Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

Was that what was bothering her? Dance halls and bakeries? “You’ve crushed the people’s last hopes to have a say in their own country. Don’t begrudge them a few eggs and dance halls.”

  She snorted. “You mean the return of capitalism in Soviet Russia? Haven’t you heard? They’re granting concessions to foreigners, selling off everything that’s not nailed down. You don’t know the half of it.” Her hand trembled so, she had to tuck it under her armpit, bringing her cigarette to her lips with the other. “I thought I could talk to you.”

  I leaned over her, keeping my voice down. “After what you’ve done to me? You can talk to that statue. It’ll hear you better than I can.” I began to walk down the gravel path.

  “I saved you more than once,” she called out after me. “We both played our hands. Your old man too. You think that was the worst thing I ever did?”

  I couldn’t yell what I was thinking across the Summer Garden. This was the world she had created, where people disappeared, later to be dumped in apartment hallways. I marched back, stood over her. If I could have picked up a rock and smashed her skull open, I would have. “No one forced you. You could have been anything, but you chose to be Torquemada. You’re a blot on the sun.”

  She looked up at me, hunched over her briefcase, as if she had a terrible cramp. “We were building a new world! And now the whole thing’s kaput.” She raised her cigarette to her lips again, those bleeding nails. “We should have seen it coming. In 1918 when that politician signed the peace with Germany.” Lenin. “Gave in to all their demands. First he sold out the German worker and now he’s sold out revolution for a tin of herring.”

  Yes, think what you’ve done. “The Bolsheviks killed the revolution.” I sat back down on the bench so I could speak without being overheard. “You gutted the soviets. You turned workers into units of labor. God forbid that people can buy a tin of herring, a bit of meat. You and your people were the ones trading. You traded the revolution for Bolshevik power. You did it.”

  “That tin is the death of the revolution,” she said.

  “If he hadn’t changed the policy, Lenin would be ruling over a nation of the dead. But he killed off the voice of the workers. The soviet’s a sham. And you’re complaining because people can buy and sell a handful of flour? Who are you, Varvara?”

  She rubbed her forehead hard with the flat of her hand, as though she could wipe something from her memory, or clear away years of soot and cobwebs. When she began again, her tone had changed. Raspy and listless. “I was a human being when this started. Remember? I liked things. Beethoven. Those little sandwiches your mother used to make. Remember when your family took me to see Chaliapin, at the House of the People?” My friend, my mortal enemy, my sister, lover…hunched over like a dirty crow. She took a last drag on her cigarette and flicked it away. “I remember sleeping over the first time. You gave me your robe—remember that? We all slept in the bed together, you, me, Mina, and the dog.” She laughed. It sounded like a sob.

  “And now you’re sorry, is that what you’re trying to say?”

  She hung her head so I couldn’t see her face, only her nose’s sharp outline, her prominent chin, and the dirty hanks of her frizzy black hair. “It’s killing me. I see their faces. I hear them, begging.” She coughed, and then kept coughing. She sounded like Gorky or old Petrovsky. “I can’t go on, Marina. It’s a nightmare. It was all for nothing.” She covered her eyes, shading them from the sun’s accusation. What she had done for her spaceman’s dream. That blood did not wash off. What agony she must be in. I knew she’d thought what she was doing was right—but it couldn’t save her from the guilt. So the spaceman had finally crashed to earth. That she, the most brilliant, our Ivan Karamazov, had not seen the obvious—that the Bolsheviks were not glittering theorists after all but just power-seeking politicians. What a terrible moment when the truth flooded in. They’d lied, they changed course when it suited them. Power was their true north—and ideologues like Varvara, the ones who couldn’t bow and hang on during the sharp turns of state, would fall or be thrown from the ship. Unlike Genya, who was proving himself quite capable of making these transitions, Varvara was dying of shame. She was the worst, but also the best.

  “If you were in my shoes, what would you do?” she whispered.

  I had never felt further from her in my life. Not angry, or pitying. But as implacable as time itself.

