by Janet Fitch
“At the orphanage,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“They arrested Gumilev,” Shafranskaya chimed in, her white hair twisted into a messy chignon, her crumpled floral dress misbuttoned. “Woke up the porter. Forced him to lead them to his room. And then to yours! They tossed it, took your notes, asked me and Alla if we knew where you were. Of course, we’d never heard of you. We didn’t even speak Russian.”
“Where’s Gumilev’s wife?” I asked. She’d come back from the country just at the wrong time.
“Still up there. She’s in shock.”
They’d arrested Gumilev. He always said they’d never arrest him—they had a gentleman’s agreement, him and the regime. He would teach, serve the Bolshevik state, and stay out of politics, and they would let him have his opinions, his prayers, his antique beliefs, and go on writing. Evidently not. Varvara had told me as much. It’s starting to look like a picture. “Has anyone told Gorky?”
No one knew.
I ran. I flew. Down Nevsky, through the General Staff arch, across Palace Square to the Troitsky Bridge. I caught a tram past the fortress, where Nikolai Stepanovich might now be imprisoned in a cold cell. I had missed the Cheka search by just a few hours. Saved by orphans. It didn’t matter that I’d drowned my dossier in the Neva. They had come for me anyway.
Though it was a hot August morning, I could feel the damp, cold walls of the Troubetskoy Bastion, the weight of the low ceiling. I did not turn my eyes from the east as we trundled past the fortress, staring into the sun glinting on the river until I jumped from the tram at Kronverksky Prospect and ran to Gorky’s house.
Molecule answered the door, her small face pale and drawn. There were dark circles around her eyes.
“I need to talk to Alexei Maximovich. Did he hear about Gumilev?”
She wore a work apron, her dark hair in a knitted beret. “It’s not just Gumilev. It’s all the intelligenty. Professors. Doctors. The relief committee. They even got Ukhtomsky at the Hermitage.” The director of the museum! Bozhe moi.
“Everything’s coming apart,” she said, “while Lenin’s got him writing to everybody in the West for famine aid. He’s even working with the Patriarch, if you can believe it.” Unthinkable. Who hated the church more than Gorky? “He’s just back from Moscow. He finally got permission for Blok to leave.”
Blok? I grabbed her arm. “Is Blok under suspicion?”
“No, he’s just sick. But here’s the thing—they won’t let his wife go, and he can’t go alone.” She wiped her eyes.
It was too much to take in. Gumilev, Blok. In the front parlor, the plants were dying, the furniture was dusty, the house felt uninhabited. “Where is everyone?”
“Gone.” She stuck her hands in her apron pockets. “Moura’s in Estonia. Maria Andreeva’s in Germany. She’s head of the Petrograd Office of Foreign Trade now—art and antiquities. It’s a mass sell-off.”
I followed her down the hall toward the heart of the apartment. No sounds came from any of the rooms, no laughter, no one talking on the telephone. How could Moura leave Gorky at a time like this? Everything was coming to an end. Now I could hear Gorky coughing.
“Lenin wants him to go to Germany to put pressure on them for aid. Is he the only person in Russia who can do anything?” she said under her breath.
“They’ve made sure there isn’t anyone else,” I said.
I knocked gently on the office door and opened it. Gorky sat in the middle of a fug of smoke, writing by hand. When he saw me, he waved me in with two nicotine-stained fingers. He was gray with exhaustion. And he was on his own now. Why had she decided to leave now, without him? Was she preparing the way? Or had she fallen under suspicion herself and decided to slip away when she could?
He reached forward and pressed my hand, gestured to a chair. His hand was hot. He was sweating, though the window was open and it was not hot in the room.
“Any news about Gumilev?” I took a seat in the leather chair where I’d once sobbed out my confession.
“They haven’t charged them yet,” he said. He rubbed his gray face with his large square hand. He was still in his dressing gown. “I never thought they’d arrest him.”
“They’re looking for me too,” I said. “They searched my room.” I hated to burden him with my problems, but he knew things, knew how a person should act. I would try to be brave, but my instincts were poor. If I was alive with any of my soul still intact, it was this man’s doing. In a way, he was my father, the father I never lied to. “I should tell you, I was seeing a Kronstadt sailor. They know that.”
