Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  The silence continued. I listened until my ears hurt. I listened like an old woman in a darkened house, waiting for footsteps.

  It wasn’t until eight that night in the crackling frost that we heard the first troops returning. Oh God, they were singing “The Internationale.” I opened the big window, not caring I was letting the heat out, and shouted down into the street as the soldiers marched by, their chins high, their step sure. “What is the fate of Kronstadt?”

  A soldier heard me. “Taken,” he shouted back.

  The revolution was over. On March 18, 1921, it was pronounced dead. All I heard was the hollowness of “The Internationale,” with its bold promises. I could hear the devil laughing. How many Kronstadt dead? I couldn’t exactly shout that out the window. I closed it, noticing a new crack from the force of the bombardment. I thought of sixteen thousand sailors—would the army have accepted their surrender? Would the sailors have offered it?

  Watching the soldiers head back into their districts, squadron after squadron, bursting with their triumph, I felt like a citizen of a defeated nation, watching the victors roll in. I imagined Pasha in a long row, his hands tied behind him. They would have dragged him up out of the hold onto the deck. Lined him and his comrades along the rail. Pasha wouldn’t look away. He would try to talk reason to them—they’d make him turn around. Then the signal given, a stream of machine-gun fire like the stitches of a sewing machine. And down they would go, wheat before the scythe. The limp bodies thrown overboard, but first, the soldiers would search them, confiscating weapons, souvenirs, money, boots…They fought on ice, in sandals…

  I had not given Pasha anything of mine to die with.

  Never, never to sail, racing on the blue, wind cooling our bronzed faces, our work-toughened hands. His Aegean eyes, his calloused feet in the rigging, his head in the sky.

  The world was a net, a noose, a cell with a judas hole in the door. Nothing would escape it—not a beam of light, not a chime, not a whisper. The door of the world clanged shut that night. I heard the key turn in the lock.

  Part V

  Little Apple

  (Spring–Fall 1921)

  58 Pashli

  A flower shop opened on Liteiny. A beauty parlor in a courtyard off the Fontanka. Like dandelions pushing their way up between the stones of an empty square. On the Neva, the ice was beginning to break. Too late. It was all too late. Too late, this shop in Gostinny Dvor, filled with ducks and chickens. Where had they come from, these miraculous fowl, when we hadn’t seen meat in years? A bakery appeared on the Moika Embankment—not one of the official ration stations barely able to supply ticket holders with scant ounces of bad bread, no. This one’s tantalizing windows attracted us like clouds of ghosts to peer in at rounds of golden-topped breads, flour-dusted white rolls, rogaliki, and raisin buns. No one could afford even the scent of them, and yet the shop was busy. Who were these people who had such riches in the spring of 1921? We stood on the broken pavement, gaping at women filling bags from the trays.

  On Nevsky Prospect, a former emporium unshuttered itself. The display mesmerized us—pâté, glistening hillocks of butter, stacked tins of goods displayed like the treasures of sultans. A young man leaned forward and kissed the glass. A little Former in black wept silently.

  Another wailed, “For this we starved? My old man died this winter, and they’ve got caviar. White flour! The prices! Who’s got that kind of money?”

  For this, Kronstadt had been crushed. For this, my father was shot by the Cheka. For this, Seryozha had been buried in Moscow. For this bald-faced inequality. Yet like all the others, I couldn’t stop staring. Tins of condensed milk, small bags of real tea. Cones of jaggery. I wanted to plunge my face into that pâté and lick that butter. Bottles of milk. How had they manifested cows from thin air? The world had changed once again, so fast you could break your neck.

  A woman with a self-righteous air and a hat à la Monomakh squeezed in past us as the crowd heckled. Guards shoved us back. Guards, protecting a capitalist food emporium in the cradle of the revolution! Even Lewis Carroll could not have imagined this. How many soldiers had fallen in this war—Red, White, Green, and anarchist Black? How many peasants had been shot for fighting grain seizures? How many families torn apart, how many civilians sent to labor camps in the far north, for selling a photo album or a bolt of lace, for bringing in a wheel of cheese or a funt of grain. I would never see my mother again. Maryino was a cinder. And yet there was white bread in the capital of Once-Had-Been.