  A worker family strolled nearby—mother, father, a little boy about four with the shaved head of summer—taking the air amid the Greek and Roman statues commissioned by emperors. The Summer Garden had only been open to the public since the 1850s, and then just to the well-heeled, the formally dressed—there’d been a strict code. Avdokia had avoided it, preferred taking us to the more relaxed Tauride Gardens. Looking at this family on the gravel path, the woman in her old flowered dress, the man in a Russian shirt, examining the statue of Alexander the Great, I thought, maybe we’d done some good. Perhaps someday, something would remain. The boy rode a stick horse, galloping along the path. He’d probably never seen a live one, though certainly he’d eaten its flesh.

  Her hand crept out to hold the fabric of my skirt. “Forgive me, Marina. But there’s no one else I can talk to.”

  “What about your Cheka comrades?”

  She laughed, painfully. “That boatload of psychotic freaks?”

  “Manya?”

  “She’s in the Volga, doing famine relief. It’s a disaster out there. Kazan, Ufa, Samara. You have no idea.” She slumped unhappily on the green slatted bench, her long legs stretched before her. “Meanwhile we’re selling off pieces of Russia. You can hear the auctioneer’s gavel from here.” She pinched her nose at the bridge, trying to compose herself. “When I used to think of the future, I could see it as clearly as I can see that statue’s fat ass.” She nodded at Aphrodite’s derriere. “Now all I see is a wall.”

  I knew the sensation. I had felt it last autumn as I gazed into the Neva. Pressure, that made death seem like a rational alternative. While all around us, early summer unfurled, hope juicy in the green leaves, the innocent hope of the natural world.

  “Ever think of leaving?” she asked me.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “You?”

  She shook her head the way even a good chess player sometimes does when he looks down at the board to discover that in his pursuit of the adversary, he’s closed off every avenue.

  Two men walked past, smoking desultorily, looking us over. One said, “Hey, girlies—”

  “Keep walking, bratya.” She had no Mauser but her tone commanded respect.

  We watched the men’s backs moving away in their frayed shirts, their tattered jackets. “I just came to warn you,” she said. “Your name’s being mentioned in connection with the mutiny.”

  I felt the familiar tzing of terror in the center of my chest and up my spine. “What did they say?”

  “That you taught at the sailors’ club. That you’d been regularly seen with one of the instigators. Sleeping with him, of course.”

  “It’s not a crime.”

  “Kislov, Pavel Vladimirovich, of the Petropavlovsk. You are in daily contact with the monarchist Nikolai Gumilev, and your father was shot by the Extraordinary Commission. It’s starting to look like a picture.”

  I felt dizzy. My skin prickled in an ugly way. Gumilev never made any secret of his beliefs, and no one had ever bothered him. Who told them about me and Pasha?

  She sighed, put her briefcase on the bench between us. “Think about going to Moscow. Hole up with Genya. He’s the best defense you’ve got.”

  Diana, moon browed, frowned, raising her bow, notching her arrow. “I can’t stand the sight of him.”

  “Better listen to me. I know what I’m talking about.”

  I nodded. But I would not take any more favors or advice from Varvara. Not after that delivery, wrapped in sheepskin.

  “If anything happens this time, I won’t be around to save you,” she said. She turned to me, her black eye
s rimmed with red.

  “Where are you going?”

  She shook her head and turned away. “Don’t remember me like this.”

  We were caught in a great net. I could feel it scooping us up out of the water, like herring. We struggled and flapped as the net drew closed and dumped us on the deck in a vast heap, gasping.

  She took my hands. “See you around,” she tried to say, but her voice cracked.

  I’d never seen her despair. She gazed into my eyes, hers so familiar, her hair as black as a raven’s wing, and, my God, she had strands of white woven in with the black. “We’ll meet again in Petersburg…” she recited. “Isn’t that how it goes?” Mandelstam’s poem. Varvara, the least poetic soul in Petrograd. “This is for you.” She handed me the cardboard briefcase. “It’ll give you a head start.”

