Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  So many women followed that procession! His poetry hadn’t been written for women any more than for men, but it spoke of us so passionately. I wondered if he had ever had that rumored affair with Akhmatova. She could barely walk from grief, clinging to her female friends. Here they all were: Benois, Ivanov, Volynsky, Shklovsky’s bald head, Anton, saying something to Tereshenko and Arseny. Here were the boys from the second floor, Zamyatin’s crew. And Gumilev’s studio. We were all here to bury our souls, following the white coffin up Ofitserskaya, turning at the Mariinsky, where more people joined us, singers and actors. Perhaps some had performed in his productions or just wished to pay tribute to the true heart of what had been and would never come again.

  By the time we crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the procession had lengthened to a full city block, a thousand people at least. It hadn’t been mentioned in the newspaper, and yet the whole city seemed to know. A carriage followed behind, empty, the pallbearers clearly set on carrying the coffin all the way. Gorky’s absence troubled me. Was he too ill to come? Had he been arrested? Summoned to Moscow? Was it political? But Blok had done nothing wrong, except talk about inner freedom.

  At last, we stood outside the small chapel of the Smolensk Cemetery, a vast, silent crowd, as the choir of the Mariinsky Theater sang the service for the dead—Rachmaninoff, and then Tchaikovsky. One last explosion of sound, like red and gold flames.

  Then we followed the coffin through the unkempt little lanes to his family plot. No one spoke. The birds were silent. The wind had ceased its rustling in the birch trees. No more sounds. A thousand people bent their heads. Silently, the gravediggers lowered him into his berth in his white ship. And silently, they filled the grave, burying the sun. Safe journey, Alexander Alexandrovich. May the immortal poets rise to greet you.

  Across the city, Iskra too, lay in her grave. Papa, Pasha. All the dead, welcoming him. Our loss was their gain.

  I hid myself in the crowd, not wanting to talk to anyone. The small sun of the poet was a secret still alive inside me. I didn’t want him to spill out of my mouth. Luckily Shklovsky was easy to see, and tall Anton with his shock of black hair. I hid until they were gone. Although I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before, I was in no hurry to return to the clamor and suffocating closeness of Orphanage No. 6. Air and silence were what I needed. Wasn’t that what Blok had been complaining about—airlessness? The pillow of the times pressed to his nose and mouth.

  Finally alone, I strolled along the cemetery’s narrow, shady paths. I liked how unkempt it was, the untidy rows and heavy trees. Perhaps this was how it was going to be—beauty relegated to the hidden places, to tall weeds and mossy corners. I collected blooming weeds, asters and carrot and Queen Anne’s lace. I remembered walking with Mother in the yard at Maryino, the Queen Anne’s lace waist high. Then I noticed strawberries growing on the graves and along the paths, no bigger than my thumbnail. The longer I looked, the more I saw them. I collected the little heart-shaped berries in my pocket, careful not to bruise them. I wished certain of my charges were with me. I’d already taken a special interest in a few, though it wasn’t right to favor one over another. But that’s how it was in life—you liked certain people, and didn’t we all need to feel singled out by someone as special? Wasn’t that a secret gift I could still give? I’d had the idea I would save the berries for them, but in the end, I ate them all myself, sitting against a tree, watching clouds sail overhead. I could collect more before I left.

  A man came strolling up the path, well dressed, wearing a light-colored suit and hat—a foreigner? An Englishman? French? And then the hat tipped back, and the grin. My mouth still full of strawberries.

  62 The NEPman

  He squatted down in his beautiful suit, not wanting to get grass stains on his trousers. I held out my hand full of berries. He lowered his mouth to my hand and ate them from my palm. The blood of the berries stained his lips as he chewed. It was my heart he was eating, that graveyard fruit. His mouth in my hand, his eyes closed. He had come for me, my Orpheus, to pluck me from the dead. Was he even alive, in his light summer suit and straw hat, shoes of two colors? His laughing eyes, upturned, oh, just like hers.

  He took his hat off, his chestnut hair curly, longer than before. Slowly he pulled the scarf from my head, revealing my uncombed locks, which had spent the night in the bushes on the bank of the Pryazhka. His smell, I’d have known it in the last darkness before the grave—honey, and lime. And then we were falling into the grass, the years dissolved like dandelion floss.