  A moonfaced shopgirl packed a tin of smoked sprats for the customer. I knew those tins. There was a little key in the bottom to roll back the metal lid. My father had eaten them. Now new people would have that same fishy breath my mother had hated. Not proletarians, not Formers, but party officials and businessmen. The New Soviet Bourgeoisie. My stomach growled. I wondered if my mother would object to fish breath now, wherever she’d landed, on a chessboard square in Bukhara or in the mountains of Tibet. Eggs and butter and smoked Riga sprats in olive oil. How many writers and scholars could be saved by those tins, how many workers? Two weeks ago, you could have been shot for any of this. The mind simply couldn’t take it all in.

  We had paid for this with four years of cold and darkness, lice and filth and hard bits of vobla and pine-needle tea, bread full of sawdust and rags. Rooms turned into latrines. Apartments ravaged for wood.

  The people had allowed themselves to be paid off in lies and flour, leaving Pasha and his comrades to die on the ice of Kronstadt. An entire class of human beings lost, so that Soviet apparatchiks and speculators and criminals could dine on roast chicken and halvah. Like cicadas, crawling forth from burrows in the warming earth.

  In Pravda, Lenin admitted that the sailors weren’t really counterrevolutionaries. They simply didn’t want party rule. And so they had had to die.

  Genya left for Moscow without returning to the House of Arts. No fanfare, no public evening. Anton the only one who went to the station to see him off. “He said he couldn’t bear to look into your eyes.”

  And rightly so. I tore myself from the spectacle of butter and ham and wandered the thawing streets, trying to feel my way into this new world. My poor city. Grass coming up in the middle of Nevsky Prospect—you could graze goats here. Perhaps I could find some goats and become the Goat Girl of Petrograd. They said a man was keeping bees up on Vasilievsky Island. You could buy honey.

  On every street, houses had crumbled under their own rotting roofs, eaten away from within, finally collapsing in defeat. Some blocks had only one house left standing, the rest just rubble, as if they had been bombed. One could imagine them succumbing to the weight of centuries, like ancient Rome. And we, like starving barbarians, living rough among the ruins of the noble ancients, without any notion of who had constructed the walls within which we sheltered. But we’d done it ourselves, termites that we were, the wood disappearing into a million tiny stoves.

  The flower shop on Liteiny proved as irresistible as white rolls, and here there were no guards to keep me out. The mingled perfumes of lilac and lily, cherry blossoms, hothouse violets, overpowered me. I stood in the middle of the shop and wept like a child, hands hanging at my sides. An old man arranging cherry branches forced into bloom looked up and smiled, an old-fashioned face, an old-fashioned smile, soft and pitying, the way you hoped God would look, among the pink blooms. “Like old days, a little, yes?” I was Former enough to remember florist shops full of forced branches, forsythia, cherry, lilacs…the white lilacs at New Year’s, my mother’s signature. Lily of the valley, drooping their small fragrant bells.

  I turned a corner in the shop and almost fainted. A handcart held a raft of blue hyacinths, the smell so strong it drowned out all the others. I had to press my hand to my mouth not to cry out. That smell, filling our apartment on Furshtatskaya…

  The old man with the eyeglasses watched me curiously, pretending to clip and arrange lilies. Perhaps he’d known the Archangel. Perhaps he’d lived throug
h these years working in a greenhouse on the Vyborg side, tending plants in their timeless, glass-encased world. “You like hyacinths?”

  Ai, ai. Regret, distilled.

  They were cheap, but I could not bear it. I bought lilies of the valley with all the money I had. He wrapped the stems in twine and the whole bouquet in an old copy of Pravda.

  I walked along the Neva Embankment, the air scented with the fresh wind and the melancholy sweetness of the flowers. Out in the river, newly broken flats of ice traveled west. Na zapad. If the ice had only melted two weeks earlier, the sailors would have held Kronstadt. But it had not, and they had not, and now the revolution was over.