  I opened it, withdrew a gray file folder. MAKAROVA, Marina Dmitrievna. Varvara had stolen my Cheka file. It was terrifyingly fat, an inch thick at least. I remembered the files we’d burned on the street when they’d broken into the police station on Liteiny. She’d gone in, while I had stayed outside on the sidewalk, feeding files to the fire. Back when I thought people would be free of such things. My own dossier: my picture, my aliases, addresses, known associates, my number at Gorokhovaya 2. My father. Kolya. Genya. The Krestovskys. Current residence: House of Arts, 59 Moika.

  Varvara was not planning to return. Not to Petrograd, not anywhere.

  We kissed each other formally, three times. She smiled her crooked smile and left me there by the haunch of Aphrodite, the statue’s hand shielding its face from the light.

  60 Famine

  In the black-earth belt of central Russia, from Kazan down to the Caspian Sea, the dry hot summer replaced our rye and wheat—our elemental gold—with dust. This wasn’t just hunger, where “somewhere” there was food—a problem of distribution, a problem in the city—but famine. Famine in the Volga, starvation in the Don, drought in the Crimea. Kazan, Samara, Izhevsk, Kambarka. The ravens flew in the cruel cloudless skies over the exhausted land. After last year’s poor harvest came the blow of drought. The rains in Petrograd belied the searing pitiless sun blanching the agricultural lands of the Volga and the Ukraine. Starvation spread out its ghastly rule, tenfold anything we’d experienced in the city. No one in Petrograd complained about his rations now. The Povolzhye, the great basin of the Volga, was down to its last grains. Unthinkable.

  Even from here, I could tell how bad it was, the way hunters read the migration of birds. Besprizorniki were pouring into the city, their numbers like locusts emerging from the ground. They arrived by train, thousands each day, begging, mobbing passersby. “Where are you from, sweetheart?” I would ask in the street. Samara, they said. Tambov. Taganrog, Tsaritsyn. Some could only stare. Little children, perhaps they didn’t know themselves. Only that the White One had chalked the crosses on their doors, and summoned the ravens, and the ravens obeyed.

  Finally, even our lying government stopped trying to cover it up. Pomogi! Help! cried the old man from the posters in the windows where the ROSTA campaign against the sailors had made its claim just a few months ago. People who had not been seen in public life since the October Revolution came out of the woodwork, stepping forward to raise money for the starving. The All-Russian Famine Relief Committee consisted of an unprecedented cross section of influential Russians—SRs, old generals, even Tolstoy’s daughter—framed by the usual Bolshevik officials. Of course, Gorky led the way. Benefits for the victims were held all summer long—concerts, art auctions, readings, plays. Citizens parted with their money, the little we had.

  But everything conspired against the victims—seven years of war, everyone taking the peasants’ grain as they rode through, the Whites and the Reds alike, the food detachments from the city. The Bolshevik policy that everything belonged to the state compounded by the lack of manufactured goods from the cities’ exhausted factories, all caused the peasants to plant less. Why should Ivan work so hard when there was nothing to buy and it would all be taken from him anyway? But Ivan hadn’t planned on last year’s poor harvest, and—fatally—this year’s vicious drought to finish him off. His rebellion had backfired, and now temperatures above 100 degrees baked the land to ceramic.

  The propaganda, of course, was that it was all the fault of the Entente and the bourgeoisie. Everything had been forced upon us, the war, the civil war, everything but the weather was bourgeois wrecking, and if the Bolsheviks could have figured out a way to blame the weather on “the capitalists,” they would have. And yet, who was allowing capitalism into Russia?

  A note from Lenin in Pravda appealed to the trade unions of the West. He admitted the size of the famine, but blamed it on Russia’s backwardness and the war and the civil war, forced upon the workers and peasants by the landowners and capitalists of all countries. He asked for the help of the oppressed masses in Europe, who should make common cause with us whose lot it was to be the first to undertake the hard but gratifying task of overthrowing capitalism, and then enumerated the ways in which the capitalists of all countries were revenging themselves on the Soviet Republic, preparing new insurgencies and counterrevolution. The hypocrisy took your breath away.