When I saw the painful expression on his face, I wished I had kept that to myself. How tired he looked in that worn dressing gown, his seamed face, his hollowed-out chest. He turned his head to cough. He really needed to get out of Russia, every bit as much as Blok did. The phone rang, a relief. God knew from what hidden reserves he summoned the energy to keep his hand in all our lives. I tried not to eavesdrop, but how could I not. It was about Ukhtomsky, the roundup over at the Hermitage. Though it was perfectly calm in the room, I felt the storm raging outside—huge trunks cracking, branches flying in the wind. Would this be the final storm? I could almost hear the house groan.
“You need help,” I said after he’d hung up. “Why did Moura go?”
“I wanted her to,” he said. “I wanted to get her out of this before it gets any worse.” He screwed a cigarette into his black holder, lit it. “So what were you doing with a Kronstadt sailor?”
“A lover.”
He nodded. “And how did you meet him?”
“I was teaching at their club on the Admiralty docks. Gumilev gave me the class.”
He winced. “And people knew—about the sailor?”
I thought of the eyes watching us as I brought him through the House of Arts. The way he would sit in the canteen with Kuzmin, waiting for me. “It wasn’t a secret. But he was from the Petropavlovsk. On their committee.”
He closed his eyes, massaged his broad forehead with his fingers, along the ridge of his brow. “Luck has not been your friend,” he said. “Is there anywhere safe you can go? A school friend in the suburbs? Cousin in the country?”
Cousin in the country.
It’s starting to look like a picture.
The air left the room as I realized with a sickening jolt that I could not return to the House of Arts. I was done there. Done as a poet, a member of that blessed fraternity. Just when I’d finally joined their world. Blok knew my name, but Blok was dying. Now it was over. Just like that. I’d had everything, and then it was taken away. What had I thought? That I would tell Gorky about Gumilev and go back to the House, clean up my room, set the furniture to rights, pick up where I’d left off? What a fool.
“Will you be all right?”
I struggling to breathe, to see, bumped my leg on the chair in my hurry to get away, to keen and sob somewhere private. “I’ll be fine.”
“Marina?”
I stood at the door, my hand on the knob. I rested my forehead against the wood, the intricate grain of the oak.
“I’m sorry. I’d invite you to stay here—we’ve got nothing but rooms—but it’s impossible now. You have some idea of the situation…But come back if you can’t find anything. I’ll think of something.”
His kind face. We never did lie to each other, Alexei Maximovich and I. “Don’t worry about me.” I tried to smile. “Good luck with Gumilev.”
He reached out his big square hand and I shook it. “I wish I could do more for you.” He let me go, took out his wallet from the desk drawer, and handed me five hundred rubles. A month’s wages for a workingman, or used to be. The sight of it only emphasized the danger he felt me to be in. I waved it away, but he took my hand, pressed the money into my palm. “It won’t help much, but for my sake, take it.”
I put it in my pocket. I could hardly see for the tears in my eyes. I would never see him again either? It was all ending.
“Who would have guessed we�
�d have to be so brave in this life, eh? I thought I could just get rich and take it easy.” He laughed and started coughing. “Be well, Marina Dmitrievna.”
“And you, Alexei Maximovich.”
I slipped out of the apartment, down the back stairs, and out into the courtyard, and through the little alleys and the park, the long way home. Home to Orphanage No. 6, where they knew me only as Comrade Marina. With Matron’s connivance, I could stay hidden among the children. I had paid my passage on this ship well ahead.
61 The Poet, Blok
I cut off all contact with the House of Arts. I only hoped Anton would think to go to my room, get my clothes, the things I’d need this winter, and keep them safe—and for Christ’s sake not come looking for me. Orphanage No. 6 was only two blocks away, but it might as well be Irkutsk, and had to be. I set the distance in my mind, already a parallel dimension, unreachable. The House of Arts simply did not exist. Here at the orphanage, my petty literary ambitions were nothing compared to the desperate needs of these starved children, hands as light as paper, eyes so wounded it was hard to return their gaze. What was I compared to this? Longings, friendship, community—dreams.