  I walked down to the westernmost bridge, the Nikolaevsky, where the water rushed black to the sea. There was still a possibility that Pasha had escaped, I told myself. Out of sixteen thousand Kronstadters, surely there had been survivors. Some must have escaped, fleeing across the ice, that same treasonous ice that had not melted in time. He could have made it to Finland. Some must have escaped, I knew, because of the rigor with which the Cheka searched every night. But I also knew Pasha. I didn’t think flee was even in his vocabulary. He wouldn’t have run if his mates were still fighting.

  I stood on the bridge, facing west, smelling the tidal reach of the sea. The Neva ice was moving below me in the center of the river, and the gulls screamed. Legend said that gulls were the souls of dead sailors. West, they screamed.

  I unwrapped the bundle from its cloak of Pravda, its headlines all threats and lies, unbound the twine and loosened the stems of the tender white blooms. Picking out a sweet-smelling cluster, I called out his name. “Pavel Vladimirovich Kislov. Vechnaya pamyat’, dearest.” And tossed them into the place where the current showed black. Let the tears roll. Then one for “Iskra Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova.” It hit the edge of a floe, but in time, it would find its way to the sea. Eternal memory. “Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov.” I had had no flowers for him that day. “I love you, Papa.” Another bloom, floated, bobbed, sank. “Sergei Dmitrievich Makarov.” Seryozha, four years gone. “Avdokia Fomanovna Malykh, be you alive or gone.” I continued with the roll of my dead. Maxim the Orphan. Solomon Moiseivich Katzev. Andrei Alexandrovich Petrovin. The family Podharzhevsky. Krestovsky. Viktoria Karlinskaya, God forgive me. Slava, and all the heroes of Kronstadt. Eternal memory. In the bottom, there was one more bloom—a scrap of blue. The old man had put it there. I held it in my hand and thought of that strange twisted soul, mourned by no one. “Arkady von Princip. May you find peace,” I whispered, and threw the last trembling sprig into the black water.

  I stood on the bridge and sent my regrets to the lands of the dead, west with the setting sun.

  59 Summon the Ravens

  We rose from the winter, from the broken years, as you do when you rise from bed after a grave illness. Shaky, weak, squinting at the sun, glad to be alive, but not yet recovered, not trusting the state of your health. Yet we had lived, and it was spring, and the city managed to find a lilac shawl in her steamer trunk to wrap about her emaciated frame. The light had been well kept under winter’s bed, and was around us once again, glamorous and tender, as only Petersburg could wear it. I walked in the light and touched the stones of the mirage. Overhead, the same gulls wheeled. How empty the city had grown.

  Trees budded into May, burst forth in summer green. Iskra would have been walking, saying her first words, Mama, Papa, kitty, doggie. Avdokia said my first word had been Opusti! Put me down! Seryozha had been a silent child, but Iskra was a great chatterer, even at three months. Oh, such stories we would have told…

  As the nights grew short, I walked alone in the Summer Garden, the warm breeze ruffling the trees where Genya and I had once embraced under the strict stone eye of Diana and her bow. A young couple walked toward me, in and out of twilight’s glow. How old were they, fifteen? She fit perfectly under his arm, her makeup gaudy. Like any other plant unsure of the future, they grew up fast. Fast to grow, fast to seed. There was no time for great oaks now. No Tolstoys would rise up among us. There was no time for giants. To think, when I was the age of these young lovers, I still wore a pinafore, and curtsied when introduced. As they passed, they glanced at me with no more curiosity than if I’d been a tree. I felt ancient. They would live lives I could not even imagine. I was twenty-one, my youth past, my beauty lost. My time was over. I’d become this somber creature, a survivor, no longer starving, but changed. Lines already formed on my forehead. Looking in a mirror, I would not have been surprised to see gray hair. I sat on a slatted bench, took out my notebook. He holds her hand. / Between the stones sprout daisies…

  The time of the poets was passing. We were entering an era of prose. Zoshchenko and Lunts, Nikitin and Slezin, boys from Zamyatin’s studio—they called themselves the Serapions—had won this winter’s House of Writers prize. A triumph for the House of Arts, but all were writing fiction. Gorky was giving them an annual—The Year 1921. The first issue of Dom Iskusstv appeared—but it included no younger poets, only the great ones, Mandelstam and Gumilev, Khodasevich and Kuzmin, essays by Blok and Chukovsky. Akhmatova had a new poem:

  Why is this century worse than all others?

