Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  I wiped my face, exhausted. Clever Kolya, too clever by half. But as long as I had those papers, it didn’t matter what he thought.

  I couldn’t sleep, not even after the nightclub, the sex, more champagne. As he slept, I wrote:

  One by one the poets disappear

  Into the dark at the end of the hall.

  I turn back

  see the smiths

  fitting new locks on the doors.

  The new tenants come in through the front

  carrying carpets, brass beds,

  birdcages, gramophones.

  We, we don’t even have shoes.

  And it’s a long walk to anywhere.

  He lay on the bed, snoring, spread out like a king, as if no harm could ever come to him. His daughter had slept the same way. God, I loved this man, but we’d both become what we had within us to become—he the businessman, gambler, maker of deals, charmer for a purpose and for no purpose. And I was still me, after these long and difficult years, putting one word against the next, holding up my tiny pocket mirror to the world. We’d grown into our destinies, Kolya and I. Yet after everything, I still felt him like a rush of cocaine. The smell of him all over everything, the bed, my hair. We could have another child…

  He turned over, making the springs squeak, squinted against the light. “What are you writing? Come back to bed.”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be up for a while.”

  He stretched like a cat, twisting his solid body clockwise and counter, enjoying each ligament’s torsion, poured himself some water, drank it down. “What’s it about?”

  “Roses,” I said.

  The time would come when you couldn’t even say Pushkin, or Blok. People wouldn’t know what that meant. Russia without her poets…what would that place be like? Poetry replaced by prose—like dance replaced by long-distance marching. Nothing to recite when life turned and flashed its teeth, and you had to retreat inside yourself to the place only poetry could reach.

  He got up, nude, shuffled to the toilet, pissed like a fire hose. Then he was back, leaning over me, kissing my neck, loosening the pen from my hand, putting it on the table, screwing the lid back on the ink. There was no question of writing when Kolya was awake. A haze came over me, I got lost, his touch, his spell. But I knew now I would not give him another child, not in Russia. He could have me, body and soul, but not that.

  65 The Call

  I went out the next day to sniff the wind, see if I could learn something more about Gumilev. With a hat, new dress, new shoes, who would recognize me? Still, I went to the House of Scholars, where I was not as well known. I found a handwritten sign on the wall:

  Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev,

  Requiem Mass,

  Kazan Cathedral, noon.

  I stood staring at the note. Noon today. The black clock over the entrance showed quarter past eleven. In “The Lost Tram,” he had imagined everything, though he’d placed his requiem at St. Isaac’s.

  The church was cold, the marble dirty, a feeling of neglect, death and more death. There were requiems all day for the fallen. The writers stood together, just as they had with Blok, but far more perilously. His studio students, hundreds of people. Each of them knew he would be watched, his presence noted, but it was the moment to show one’s face, albeit silently, with eyes lowered. The choir sang, the ruddy priest grimly swung his censer. No coffins. No bodies. It was a brave thing on the part of the priests as well. I prayed for him, and the Tagantsevs, for all of them, the precious ark of Russian culture, slipping away. What would become of us? Akhmatova stood by the wall. She looked ready to collapse. To have lost not one but two of her great generation, first Blok and now her husband, her friend. She was the only one left. So pale, thin, and tall. Grief personified. I stood near her, not daring to speak. There would be no more services like this. I imagined they’d close the cathedral after these requiems. “Vechnaya pamyat’…” we sang. Akhmatova crossed herself.

  What we’ll be asked to bear, before this is over, her profile seemed to say. Remember this. We can’t save anyone, we can’t save ourselves. All we can do is the thing no one wants us to do, live on. And spare ourselves nothing.

  Yes, she would witness, and wait for the executioner. Just as Gumilev had done. These giants. I thought with shame how I’d begged Kolya for that visa. But I remembered too what Gorky had said: She’s a martyr looking for a cross. And what greater cross than Russia? I recognized her old friend Olga Sudeikina. I saw Anton, standing with Sasha and Dunya, and he saw me, even in this crowd, even in my new finery. I nodded back. Yes, I’m still here. Still above ground. Don’t ask. He started toward me, but I shook my head, pulled my hat lower, and backed into the shadows.