When I thought the situation could not be more depressing, the last blow arrived. Taking a break in the summer dusk in Arts Square, I glimpsed Makar selling Pravda and God knew what else, with a group of older…you couldn’t call them orphans. At fifteen or sixteen they were men of the city, biznissmen. I went over to buy a paper, hoping for news of Gumilev. On the front page, lower right corner, a box edged in black held a simple notice:
Last night the poet Alexander Blok passed away.
I felt as if a giant guillotine had sliced me in two, from the top of my head to my feet. I would split like a log and fall to the stones of Arts Square. My lips formed the words. “Blok is dead.” As if saying the words would make it anything less than lunacy.
“Blok, Blok,” Makar mocked me. “Lya lya fa fa. Who was he, Lenin’s brother?”
I leaned on him so that I would not come apart in the middle of Mikhailovskaya Street. Tried to breathe some air but suddenly my lungs seemed glued together.
Although I’d been sleeping with starving children for days, rubbing empty, aching bellies, holding them as they described their villages where people lay on the sidewalk with only the strength to hold one hand outstretched. Although I’d been cast out by poetry, and brave Gumilev languished in prison, and Pasha was dead in the gulf, and Anton was out of reach, this was the thing that I could not bear. I would have thought myself beyond such grief, but this anguish was of a very special sort.
I looked around me at the noble, shabby buildings, the bushes and lawns, the statue of Pushkin, covered with pigeons. Pushkin, hounded by the rabble, and now, Blok was dead. I lowered myself to the bench where I’d once sat with Varvara and Mina as we ate nonpareils out of a paper cone and watched the doorway to the Stray Dog Café. Now I paged through Pravda. Surely there would be a paragraph or two devoted to the poet, a famous poem or two, but it was just that one line: The poet Alexander Blok…passed away…The poet. You might as well have said that poetry itself had died.
I headed out to Kolomna through the shimmering summer dusk as if pulled by an unearthly hand. Every canal, every square, whispered his name. I remembered the day I went to speak to him about our reading and his wife came to the door. The day we met on Bolshaya Morskaya outside the telephone exchange and he invited me to the Bely reading at the House of Arts. Those afternoons I sat on the Pryazhka Embankment, a young girl, watching his windows. His name trembled in the air like radiograph waves, vibrated along the stones. The poet Alexander Blok passed away…A streetcar sailed by me on Kazanskaya Street so close I had to jump. I didn’t even hear the screech and bells. Gumilev’s lost streetcar. But it wouldn’t be suitable to take a tram to Blok’s house. One should go on one’s knees.
The air grew cooler as I passed the Mariinsky Theater and entered Ofitserskaya Street, wide and commercial. A few shops had opened here—a pastry shop, a cobbler, a pharmacy. How appropriate. The night, the street, the streetlamp, the pharmacy…He should have died in wintertime. Summer wasn’t his season. Blok needed a frozen canal, a group of poets escorting actresses home from Ivanov’s Tower on a frosty midnight. I passed the Komissarzhevskaya Theater, where his famous Puppet Show had played. And what about this puppet show? You die—and then relive it all…there is no change. And no escape.
Was I weeping because I’d never had that beauty? Or because he gave it to me, gave it to everyone who had heard his song. I stumbled down to the Pryazhka River and his tall house on the corner, 57 Ofitserskaya. I stood on the embankment where I’d stood so many times, staring up at those windows. In a world of poets, he’d been the poet—who had seduced us all, the angel of light, shadow against blinds, the flicker in the mirror. Blok. You saved my life. You can’t be dead. He’d taken me—this orphan—from the streets, and breathed life into my lungs, called me poet.
I heard singing through the open windows, the Orthodox liturgy. People entered and left by the main street door. Did I dare go up? Who was I? Just another dreamer whose life he’d touched. One of millions. Millions, alone and lost on this earth, and just a few angels. They show us how we must live, breathe life into the mud we are, and give us—beauty. Colors to which we would otherwise be blind. Light blue and silver and lilac. His, the snow falling. His, the fog. His, the masquerade. His Twelve, that blizzard, that mystery, with Christ leading the parade. But for me, he would always be the lover who sends roses to the mysterious woman in a restaurant, a woman with a feather in her hat who nods and says to her friend, “He’s in love with me too.”