  A meadowlark cheeeeeed, the little flowers bloomed, and holding his face between my hands, I couldn’t remember what had ever parted us. His weight pinned me to the earth or I might have spun into the blue air. Kolya. His cheek against my hair. Who was that spoiled girl, throwing herself around in self-dramatizing outrage? Three years lost over a poor peasant woman in a cowshed.

  I could hear people from the funeral shifting around us, unseen, the leftover song of that choir still hanging in the air, and this, gold and bright, lime and cigars, this secret of secrets. My love had come for me. The fleshy solidity of him, this was real. He’d put on weight. He’d always had a tendency, a chubby child, but had grown hard in the war years. “You saw my poem.”

  “One can’t dance it alone,” he sang in my ear as he worked the buttons on my dress. That mouth, the top lip thin, the bottom full. His eyes, very blue and turned up at the corners, eyes made for laughter. His mouth on my neck, his hand under my skirt.

  I didn’t believe in salvation. I knew prayer protected no one. But how else to account for this miracle? I could feel him against me, his knees parting my thighs. Were we going to make love in the cemetery? But what was all lovemaking but love in a graveyard under the sad, envious eyes of the dead.

  We heard a gasp and looked up. A woman in patched clothing, accompanied by two children, hissed, “Have you no shame?”

  “Have you no shame, Comrade?” I asked Kolya, my irrepressible love.

  “Honestly, no.” But we stood and brushed ourselves off. I rebuttoned my dress and Kolya retrieved his hat. I retied my kerchief. We began to walk, arms around each other’s waists, like skaters. Our footsteps fell in perfect harmony, as they always did. We passed the poor scandalized woman again—she just couldn’t get clear of us. My face hurt from smiling. He’d come for me, as he’d said he would. I glanced up and down the paths, making sure no one else was watching. If either of us were arrested, it was hard to say who would be in more danger. But my fear seemed to be missing. I couldn’t remember its address. The Cheka would have to catch me on the run. Even they didn’t have the manpower.

  From Smolensk Cemetery back to the center of the city was a two-mile walk, but it could have been fifty for all I cared. My head against his, my arm around that solid waist, the scent of his body, we could have walked right off the face of the earth, our feet in step. We stopped at the Sphinx on the Neva Embankment to pay our respects, stood, hip to hip, contemplating the statues—ancient, patient in exile, built for the timeless heat of the desert, and forced to endure the damp and the tedious frost of our northern clime. They seemed to be laughing at our clothing of frail flesh. Stone being the answer to all riddles.

  Egypt made me think Gumilev, languishing in the hands of the Cheka, reminding me of the danger—but distantly, like someone shouting from a far shore. No one was paying attention to us, except to eye Kolya in his foreign clothes, glances variously revealing distrust, admiration, or disgust, depending on their outlook on the New Economic Policy, which had spawned a new race of people, the so-called NEPmen—traders and middlemen, gangsters.

  But we’d never been able to walk the streets of Petrograd like this before, arm in arm, back when we’d been young and unscarred, when there weren’t ghosts fluttering all around us. There’d always been some reason we had to hide. First I was too young, next I was a boy. Then we were peasants. I laid my head on his shoulder. He didn’t know about Iskra. He didn’t know about Papa. A
nd in the time we’d been apart, what women had he known? Where had he been? Across the river, the yellow blotch of the little mansion’s facade stirred in the water’s mirror.

  We stopped beneath the Rostral Columns, the wind fresh in our faces. I thought of the day I almost gave myself to the river. Not even a year ago. And now he’d returned. His hand found my breast, his lips, my neck. His breath buzzed in my ear. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “We’re together.”

  We crossed the bridge, the shifting green waters glinting in the summer sun. He glanced up as we passed the yellow mansion, an end and a beginning, and leaned in to rest his cheek on mine. We didn’t say anything, we didn’t dare. There was broken glass everywhere in the space around the present. In Palace Square, the weeds grew up through the stones, and the sculptures atop the General Staff arch watched us enviously, the way chessmen would watch two pieces moving across a board of their own volition.

