Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  He wiped his tears. “I’ve always hated that girl.”

  “The feeling was mutual.”

  He took out an Egyptian oval cigarette, lit it with his old lighter. “You wouldn’t do it to save his life?”

  “Once they have you, they never let you go. Everyone I knew would be in danger.”

  He turned away. Now I wasn’t so beautiful. He sat smoking and watching the curtain breathe.

  I pulled on my slip. “He begged me not to work for them. It would have driven him mad if I’d agreed.”

  Kolya reached out and hooked the curtain with a finger, peered out through the parting of the cloth. The leaves on the trees were fluttering, fingering his face with their shadows. “Is there more?”

  “It’s enough for now. But you should know, it’s Red Terror all over again. The Bolsheviks are telling us, Don’t be fooled by restaurants and flower shops. We’re still in charge.” All the fear that I’d been barely containing since Kronstadt came bubbling up again. “I can’t be arrested again.”

  He came back to our bed, tucked my head under his chin and rocked me. “You’re safe now. They won’t risk screwing up this deal for some girl poet, even if she’s Dmitry Makarov’s daughter.” He kissed my hair, murmured in my ear. “If I shot Lenin and you fed me the ammunition, they still wouldn’t arrest us, that’s how much they want this deal.” His confidence began to invade me, calm me. “If they haven’t arrested me with my record, I promise they won’t arrest you. People start getting arrested around Sir Graham, he gets nervous. They won’t take that chance.”

  But why take the chance on attacking the intelligentsia now, with so much at stake?

  The answer came quickly: to keep us quiet, while they did their bizniss.

  We sat like that for the longest time. Like survivors of a shipwreck, in which everyone we knew had drowned. What he said sounded reasonable, but I knew not to trust it entirely. In our looking-glass world, things changed overnight. You could break your neck. Deals fell through, political players changed partners. I didn’t think he would intentionally try to deceive me, but he’d been out of the country too long. Before, he’d been a cautious and clever fox. He cheered me as he always did, but worried me as well. I had already seen a fox in a trap. I’d made a hat out of him.

  The next day, Kolya bought two large containers of milk from a Finnish peasant at the market in Salt Town, paying for it in fat handfuls of Kerensky currency, newly back in circulation. I had a hard time getting over the look of them. My lover insisted the Finn help us convey our purchases to Orphanage No. 6. He wanted to thank Matron, and see if she’d allow some of the grain Sir Graham was bringing to be delivered for the children. I’d forgotten this side of Kolya, his generosity, his capacity for tenderness, as well as his love of grand gestures.

  We picked up a trail of besprizorniki as we walked along, this well-dressed foreign gentleman handing out coins and cigarettes through the park at the Mikhailovsky Palace and past the bronze statue of Pushkin, hand outstretched as if he too wanted a tip. The old Stray Dog Café had reopened as a new restaurant for New People, their pockets bulging with new money. More ragged children rushed over to see what was going on. Some wore only shirts, all were barefoot. The Finn set down his cans and wiped his forehead before setting off again. We waded through children like Moses as we made our way up the stairs of the porte cochere. Orphans clutched at our clothes and wouldn’t let go. “Comrade!” “Comrade Marina!”

  “Merde,” Kolya said, as we entered the lobby and he saw for the first time what I’d come to accept as the new reality. Children slept right on the bird’s-eye marble without so much as a pallet. They rocked themselves, thumbs in mouths. At the desk, Alla Denisovna and my lover eyed each other like boxers in a ring, assessing each other’s reach and condition with wary approval, her eyes flicking to the Finn with the milk cans. We waited as she went to get Matron, children climbing all over Kolya, who was handing out smiles and kopek coins like a pasha. He would have been a good father—indulgent, playful, the kind any child would have adored. I still could not bring myself to tell him about Iskra. I ran my hand over the cold marble and wondered if he’d ever checked in here with some elegant lover in years gone by?

