up my chair and slamming it back down again. “Give me your list. I’ll see what I can do!”

  He turned around in my tiny room like a horse in a stall. There was no room to pace. He threw up his hands like an actor on stage, almost burning himself on the stovepipe. “I don’t know, Marina. I’m just a poet. But I’ll tell you one thing—Lenin won’t be forced by the Kronstadt sailors. Or trade unions or the Entente. Or Blok, or you or me. He’s doing what he needs to do to make sure the revolution survives.”

  Lenin reminded me of Ukashin. The same mysterious philosophy, which somehow covered every situation. I said, “I’ve seen four years of Lenin, and if you ask me, he’s got no more plan than the sailors. He finds a way to justify everything. But his only program I can see is that he’ll do what’s best for the party, to make sure they come out on top. Just like in 1918 when they left us to the Germans.”

  Genya toppled back onto my bed with a groan. I thought the whole thing would collapse under him. “This is giving me a headache. Come, sit with me for a while. Don’t talk. Just rub my forehead. Then I’ll go.”

  His silky tawny-colored hair, like rye in the sun.

  “The next time we meet, we’ll meet as strangers,” I said.

  He turned over and gazed at me, as if he hadn’t heard me all along, as if I had said something completely surprising. “It’s a lost cause. Can’t you accept that?”

  “I don’t believe in anything anymore. Not in the revolution, and not in you. It ends now.” It was as great a shock to me as to him. I suppose I thought we’d always be together in some way. He had kept saying, Wake up, and I finally had. Pasha and the sailors, that hope…but I saw that the Bolsheviks had gotten there first. They’d given the people food, but no power. They would never give them power. And the people would be happy with the food. They were starving and beaten down and hypnotized by lies. The people wouldn’t rise to save Kronstadt. The sailors, loyalists, idealists, Victory or Death. They were doomed.

  I sat down next to Genya. This monster we’d created, out roaming the streets. We had done this. We had marched for it, we had spoken out for it. I had given up everything, for this. My family, my country. The enormity of it. We sat together, Genya and I, like people after a funeral. We were burying our best dreams, in separate graves. Two little graves. We sat side by side while the snow fell, covering the raw earth in white.

  57 The Turn of the Tide

  The Squared Circle group huddled in Anton’s room, cold enough to freeze fish, but everyone came, all but Oksana and Petya, who were caught on Vasilievsky Island. I was reading the Eliot to them line by line, translating roughly into Russian, which Anton jotted down for later refinement. He’d decided that Eliot could be extremely important for us. I wasn’t sure if it was that vital, or whether it was his way to distract me from the horrors of the moment. Eliot had no political perspective that I could see, except for a cynical and depressing one, a poetry of aftermath, which suited my mood perfectly.

  The door, already ajar, began to move. “Comrade Marina?” The face that appeared in the crack of the door was somewhat lower than expected—the orphan Makar, in his cap and lice-ridden rags, his bright dark eyes. Makar took in the poets, the books, the scissors on the desk, the typewriting machine, with the quickness of a magpie. His boots didn’t match. “You said to come,” he said. “If anything changed.”

  Anton lifted his peaked eyebrow like a boomerang. “How’d you get in here?” The presence of the orphan terrified him. He had no contact with the streets anymore, he didn’t know anyone who wasn’t familiar with Khlebnikov or Kruchonykh—meaning all of humanity except for the people in this room.

  Makar indicated the door with his head, and I followed him.

  “They’re stopping Communism,” he said in the hall. “Come on.”

  I pulled my scarf up over my face as I tried to keep up with the poorly clad boy scampering ahead. Let us go then, you and I…The day was sullen, maybe 10 below, the hairs in my nose froze. My words were a cloud of white as I followed him at a half run. “Where are we going?” Once again I said a prayer of thanks to Aura Cady Sands and her sturdy boots.

  “Can’t you go any faster?”

  I didn’t have the strength. I was fighting for air, huffing like a surfacing whale. He must be taking something, cocaine most likely. He turned around and fairly danced in front of me, trotting backward, his eyes glassy black with excitement. “It’s over. They told the soldiers this morning. It’s Bolsheviks without Communism! You think I’m kidding? They’re letting the markets in. Free trade. No more grain seizures. It’s all going to be out in the open. No arrests.”

  I stopped, stooped over, holding my knees like an old woman trying to catch my breath. “Who announced this? Is it in the papers?” Nobody at the House of Arts had heard anything. Free trade in Soviet Russia? What happened to He who trades in the free market, trades the freedom of the people? It was on all our ration tickets. It had to be some kind of Bolshevik trick, more propaganda to disarm the workers and defuse support for Kronstadt.