  I returned to the consular district, back to our little flat, missing my friends, feeling my forfeited place in the family of Russian courage. I felt the chill of autumn coming, the anxious calls of birds taking to the air, the honking of geese. Bears in the forests were gorging, preparing for a long sleep. And how long would our sleep be—our Sleeping Beauty castle back under the spell of the sorcerer? How many more centuries before we awakened again?

  The phone was ringing as I entered the flat. Not thinking, I answered. “Hello?”

  A man spoke in terrible Russian. “Izvenite. Nikolai Stepanovich tam, pozhalusta?” An English accent.

  “He’s not here,” I said in English.

  “Stanley here,” the man said. “Give him a message, will you? Tell him Adela’s arrived safely, she’s tucked up at the National, safe and sound. And we’re looking forward to seeing him.”

  “I will tell him,” I said, and hung the handset onto the cradle.

  So Sir Graham Stanley was not a figment of Kolya’s imagination after all. He had a certain kind of clipped voice, a regional accent. I wrote down the message. Sir Graham called. Adela’s arrived. Hotel National. Look forward to seeing you. The National—Moscow’s best hotel, it was their equivalent of the Astoria. First House of the Soviet. Obviously open for foreign businessmen of a certain rank.

  I lay on the bed, still thinking of Gumilev’s requiem mass. Of Akhmatova’s mute presence. Such grief, all we could do was hold it, our piece of it. It was too heavy a cloak for any one of us to bear alone. And seeing Anton…

  But something about that phone call began to nag. Tell him Adela’s arrived…

  Why would Sir Graham call Kolya to say that Lady Stanley had arrived safely? Kolya often took an interest in old people, I knew. Perhaps they were fond of one another. Yet it didn’t feel quite English. Sir Graham referring to his wife as Adela. He would have said Lady Stanley. I wondered…Kolya had said nothing about going to Moscow.

  I went back to the telephone on the wall, lifted the receiver. I’d never placed a call from here, only accepted them. Ring twice, ring again. Don’t answer.

  I depressed the cradle a couple of times. “Number, please,” said the operator. I could see her at her station surrounded by hundreds of other girls just like her.

  I took a breath. “Hotel National, Moscow.”

  “Connecting. Please stand by.”

  I waited, listening as the operators on the trunk line forwarded the call, the hailstorm of clicking at phone exchanges from Petrograd to Moscow. How I wished there was something like this that could connect people through layers of time as well as miles. Layers of secrecy and misdirection.

  At last, the Moscow operator came on the line. “Hotel National, go ahead.”

  “Hotel National,” said a nasal, official-sounding hotel operator.

  “Yes, could I have the room of Adela Stanley, please? Englishwoman. Just arrived.”

  “No Adela Stanley. Sir Graham Stanley…Oh, here. Shurova, Adela. Same suite. I’ll connect you now.”

  Shurova. Of the Knock-Me-Down-with-a-Breath Shurovs of Petersburg, London, Nottingham, Hell, and beyond. “No, that’s all right—” But the phone was already ringing. I was paralyzed. No! I did not want to hear her voice.

&nbs
p; “Allo?” Youthful, high. Just a girl.

  “Eto Meesis Adela Shurova?” My strangled voice, it would not cross the hurdle of its last jump.

  “Da?” Her voice warbled, a bit impatient. Spoiled.

  My arms felt weak, my throat narrowing. “Velcom Moscow Gotel Natsional,” I said in the heaviest accent I could muster. “The gotel wish you fine to stay with us.” Tears burned my face. “From Petrograd, message to Meester Shurov. Call Petrograd office at earliest convenient? You tell?”

  “Yes, I will. Budu. Ya budu skazat’ evo.” I will to tell his. She’d been studying, so she could talk to her Russian husband.