  We leaned against the railing where the Moika met the Fontanka at the foot of the Summer Garden, our faces pressed closer as we peered down into the cool shifting blues and greens. A swan floated by, poking at some duckweed. “Still love me?” he asked. I leaned against him as a horse does when you groom it. “I dreamed this,” he said. “Standing here with you.” Holding his straw hat, he looked like a figure in a French painting. His wristwatch was gold, his necktie soft yellow. There was too much to say. My father saw you in Estonia. They dumped his body on my doorstep. We had a baby, her name was Iskra. Varvara’s dead, I think. There’s no one left but us. He bit me softly where my neck met my shoulder, sending an electric charge through me. I could stay here forever, in the shade of the tossing boughs, an old man painting on a small easel…I felt sleepy, as if I were in a trance.

  “Don’t stop, we’re almost there,” he said, pulling me to him as if we were dancing.

  We crossed into Salt Town, past the heavy facade of the Stieglitz Museum to the ancient St. Panteleimon Church with its domed cupola and square bell tower. “Let’s go in,” he said, opening the door for me. It was awfully unlike him. But pleasant inside, empty and cool. Our footsteps resounded between ten-foot-thick walls. The iconostasis was still intact. I’d have thought the Bolsheviks would have confiscated it for its gold and silver. A priest conducted a service for three old ladies, who sang like perfect fountains in a convent courtyard, liquid and serene. The fragrance of powdery incense excited long-ago memories. I remembered walking through Gabriel’s door and into Arkady’s world. And it was Kolya who had sent me there. If you ever need money. So much of my fate bound up with this one man, so much pleasure, so much suffering. In the end, I supposed, we were each other’s destiny.

  The Theotokos watched me. Was this what you wanted? Gazing at me with such pity. Kolya put some coins in the offering box, lit a candle that had already been burned, and handed it to me. The simple, symbolic act was like a marriage. We’d never had that, something solemn. With us it was either sneaking or pretending. He took my hand and kissed it. The priest glanced up to see if we’d stay for confession, but either God knew it all or the heavens were as empty as a beggar’s pockets. In the one case, there was no need, and in the other, no sense.

  Outside I blinked, temporarily blinded. Kolya took my hand. Where was he taking me, back to Furshtatskaya Street? Perhaps we would slip back into ourselves as we had once been, and start again. But no, it was still 1921, and the leafy, elegant houses were as dirty and dilapidated as everywhere else. Here was the Muruzi house, where the Poets’ Guild was garrisoned—Gumilev’s group. Were they still meeting, now that the Maître was under arrest? Had they too been taken in the sweep?

  Mother’s old friend, the art dealer Tripov, lived there. Arkady’s one-time customer. I wondered if Kolya knew Arkady was dead. He must, or he wouldn’t be here, walking around like an English aristocrat. If it wasn’t for Kolya, I’d never have known the name Arkady von Princip. On the other hand, Kolya never said, Go have an affair with the Archangel. Who could say whose fault it was. Life wasn’t a tapestry, it was some sort of felt, formed by water and pressure—primitive, yet stronger than anything woven, impossible to tear.

  We entered the square by the Preobrazhensky Church, where Avdokia once bought oil and potatoes while Mother prayed for deliverance. A man smoked in the shade—was he selling something, or watching one of the flats? Over a doorway a flag hung, white with a blue cross. “That’s new,” I said.

  “Finnish consulate,” Kolya replied, kissing my cheek. “Things are changing. In six months, you won’t recognize your Soviet Russia.”

  “I already don’t recognize it,” I said.

  We stopped on the south side of the square, in the shade of a maple. How much he looked like Iskra—I couldn’t get over it. Grief ripped my throat. How could I tell him about her, how could I even begin? Not yet. I would savor what the gods had offered one precious moment at a time.

  “I used to pass here on the way to your house,” he said. “Like the poor country cousin, hat in hand.”

  The most confident boy in Petersburg. “Poor you.”