I wasn’t planning to go up, and yet, I went. The door was open. After the greenish summer-river smell of the Pryazhka, it was hot and close in the apartment. All was just as I remembered, the door, the stairs, the striped wallpaper in the entry. The flat was full of people, a service going on, the heat and smell of flowers overpowering. A man was leaving. He passed me by, wiping his face with his handkerchief, overcome with heat or emotion. I stopped in the doorway of the dining room, where Blok was the guest of honor as well as the host, on the table in a white coffin and, oh God—in death he looked nothing like himself. I remembered him tall and golden, but the corpse was slight and dark, with a dark stubble of beard and dark hair. Death changed a man. Illness, suffering—though who of us had remained unchanged? An old lady hovered nearby, his mother maybe. And two other women. I recognized his wife, Lyubov Mendeleeva, and a woman I realized with a shock was Lyubov Andreeva-Delmas, his Carmen. He had written an entire cycle of poems about her. Now she was just an ordinary stout middle-aged woman, but the poet had made her immortal, the voice that had driven him mad. His fourth muse, or his tenth. Lyubov i Lyubov. Two loves among the many.
And here was Kuzmin, and Inna Gants, and Zamyatin with his sophisticated face, his moustache. People I didn’t know, but who knew each other, from his precious life—not long, but long enough to mark a country. The singing went on and on. It lulled me as I listened, just outside the doorway. At one side of the dining room, standing with a woman friend, was Akhmatova. She rolled against the wall, leaned her cheek on it as if it were alive. So much suffering in this world. Enough to go around for the rest of time. Bely arrived, white-haired in a black skullcap. Seeing Blok, his blue eyes grew so wide they were squares. How strange that death admitted all, opened every door. People who had not the sense to gather before had gathered now. Blok, where did you go? We were orphans without you, starving, lost. I’d cut a pine bough across the street. You could see the light green of the new growth. I held it to my nose. Like Blok, it freshened. Like Blok, tall and ever green. I laid it with the flowers. Someone, a girl—I remember having seen her but not who she was—told us the funeral would be tomorrow at ten at Smolensk Cemetery, up on Vasilievsky Island. A breeze blew the curtains. It was still light outside. How could that be?
More people arrived. It was time for me to give up my place. I sho
ok his wife’s hand, said something, even curtsied—my God, where did that come from?—and rushed out, back down the stairs, onto the Pryazhka Embankment. The green freshness of the river calmed me. I found a little copse of trees down by the water where I could sit and watch the ripples, the silver and rose of the Petersburg twilight, hear the plash of the water, a flash of fish, and remain with Blok a little longer, in sight of the lit window. No point in walking all the way back to the orphanage. I lay down and fell asleep to the singing on the air and in the mouths of frogs.
I woke in the morning stiff and rumpled, leaves in my hair. Old people and girls with flowers had already gathered on the Pryazhka Embankment above me. A bright, clear day, without a cloud, inappropriately halcyon for a poet whose preferred moods of nature were fog, gloom, and storm. I shook my hair and my dress, tried to smooth myself out, relieved myself behind a bush, washed in the water lapping the embankment, and joined the others who waited on the corner—forty, fifty, a hundred souls. More kept arriving. I could smell the flowers—lilies—in their hands. Suddenly the sound of singing swelled, loud and full throated as the gates to the courtyard were flung open and the white coffin emerged.
They bore him aloft at shoulder height, so that all could see his profile against the sky, whittled to dark wood like a mannerist Christ. Carrying the coffin seemed surprisingly light work for such as Bely, Zamyatin, others I knew or didn’t recognize. In the crowd was every last remaining member of literary Petersburg, all but Gumilev. I wonder if anybody had told him Blok had perished. Here were Delmas and Lyubov holding up Blok’s mother as we began our march in the morning sun, and Akhmatova, in a black veil, as if she had been the wife and not Lyubov. But where was Gorky?
The corpse seemed happier in the open air, and the choir’s voices swelled as if unloosed from the walls. I tied my white matron’s scarf around my hair, peasant style, low on my forehead. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me. I only wanted to be close to Blok in these last minutes, as long as he remained above soil. It made me feel like a nun as I followed the procession, several modest lengths behind the notables.