  I hung up the handset, my arms so weak I almost dropped it. Shurova. I fought to catch my breath. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Someone should tell her he wouldn’t give a damn if she spoke Russian or Swahili, as long as she was beautiful, as long as she liked a good fuck. What went on in her head mattered not at all. To him a woman was an animal, a glorious one, but anything else about her was simply the difference between a brindled roan and a bay with black socks. Bile filled my throat. In the same suite. I saw it all now. Even if she was a cold English fish with eyes on the same side of her nose like a halibut, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was related to Sir Graham.

  Not his wife, his daughter.

  I collapsed onto the bed, clutched at my head. Sir Graham’s interest in this deal includes Kolya Shurov. My brain exploded, coated the striped wallpaper in blood and gray goo.

  I thought I knew him, knew the shape of his deceptions. But there were dimensions, whole universes I had yet to suspect. And I’d told him everything. About Pasha, and Iskra, and Gorky, and Father. And he’d given me nothing.

  Don’t answer the phone. I don’t want to have to chase my messages.

  Married. I should have known something was wrong in all this bizniss. He was playing everyone. Why did I think I would be exempt? No, Sir Graham would never trust just any Kolya Shurov riding in on a rented horse…He had probably gotten her pregnant too, to seal the deal.

  I had to think fast, but my mind was up circling the pattern of grape leaves around the ceiling light. I could kill him. I could slit his lying throat when he came in the door. I could wait until he was sleeping.

  Don’t do anything rash.

  But Shurova. It kept shocking me, like a bad socket on a lamp. I couldn’t resist putting my wet finger on it. We could have another child…How could he have said such a thing with a secret like this up his sleeve? To think how long I’d waited for him, the way other people wait for the Messiah. When was he planning on telling me, after I’d borne him another little redheaded baby?

  I rolled from side to side, trying to find a place to rest. I felt like my ribs were broken. I could do nothing for him, none of the things she could do with her name alone. What could I offer—a poet with one dress and another woman’s boots, this restless orphan—besides love him as richly as any man could desire, and remember him, an officer in a sleigh, a fattish boy with a top hat and a pony whip? No wonder he was so sure they wouldn’t arrest him. No wonder.

  That gap between my ribs, a heart-sized bruise.

  I could imagine his reunion with his wife. How he’d make love to her in their room at the Hotel National, Moscow. Maybe not passionately, but with exquisite tenderness. She would probably undress in the bathroom. And he’d be the perfect gentleman—why not? It wasn’t love, it was diplomacy. He’d be all charm, so she would come to him, binding herself with each surrender. He’d be her guide, his tutorial hand light at the base of her spine, the energy radiating…Oh, I knew that pleasure. He’d show her the twenty towers of the Kremlin. But not the grave of Seryozha Makarov, hard by the Kremlin wall. He’d walk her into Red Square, tell her to close her eyes, and he’d position her before St. Basil’s Cathedral. “Now look.” Her gasp, her joy. As if he’d built it for her. They’d stand, hand in hand as he relayed the story—how after it was completed, Ivan the Terrible put out the eyes of the Italian builders, so that they’d never again construct anything so beautiful—astonishing her with our cruelty, our sense of iron destiny.

  That fist in my ribs would not stop.

  And she’d beg him to bring her to Petrograd. She’d heard so much about it from him when they were together in London. But now she was here, he’d discourage her. How he loved a side deal. Me, his redheaded mistress in Petrograd, and Adela, his English wife in Moscow. And London. And the world. No wonder he didn’t want to get me a passport.

  I could smell him in my hair, on my hands. I felt his kisses even now. He’d filled me with such visions of the future. While all the while, it was just the mirrored box of a magician’s act, gently lit in fantasy light. Worlds and worlds. In this world, there were nightclubs and silver dresses and impossible sex morning and night. In this world he adored me, was going to protect me, was going to get my papers, we would have another child. Then, in a world parallel to it, one floor up or one floor down, there were his wife and Sir Gram, contracts and copper and Lady Stanley and her gum boots. In that life I was simply a sensual memory, a city he could visit when he had time.