  Matron emerged, her solid military air. She evaluated the situation immediately, instructed Alla to take the Finn to the kitchen, and not to take her eyes off that milk until dinnertime. Meanwhile, Matron led us back to her office, where we sat before her desk and Kolya explained that he was involved with a group bringing in aid and wanted to make sure the orphanage had what it needed. The more he talked, the more skeptical she became. He started making assurances, not only about his cargo but about the Americans as well. Finally we rose. I kissed her three times. “Thank you.” Then under my breath, “You might see me back here yet.”

  “It’s the baby’s father, isn’t it?” she said, low. “Does he know yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can come back if you need to,” she said. “You always have a place with us.”

  Me and all the other orphans.

  When we emerged, the children surged, clinging to us. “Are you leaving?” the little girl Tinka wept, a bright, sensitive child, clutching my dress. “Are you getting married, Comrade Marina? Please don’t leave…” She was making the others cry.

  I knelt down. “I’m going for now. Give me a kiss and say Poka.” See you.

  She flung her arms around my neck. I looked up at Kolya—now he could see what I’d been doing here. She kissed me, hiccupping, her lips a ripple of grief. “Poka,” she whispered tearfully.

  “Poka,” I said to the children, who followed us to the lobby door.

  By the time we got onto Nevsky, most of them had returned to the porte cochere. Kolya took out his handkerchief, wiped his face. “Poor devils.” He kissed me on the forehead. “We’ll do something for them, you’ll see.” He drew me close, his arm around my waist.

  That’s when I realized where we were standing. I’d been so distracted, so frankly relieved to be away from them, I’d failed to notice. I jerked Kolya away from the spot with a cry. He must not walk there.

  He stumbled off the pavement. I started walking fast across wide Nevsky, blindly, then realized I was heading toward the House of Arts. I turned in the other direction, away from my life.

  “What’s going on? Are you having a seizure?”

  There was nowhere to go, no place I could step that was free from my ghosts. The city was a minefield.

  Kolya drew me close, made me stop my panicked flight. He held my shoulders, had me gaze down Nevsky, spread out on either side, shining in the sun. “Look. We’re here. Together. Look how beautiful it is. Stop running.” I took a deep breath. Yes, it was beautiful. The columned sweep of Kazan Cathedral, the Singer Building with its art nouveau dome, the old red Duma tower, the yellow arcades of Gostinny Dvor. The Catherine Canal, the golden-winged griffins of the Bank Bridge, which had led to our first tryst. “It’s coming back to life,” he said, “and so are we.”

  But the weight of that corner, where my baby had died, stained the beauty of the day.

  We walked arm in arm, away from the House of Arts, toward the Alexandrinsky Theater. Its park swarmed with besprizorniki—ours, turned out of doors to fend for themselves until nightfall, and also the feral ones who avoided the orphanage, they fought like tigers if someone tried to bring them in. I needed to tell him the rest, the last piece of my story. “When we parted in Tikhvin…turns out I was pregnant.”

  I felt the intake of his breath, the stiffening of his body at my side. “You never sent word.”

  I shook my head. “I wouldn’t have known how anyway.” The air had gone out of the day. “She was born in July, in Udmurtia, near a town called Kambarka. She died last October, right on that corner where we were just standing. Just before Yudenich attacked.” I tried to keep my voice level, like someone reading a newspaper aloud. “I’d come in from the country, thought I could stay with Mina. But she
was mad at me for abandoning her. I got work at the orphanage. It was fine for a while. I lived in the flat with the Golovins and the Naryshkins, worked nights. I could take the baby. It was working out. But Arkady found me there.”

  I watched the orphans, begging, picking up butts, lolling against the Catherine statue. He tipped his head back, staring up at the white summer sky. “And?”

  “He had a new gang by then—Orphans. They found me at work, dragged me out and stuffed me into a car. But the baby was left behind. When I didn’t return, one of my boys thought I’d been killed, and he jumped off the roof. With her under his coat.”

  His eyes closed, his tears dripped back into his hair.

  I pitied him. I’d had all year to get used to this. I’d just given him a child, and then taken her away. I slipped my hand into his, brought it to my lips.

  “What was her name?”

  “Iskra,” I said. “Though the midwife baptized her Antonina. She looked just like you. Matron knew it right away when she saw you.” I put my arm around him, rested my head on his shoulder.