  “It was Lenin said it. Old Egghead himself, swear to God. This morning.” Makar’s skinny bones jerked with excitement, his black cropped orphan’s head under his poor cap. “They’re going to let everybody buy what they need. The pe
asants can sell. No more Cheka, no more arrests. I’ll be a biznissman. Unless the sailors win. They say the sailors are the only ones holding it back.”

  Ice in my lungs, winter’s hand wrapping itself around my chest. How cynical. How brilliant. “But the sailors are supporting the strikers. This is exactly what they called for.”

  “The strikers are against them now. They want the market. They want the food. The soldiers aren’t scared anymore. They’re ready to die for the good of the people. You said to watch them. They’re leaving. Let’s go!”

  I followed him in and out the small lanes and snow-filled courtyards. He knew every back way, past Haymarket Square, so huge and bare it could have been a field. Would there be a market here again? If Communism was over, there was no sign of it. Only soldiers marching, a new firmness on their faces. Oh God.

  Makar led on, crossing the Fontanka at Moskovsky. We were heading into the soldiers’ district, the old Ismailovsky barracks. The garrison of Petrograd.

  It was huge, monstrous, ugly, a world unto itself—street after street of long old buildings, stone and brick, a whole quarter boiling with soldiers. Soldiers called after me, laughter followed. “Hey, sweetheart, let’s have a quick one.” “Hey, Katya, over here!” That one clasping his crotch. Laugh all you want now, bratya. You won’t be laughing when you cross the ice.

  Makar disappeared into the courtyard of an old brick barracks with shutters on the windows like a stable. I held my breath and entered. In the yard, soldiers lounged, assembling bundles, checking rifles, stowing grenades and ammunition, sharpening bayonets, smearing boots with something out of a big bucket. Couldn’t be lard, they would have eaten that. Wax? The boots had seen many miles of marching, but their clothes looked warm enough. Soldiers, everywhere you looked. Some knelt in prayer. My God, how many thousands had been assembled in Petrograd for this assault. Twenty? Forty?

  I kept close to my young guide, who led me up to a group of soldiers packing provisions into knapsacks. Preparing for battle. Money was exchanged for small packets, marafet no doubt, each man scanning the yard with quick eyes. They pulled out tin cups and the boy furtively filled them from an old canteen he had tucked under his coat. The men drank it off in single swallows, coughed, laughed. I could smell the fruity alcohol of the samogon. Their accents recalled those I had heard in Izhevsk. They’d brought these troops in from the Urals.

  “How much for her, bratik?” a reedy-necked redheaded soldier asked, his cheeks flushed with the samogon.

  “This is my aunt. She’s a teacher. She wants to know about the proclamation,” said Makar. “The new one, about the peasants.”

  “A teacher, eh?” said a sturdy man sitting on a crate. “How would this little criminal know you, then?” He held out his cup for another drink.

  “He said they’re ending the grain seizures. Is that true?” I didn’t want to get involved with a lot of chitchat down here.

  “You know, little teacher,” said the reedy soldier, breathing out a great scroll of white vapor. “I could use a quick fuck. A hand job. I’ve got five hundred rubles—”

  “Shut up,” said the sturdy man, a wide face like a wall, with clever small eyes. “She’s a teacher. Have respect.”

  “He says there’s going to be a return of capitalism, that Communism is over,” I said.

  “He said that? Stupid runt,” said the soldier, sticking out his foot to try to trip Makar, who was pouring out samogon. “The soviet’s giving ’em what they been askin’ for is all. Lettin’ city folk bring in food if they want, a tax in kind for us peasants. I’m a peasant myself. From Okhansk.” Name, region, district, profession. “We pay the tax, we do what we want with the rest. And the workers can stay home and do something useful instead of crawling all over the countryside stealing our food. I’m happy to sell ’em what they want, if I can set the price. Better they get back to work and make us some boots, eh? Then we’ll have real Communism. We just gotta stop these Kronstadt bastards from wrecking it. They want to start the war all over again.”

  This was wrong in so many ways. “But that’s exactly what the sailors want!” I said, trying not to cry. “They made just those demands. The end to the requisitioning, tax in kind, bringing in food, all of it.” Lenin was acceding to the sailors’ terms. So why was he sending all these men out to crush them? “It’s the Petropavlovsk Resolution—didn’t you see it?”

  He screwed his eyes narrower. His affable demeanor melted away. “What are you, some kind of agitator?”

  Why hadn’t Pasha given me some copies? I could hand them out, show them. “No. I just—”

  Makar quickly interrupted me, taking my arm. “She’s just trying to understand. We oughta move on, Auntie. They got their work to do.”