  Ukashin had taught us the spiral of worlds, the vertiginous layered dimensions of cosmic reality. People had dimensions as well, stories in which they were heroes, stories in which they were the devil himself. In one of those worlds I could cut his heart out and eat it raw, still beating. In another I could bludgeon him to death with a bottle of wine. In a third, I’d strangle him with a silk stocking. In a fourth, lie sobbing and screaming on the floor. And in a fifth, just an empty room. Table, bed, chairs. A phone ringing with no one to answer.

  He returned that evening, arms full of packages. He dropped a book on the table, and a wrapper of sweet peas, fish in newspaper, a loaf of good bread. He kissed me on the head as if I were a child. “What a day! Let me put these away.” He bustled into the kitchen. I didn’t follow him. Didn’t wrap myself around his ankles like a cat. He returned in a moment, a bottle of vodka pressed to his chest, two pink glasses pinched between forefinger and thumb. He set them on the table, filled them, collapsed into the other chair. His long hard day, poor dear. He lifted his glass. “To the Bolsheviks. Long may they rule.” Those dear happy eyes, turned up at the corners, though hers had been green, and his were lying blue. He nudged my vodka toward me. “They just gave us the all clear to bring the Haarlem into Petrograd. Grain for the Volga, Marina.”

  Grain for the Volga. I examined my glass, its narrow facets. How many facets did he have? Sparkling, and each a little different. “When were you going to tell me about her?”

  He cocked his head to one side, as if puzzled. Whatever could I mean? The Haarlem? His face registered not the slightest shock. What a gambler. When he hadn’t a card worth a tinker’s damn. If only his father had been so good, he wouldn’t have lost their fortune.

  “I know, Kolya. She called. Adela.”

  He went white, then red, respecting all factions. “What did you tell her?”

  Now I wished I’d told her everything, instead of taking the coward’s way out, hanging up. “I told her that her husband was a liar and a thief. That he was already married and that she should jump in some English lake.”

  He drank down his vodka, traced his brow with the glass. “I was going to tell you, I swear. That very first day. But I couldn’t. Then you told me about Antonina—”

  “Iskra.”

  “How could I tell you? When? Standing by her grave?” An automobile sputtered along outside the open window. “I just want you to be happy, Marina. I didn’t want to complicate it.” He always wanted to make everyone happy, that was his weakness. Truth was an unfortunate orphan tugging at his coat, trying to get his attention as he pushed it away with his foot.

  “But you did—complicate it.”

  He stretched out his hand to me, but I wouldn’t take it. “Be reasonable. I didn’t know I’d be coming back. I had to start over, and England isn’t so easy for foreigners. Even with my sterling references
.” He smiled, weakly. “Sir Graham invited me to a holiday weekend at his estate. There were three daughters, the younger two married, but this one was left over.” He shrugged, sticking out his lower lip, as if it was nothing. “People get married, why not this girl? Good as anyone. Important family, sweet temper. No beauty but that was fine.”

  “How are her teeth?” I drank down my vodka and poured myself another. The curtains sighed in the mellow light of early autumn.

  “Not bad,” he said with a wry smile. “Then this trade agreement changed everything. I saw a chance to come back. It’s what I’d been waiting for, a triumphal return. The lion rampant. Rawr.” He was trying to make me laugh, unsuccessfully. Dragging his chair closer, our knees touching under the table, he threw his arm over the back of my chair, leaning in, knowing that just the smell of him disarmed me. “You’re still married, aren’t you?” he said. “Does it make any difference to me? Did it ever?”

  Of course it didn’t.

  “So why should this be a big deal? Have you suddenly become a moralist?” His eyes glinted, knowing he’d made a good point. “It was necessary, to become part of Sir Graham’s world. It was my ticket home.”

  It was insane, pretending he’d done it all for me. “Tell me one thing. Do you love her?”

  “Don’t be absurd. Don’t even think about her,” he said, even softer. “There’s you and me, and that’s it. Always.”

  I wasn’t going to listen. “So you thought I’d just sit here waiting while you went down to Moscow and greeted your English wife? Wait for you to drop by when you want a good fuck or some nostalgic chitchat?”

  “Oh, and you are such a good fuck,” he said, pushing up my skirt.