  “Do you have any pictures?”

  “No.” She’d come and gone, like snow melting in your hands. “Only a lock of her hair. I’ll show it to you.” We stood, eyes closed, forehead to forehead the way we always did, leaning in for the comfort of one another, like good horses.

  “I want to see her,” he said. “Can you take me?”

  “It’s Novodevichy.” A good hour’s walk.

  “We have time.” He rubbed his forehead against mine, then his clean-shaven cheek. We walked around the Alexandrinsky Theater and down Carlo Rossi Street out to the Fontanka, across the Chernyshevsky Bridge, where I’d stood on that terrible morning, with her on the balustrade, wondering how to climb it with her in my arms, and jump. Now the water flowed freely, and three houses painted green, pink, and yellow admired their reflections. Like three old friends. So much of my history locked into these stones, the chains, the towers overlooking the river. Varvara’s old room where she’d tended me after my release from the Cheka prison was just a few steps away. Had she thrown herself off this bridge? Sometimes I hoped she was on a train to the Povolzhye, to help with the famine. But I knew she wouldn’t be, that she would not be able to bear the sight of the starving, knowing what she had done to ensure this disaster. I’d always thought we would be together, like these three houses—Mina, Varvara, and me. Three fates tied together—well, that proved true.

  A few boats plied the embankment. Bargemen hoisted boxes onto their decks. Suddenly the waterfront was alive again. Change in the air. Perhaps for me as well.

  “I wish I could have seen you pregnant,” Kolya said as we walked down the other side, his straw hat pushed to the back of his head, our arms around each other’s waists. “Fat, waddling along.” He kissed my temple. “Then the child in your arms.”

  “Everyone loved her. She had red hair, and eyes like yours, only green.”

  The ripples in the water, following us down. “Maybe we could have another one,” he said.

  I felt a flash of anger. He was master of the conditional tense. I pulled away from him. He didn’t know what he was asking.

  “Don’t say anything now. Just think about it. We have time. We have our whole lives.”

  But there was only so much pain a person could endure and I had reached my limit. I watched the boats rocking among the reflections of the stately buildings. Were they fishing boats? Were they moving produce?

  “Does she have a stone, the baby? Some kind of marker?”

  “She doesn’t even have a legal grave.” That horrible day came flooding back. Even now, the memory was too fresh, too raw. “The gravediggers took pity on me and buried her. I gave them your gun.”

  “I should order a stone.”

  “No,” I said, more emphatically than I thought I was going to.

  He put his hand in mine. “Why not?”

  “We’re the only ones she was important to.” Skeletons of old barges, torn apart for firewood, bobbed at the river’s edge. “When we’re gone, there’ll be no one else.” It seems too sad to leave a monument. “I wrote her a poem…That’s my stone.”

  Gulls flew upriver from the sea, screamed and circled. Lost, lost, lost.

  “Those shoes,” he said, nodding at my feet. “Are they your only pair?”

  Aura’s boots, stained and scuffed. “They’re almost new.”

  “You don’t have to do without anymore.” He cupped the back of my head in his hand. “It’s the least I can do. And the apartment, that’s yours.”

  How could he give me an apartment? It wasn’t London. People had to be registered, the domkom kept records. “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s not to understand?” He shrugged, adjusted his boater. “A man gives a woman a flat. You’re the only girl in Petrograd who wouldn’t understand.” The way he was smiling, sweet, I sensed a joke he was having with himself. I’d been on that cart through a thousand muddy villages. I’d learned a thing or two about my clever man.

  “And where will you be?” I asked.

  He looked like a schoolboy, swinging along. Like Tom Sawyer, chewing on a piece of straw. When he looked the most innocent, that’s when Kolya Shurov was sure to be up to something. “Me? I’m the Holy Ghost. Everywhere and nowhere. Decisions are made in Moscow. Coal in the Donbass, mines in the Urals, gold in Siberia. Famines in the Volga. And in Petrograd—my Beautiful Lady.” He stopped and bowed, pretending to doff a plumed hat.

  “Not so beautiful anymore.”