  You could see the crosses on every house. The fear was a scent. It smelled dry and parched. It sounded like wind. How terrible the situation must be if the Bolsheviks allowed people like Alexandra Tolstaya; the well-known anti-Bolshevik intellectual Kuskova; Prokopovich, a Kerensky minister; and Dr. Kishkin, also a figure from the Provisional Government, to sit on an independent famine relief committee that had the right to collect money, publish their own newspaper, start projects that would employ people, and so on. The Bolsheviks said things like “Only they and not the government could get help from abroad.” Perhaps it was also intended to show the West that independent voices were still permitted in the Bolshevik state. It was the strangest time, the government grasping at every straw.

  I couldn’t sit on my hands at such a time, comparatively well fed and well housed and producing my poems while starvation gnawed the raw bone of the Povolzhye. I didn’t have much to offer, but I contributed what wages I made, and participated in fundraising readings at the House of Writers. But it wasn’t enough. There was something more I could do, and so I did it.

  I had never seen Orphanage No. 6 as busy as it was that morning, the first of August. The lobby was as impassable as a train station, the new arrivals baffled and glassy-eyed with hardship from their recent ordeals. Behind the bars of the amber marble front desk, Alla Denisovna shuffled through a mass of files, grown to impossible height. I knocked on the counter. “Any room at this hotel?” I said. “A double, facing the square?”

  The shock on her face when she saw me. She laughed, holding her head at the temples with one long hand. “They say there’s a drought, but the Volga’s flooding—right through the doors. Are you coming in to work or just to marvel?”

  “Work,” I said. Children clustered around me, gazing up at me with hollow eyes, patting my skirt. Pomogi! I smiled down at them. I didn’t want my horrified face to be their mirror.

  “Thank God,” she said. “Start anywhere. The canteen’s a nightmare. Tell Matron you’re here.”

  I trailed a flock of tiny starvelings to her office. “Wait here,” I said. Knocked and slipped in.

  Matron was speaking to someone on the telephone, from what I could gather tracking down a load of rice. “It’s here, you devils, just bring it—before you find yourself in the fortress.” She lowered the earpiece to the cradle with a smart click, and took in the sight of me. She’d not changed—still a wall against the chaos—calm, heavy, and capable. “Are you back?”

  “I want to help. Whatever you need.”

  She smiled. “I saw you read, Comrade. At the House of Arts.”

  A sun rose inside me. There were few people whose opinion really mattered to me, and hers was one of them. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you.”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you. S
ometimes I see you walking. It’s good you’ve come. Not everyone can look at this. Most people turn their heads, and how could they not? A problem without a solution, only grief.”

  I started in the canteen. Little food, children in rags, scarce water. They were short on everything—chairs, and adults. So many orphans. All I could do was help them sit down, four to a chair, and keep the old-timers from grabbing their food and terrorizing them. Later, I washed them—Boys 6–9, a lesson in horror. What could keep human beings alive with so little flesh on them, their ribs like birdcages made of bamboo. I smiled and washed them as they stared and stared. Sang them a song, “Fais Dodo, Colin.”

  There were few fights now—mostly they were in shock—but keeping them from being preyed on by the old-timers was no easy task. They’d snatch the food on its way to the new ones’ mouths. I put them to bed, told them stories—no sorcerers or magical infants, only funny tales of talking cows and wise ravens and sneaky foxes. They were as hungry for the security of a big person’s care as they were for potatoes and vobla.

  I’d meant to spend only a day or two but ended up staying on through the days and nights, taking up the rhythm of the orphanage, soothing, watching over the children in their sleep, five to a bed, head to tail and more on the floor. Held them when they woke up screaming. What these children had endured to make that journey of thousands of miles—crossing the famine regions on foot, then fleeing by train to the farthest reaches of the country in search of food. I still remembered the children huddled on the carriage’s platform that night I shot the Chekist and shoved the body off the train. These children wanted to hear stories about houses of spun sugar where you could eat the doors and windows, about sheep knee-deep in green grass, and wolves valiantly beaten off by brave children with sticks.

  One morning I returned to the House of Arts for my ration cards, to find the residents crowding the downstairs corridor outside the canteen. They stared at me as if I’d intruded from another world, as if I’d grown three heads. Anton pushed through the throng, flung his arms around me as if I’d just been saved from a shipwreck. “Where have you been?”