  “Your father was so brilliant, he could cut you with a word. And your mother—”

  “Let it go. Please.” The last thing I wanted was to talk about my parents. Enough to have him back, for however long. He pulled me into an archway, pushed me against the wall, kissing me as if he would devour me. Pressing into me, raising my skirt, anyone could have come by and seen us. But I couldn’t have stopped him if I’d wanted to. Were we going to do it up against the wall like some poor soldier and his whore? I twisted, but he held me there, grappling with me, whispering how he adored me, making me laugh.

  At last, we passed into the courtyard of a once-stately building, where he led me to a battered door, yanked it open. Then I found myself upside down, heaved over his shoulder, as he stumbled up a flight of dark stairs to another door. Leaning on the wall, he opened it with a key and carried me in, raced me through a hall and into a light-filled room—table, brass bed, where he dumped me like loot after a robbery.

  Oh, to make love to Kolya Shurov again. Our lips needed no introductions, our skin no drinks or chitchat. We only managed to get some of our clothes off before we couldn’t even be bothered with that. We panted, we clawed as if we were scrambling from a well that was filling underneath us. As if we were running a relay but both of us running at once.

  I came to myself with one boot still on, my panties looped around that leg, the sheet torn off the bed exposing the striped mattress. Kolya still wore his socks and his singlet. Sock garters. We lay gasping on the beach, having made it to shore with our pirate’s plunder. He brought in a bottle of beer and some glasses, opened it—the fizz, amber, the bitter bright taste. I was so thirsty, I drank mine in three gulps. Where did it come from? Where had any of it come from?

  “To our new life, Marina. May all our troubles be memory, and may our memories fade.” We drank, watching each other without blinking until we had drained the small, faceted pink stakany to the bottom, and then he refilled them. The flat looked out onto the square. From the bed I could see the dome of the church, the tops of the trees through the light curtains.

  “Is the man still there?” I asked. “There was a man by the church.”

  He got up, all rosy, sturdily built, his body hair red-gold. He went to the window, peered down. “Gone now.” He opened the windows, let the freshness roll through. The curtain took the wind like sails. “Like it?” He smoothed his unruly hair as he lay down next to me. “The flat, I mean.”

  “Whose is it?” I asked, pouring the last of the beer into our glasses.

  “Yours. If you want it,” he said. That mischievous smile. My bright fox. A private flat like this would be the possession of a commissar at least. A telephone hung on the wall. How did he get it? “Whose place is this, really?”

  He tapped his nose. For him to know and me to find out. How he loved a secret. He carried a box to the table, opened it. A gramophone! A little gramophone, all in a box: a miniature
horn, turntable, everything folded out. He laid a disk on the spindle, cranked it, and lowered the needle. The room filled with music—“Mi Noche Triste.” He’d been that sure of me. These sounds contained the worlds we’d lost that day, betrayals and heartaches, but I couldn’t remember them now, only the joy, and the possibility that it would resume. What were the chances? Life could turn around as fast as the Bolsheviks.

  He plucked the beer glass from my hand, set it onto the table, and pulled me to my feet. I held on to him to remove that one remaining boot, and my underwear, before he placed one warm hand on my back, the other to my palm, and we danced. Five years since that first tango. Five years since the afternoon on the Catherine Canal, my hairpins falling. And here we were again. We danced as if we’d done it every day of our lives. We made famous the space between table and bed, the curtains blowing, nothing between my skin and his, our bodies pieces of a puzzle that we had solved. He ran his hands down my hips, holding on to me, kneeling, pressing his cheek to my pelvis as if listening to my heartbeat there. Whose dream could this possibly be?

  Later, I lay on the bed, its linen on the floor, covered with sweat and his unique odor. He brought in a tray with vodka, roasted chicken, fresh summer pickles, black bread, and butter. Together, we made the bed and sat in it. I couldn’t stop eating. Licking my fingers. It was a sin when there was famine in Russia, when children were eating dry grass. Yet I stuffed myself shamelessly. He’d made coffee, real coffee, with evaporated milk, fed me pastries—hand pies with apples. My starving orphans just blocks away. And yet I couldn’t help it. So easy to be virtuous when you had nothing. In the face of riches, I was as squalid as anyone. Yet if I ended in some Cheka cell when all this came to pieces, who would thank me for not enjoying the pies?