  He rubbed his smooth cheek against mine, lime and fresh linen. “Always beautiful.” He held my face in his hand. “Don’t you see? I’ve designed this whole business so I could be with you. I could have done a million things. I’m not here because I missed Lenin’s borscht.” He kissed my eyes, my mouth, softly. “We’re no good apart. Look what happens—all hell breaks out.”

  We walked to Novodevichy, stopping on Moskovsky Prospect for peaches, and flowers. He wanted little white roses, tinged with pink, wrapped in ivy. “Daisies were more her flower,” I said. “She was so bright, so gay.” He bought both, peeling off banknotes—he didn’t even bargain. As we continued to the convent, eating our peaches, holding our flowers, I thought of that girl I’d been in the days after Iskra died—Vintovka up in the corner room overlooking Moskovsky Prospect, waiting for the Whites. Everywhere, ghosts and more ghosts.

  Finally, we entered the shady, moist precincts of the convent, moving along the overgrown paths alive with buzzing cicadas. It still bore the feel of abandonment, more melancholy than Smolensk. Some of the headstones had fallen. I searched for the four-sided plinth that marked the spot, picking my way through the vines and tall grass that knitted the cemetery together in burgeoning green. Finally, I saw it, the gray mossy granite. I led him through. He had to hold on to his hat not to lose it to low-hanging branches. To the right of the tall column marked SVORTSOV, I showed him where I’d buried our child. Her patch of earth, indistinguishable from the rest of the graveyard, the grass starred with tiny flowers. I knelt. “Iskra, it’s your papa.”

  He lowered himself next to me, handkerchief on the grass under his knees. “Hello, sweetness,” he said to the earth. “Dearest. I didn’t know. Forgive me.” Tears rolled down his face. He put his roses on the grass and I scattered my daisies. His grief was unfeigned.

  Perhaps we should have another child. Perhaps we could start again.

  64 Spilled Blood and Roses

  My apartment. My kitchen, my bath. I worked at the gateleg table as the sun filled the room, the pretty windows overlooking the trees and the Preobrazhensky Church, with its eagles and chains. I wondered who had lived here before us. Perhaps someone Kolya had known from before. I imagined a woman—the one he’d brought to the ballet that night when I was still a girl with a bow in my hair. How I had wanted to tear her hair out, or his. The low back on her dress as he led her away. Her perfume, L’Heure Bleue.

  I kept thinking peo
ple were watching the flat. I couldn’t help noticing a bald man in a light-colored jacket. A neighbor? Or something more sinister. And a small man in a straw hat, cigarette holder in his mouth, seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time waiting for someone across the square.

  When I pointed them out to Kolya, he shrugged. “Don’t worry. No one’s looking for a little girl poet.”

  The flat had two exits—stairs to the street and back stairs that led to the courtyard. I promised myself that if anyone came up those stairs, I would be out the back like a shot. The lipstick and new shoes were lovely, coffee and butter, the brass bed, the taps that issued hot water just for the asking, but all was a dream, I had to remember that. Reality was still out there, whatever Kolya said. I had to take care not to fall asleep inside this fantasy.

  On the other hand, my passion for Kolya hadn’t faded a bit. When he returned from his bizniss, I never could wait for him to make a leisurely drink, put his feet up, tell me about his day—all that domestic rigmarole. We made love like a hurricane. The top of the mountain blew off and spewed lava, created new islands, new continents. I smelled him on me as I wrote, when I read, as I made my lunch. We couldn’t be in that room together for five minutes without our clothes flying. We made love on every piece of furniture, in the bath. We tore the bed to shreds. Only then, exhausted, could we eat and talk.

  And how he loved to talk, to share the grand exploits of his day. I privately called these monologues Tales of Brave Ulysses. His glee at receiving two pink marble urns right out of the back of the Hermitage. The tense negotiations for a bauxite concession in Murmansk. A comradely meeting with the commissar for transport. He never asked about the poems I wrote, more interested in whether I went out and spent some of the rubles he’d left me. It hurt that he was not interested in my work, but I had to accept that this was not part of our shared life.