  “Sailors,” said another soldier, and spit on the ground. “Sit around on their lazy asses dreaming all day, polishing brass. Fishing. Got too much time on their hands, nothing better to do than hatch up conspiracies and pal around with foreigners.”

  The others laughed and nodded.

  The first soldier’s wide face still held its rage. “We ain’t gonna let sailors take away everything we fought for. Four years, now they want to piss all over it.”

  It was terrible, terrible. How could I convince them? But even if I had a copy of the resolution, would they read it? Would they believe me? “They only listened to the strikers. They’re trying to support the people. The same thing as you.”

  The way they were all looking at me now, uneasy. Their leader spoke again. “Hey, we listen to our commissars, not some anarchist school lady who’s about this close to getting her ass kicked.” He puffed away like a stove. His cheeks were very pink. “Hey, get her out of here. And bring us some real women. Maybe we’ll leave a few brats behind before we head out for the ice.” He held out his cup one more time, and the other men followed suit. “Get her out of here before I hand her around to the boys.”

  “How about a kiss, Teach?” the reedy-necked one asked, his face hovering next to mine. “One kiss? I don’t want to die without having kissed my last woman.”

  “You mean your first woman,” said a soldier with a beard, who got a round of laughter.

  The redhead shrugged, ducked his head, but his eyes pleaded. His politics mattered to him, the approval of his comrades, but his longing mattered more. He might kill Pasha tonight, but he looked so sad, his freckled face, eyes the sludge green of the Volga. All soldiers were the same in the end. They killed, they died. They fought for things they believed, or that others believed, gave their spark to an idea, a flag, a movement, brotherhood, a notion of justice, a leader. Never knowing which board they were being played upon. Maybe I was an anarchist after all. So I kissed him. The taste of the samogon, of sour breath, of fear.

  Makar tugged at my coat. An official-looking man was striding forcefully toward us in a long greatcoat. We slipped away and ran, through another courtyard, skidding on the ice, into a second yard, all the way back across the Fontanka.

  A ferocious battle began that night, like nothing we had heard yet. The rattling of the windows was fierce, even in Anton’s room facing Nevsky. Dust filtered down from the bookshelf over my head. I lay on the bed watching reflected flashes of light in the odd floor-level window. I felt sick. I should have stayed in Kambarka. Anything to be away from this. I was going to lose my mind. Everything I had believed, everything beautiful and heroic, was fighting for its life out there on the ice.

  Anton brought me a bowl of soup and held it for me while I drank. Sweet Anton—who would have guessed? They’ll never make it. I kept pushing the thought away, as if my thoughts would make it come true, though I knew my mind had no such powers, or my daughter would still be alive. I was powerless to keep anything from happening. There were too many soldiers, and again they believed, convinced they were riding the magical red steed into the golden dawn—not an iron train to an icy destination.

  I rolled and sweated and shook. I couldn’t help remembering what Genya had said. I
heard his words in my head, like bullets fired in a stone room. Kronstadt too was its own red steed. The sailors would end up taking money from somewhere, or lead a peasant revolt of the bloodiest kind, and civil war would begin again.

  History was a ravaged plain, no hill, no tree, no hiding place. No quiet forest glade or rocky cove in which you could build a refuge.

  A book fell off the shelf, loosened by the continuous thunder of 350 millimeter artillery. Those soldiers, fortified by marafet and delusions of the future of Russia, were marching on Kronstadt as the ice cracked beneath them. I wish I’d bought some of that marafet myself, or a canteen full of samogon, so I could stop imagining those boys from the Urals and men from Astrakhan, converging on the island and the helpless icebound ships. Every blast and shudder told of their fates and that of the sailors. We shall not hear those bells again…

  Anton lay down with me and recited Apollinaire’s Alcools, and Khlebnikov’s “Rus’ You Are but a Kiss in the Frost,” and “The Presidents of Planet Earth,” while I shivered and moaned, my head on his shoulder.

  At ten in the morning, March 18, the rumbling of the guns ceased. I waited for it to begin again, but—nothing. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Twenty. Anton made tea, brought me soup, fed it to me, as I could not hold a spoon, I was shaking so badly. Finally I sent him out into the street to see if he could find out what had happened. He returned two hours later with a Petrogradskaya Pravda full of the news of the Tenth Party Congress, the abolition of restrictions on trade, the tax in kind, and more lies about SR manipulation of the world stock markets, framing Kronstadt as a blind.

  So the new policies were true, or true enough that the spacemen were willing to put them in black and white, willing to be held to them—at least until the next sharp turn, when we’d all have to hang on to the tram for dear life. I remembered what Varvara had said about Lenin, back when they signed the peace with Germany: Lenin used to be a revolutionary. But now he’s just plugging the dikes like the little Dutch boy. Just another politician.