  Is it because, dumbstruck with grief,

  it touched the blackest of wounds, but couldn’t

  heal it or offer any relief?

  The earthly sun still shines in the West

  and city rooftops glow in its rays…

  While here, the White One marks houses with crosses

  and summons ravens—and ravens obey.

  Critics bashed the publication, clamoring for new voices, people who could speak for our times. Well, I was alive, writing about our times, as were Tereshenko, Nikita Nikulin, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Irina Odoyevtseva, Anna Radlova, Arseny Grodetsky, and Oksana Linichuk. What about us? But the prose writers had the people’s ear. The night of The Year 1921 reading at the House of Writers, there wasn’t an empty seat. Certainly some came to hear Zamyatin, and old Grin, who had finally finished his novel, Scarlet Sails, and Inna Gants, but for a change it was the young people they wanted to see. How could I fault their success? People wanted stories to help them make sense of the times, not puzzles to challenge their souls. Solid matter had trumped the fiery spirit of verse.

  Yet Akhmatova had emerged from literary exile—all was not lost. And the State Publishing House was releasing a volume of verse by Polonskaya, the lone female Serapion brother. But she was a Marxist, a doctor. She’d distributed leaflets for Lenin in 1908. Her poems admitted the struggle but put a hopeful face on the outcome. They didn’t chalk the doors and summon ravens.

  I sat very still on the bench in the Summer Garden and kept company with the statues freed from their winter boxes, moldy and crumbling from frost, yet back in the light, pleasing our eyes with their grace. Passersby strolled arm in arm, or trailed children like little ducks, as the statues gazed on benignly. These nymphs and heroes were also survivors; it was no shame.

  A black-clad figure came forward. I thought: Summon the ravens. She’d left her Chekist leather at home today, had donned a dark blouse, a skirt. No square-handled Mauser decorated her hip. Instead, she carried a cardboard briefcase. Her black hair was unbrushed and matted. It looked like the coat of a dusty black spaniel. She sat next to me, took a cigarette from her skirt pocket, and struggled to light it. Those hands, I’d know them anywhere, long fingered, with sensitive small tips out of place in the life she’d chosen. She still bit her nails, halfway down the nail bed.

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  She squinted against the smoke, examining the hip of young Aphrodite, mottled with age and moss, and rested her head in her hand.

  How dare she come here, and sit next to me? I’d never forget the way Father looked dumped in the hall, wrapped in my bloody sheepskin. The vicious last touch when I had come home from burying him to find my room reassigned. “Look, you won. You’ve stuffed my throat with dirt. Can’t you just enjoy your triumph and leave me in pea
ce now?”

  People passed us: boys playing with sticks, girls sharing secrets with their arms around each other’s waists, men and women in their patched old clothes, so much more evident in the clear May light than under coats in the winter’s darkness. But every so often a new shirt or summer dress appeared. Already the changes were showing. And how did we seem to them, Varvara and me? Two harmless women, having a quiet conversation in the shade. If only they knew who we really were, what we’d done for the sake of history. “I don’t have to sit with you. You make me sick.” I rose but she put her hand on my arm.

  “Wait,” she said. “Please.” Something about the way she clutched her cigarette, as if she was holding on to a stair rail. Did she have some fatal disease?

  “What’s wrong? Are you dying?”

  She flicked ash into the gravel. “Who isn’t?” Her lips were cracked, her eyes sunken into bluish rings. “The revolution is over. It lies at the bottom of the sea.”

  “You should know, you were the ones who sank it. The sailors—”

  “The sailors were adventurers. Anybody could have told them they didn’t stand a chance…You could have. Surely you didn’t think they’d succeed?”

  “They had enough of a chance that you Bolsheviks changed all your policies.”

  The spark in her eyes died. She kicked her heels into the dirt. Chop chop chop. “Don’t you like your dance halls?” she said. “Traders doing business right out in the open, to the tune of the soviet’s applause?”