Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Don’t touch me.”

  His hand dropped. He pushed himself away. His face grew hard, something I’d seen before, when he dropped the charm. It was always shocking to see it, the coldness below the warmth. “Well, that’s how it is. Without this situation, I wouldn’t be here. We’d never have seen each other again this side of the grave.” But now he remembered who he was talking to. This wasn’t a business negotiation. He softened, leaned forward, took my hand. “Don’t get off the train, Marina.” As I had in Tikhvin, which I’d regretted for so long. “Let it be what it is, imperfect but—my God, who gets to have what we have?”

  There was no doubt about that. I could have lived my whole life with Anton and never seen a half second of the passion I felt every time this man and I were together.

  “Have I ever cared who else stumbles into the picture? That oaf Genya, whoever else you’re fucking these days. Poets, sailors. It doesn’t matter to me. You’re mine, I’m yours. Please, for God’s sake, don’t get off the train again. It’s taken so long to get here.”

  I had to put some distance between us. He was making too much sense. I got up, marched unhappily behind him, like some prosecutor. “Tell me the truth, Kolya. No more lies. You haven’t applied for my papers, have you?”

  He gazed up at me with his sheepish guilty-boy face, that winning pout, eyes lit with hope for forgiveness. He wanted us all, me and her, and Sir Graham’s millions, and copper and marble and for everyone to love him. I’d never known a greedier man. He reached back, trying to catch my dress, but I moved away. He stroked the edge of the tabletop as he would stroke my leg. “I’m not returning to London,” he said. “We’re opening offices in Moscow. You want to come to Moscow? There’s a housing shortage, but I can find you something…”

  “What would you do with your precious Adela?”

  “Sir Graham goes back to Nottingham soon. I can’t see her staying alone in Moscow, when I’ll be traveling so much. Overseeing the concessions.” His smile, as if we were both in on the joke.

  “Still wanting it all.” I poured a last vodka and drank it off, hoping it might soften the fist between my ribs.

  “Who doesn’t?” Now he was looking at me directly, hands on the table. “Don’t you? What do you want most of all? Tell me, if you even know.”

  Once, the answer would have been so simple. I would have said: You. To be together under any circumstances.

  Once, I might have said: Just to be known. Accepted as a poet. By a Blok, a Gorky. And now I was. Part of the House of Arts, not just the building at 59 Moika. The secret society of artists that knows no walls.

  Once, I might have said: Revolution. Freedom and justice, all the promises the Bolsheviks had made come true. I might even have said: For Kronstadt to hold, for the people of Russia to have risen up in the sailors’ defense.

  I might have just said: I want the impossible. Iskra back, and Seryozha, my father, Volodya home from the war. Maryino and fireflies, summer rain. To start over.

  But now I just wanted to walk across the Troitsky Bridge without screaming. Never to be cornered again. Really, just to be completely forgotten. To go about my business without looking over my shoulder.

  He was waiting for an answer—tapping one of his Egyptian cigarettes on its pretty box, putting it between his lips, lighting it with his battered lighter made from a shell cartridge. I was sure she’d given him a gold one for a wedding gift. All my love, Adela. But he didn’t want to show it to me. What did I want? He wasn’t talking about impossible things. He wanted it to be something he could give me. Besides fidelity, a life together, a real life of washing out clothes in a basin and hanging them by the fire, making dinner over a Primus stove, getting under the thick covers on winter evenings. Kolya Shurov didn’t want a life with me. He just wanted moments, like candies stuffed with brandy, like Roman candles, like arias. Exquisite moments of passion, of playfulness, of beauty. But life was all the rest.

  We gazed at each other, like two old warriors sitting on shaggy horses at a crossroads filled with skulls.

  “Your problem is, you don’t know what you want.” He pushed the box of cigarettes and the lighter away from himself, rose and stood next to me, smoke trailing up from his hand on the chair back. “I know who I am, what I want. I want that tightrope walker. I knew that girl. But who are you now? The revolutionary? The adventurer? The poet? Or this”—he gestured to me with his cigarette—“sanctimonious little wife? I don’t know who I’m talking to anymore.”

  Adventurer, that’s what Arkady had called me. But I’d lost my taste for adventure. At one time, I’d have been dazzled to be a man’s mistress. How romantic it would have sounded! Now it seemed like the hard heel of a stale loaf of bread. Politics was a failure, idealism had drowned itself and lay like Ophelia in the water weeds, the surface floating with pages from my Cheka file.

  What did I want? A new baby? If I asked in my truest heart, what I wanted was—sails. Open water. The freshness of the wind. That formless airy unwritten thing—the future.

  Freedom. More than courage, more than poetry. More than fame, or love. To love Kolya would always mean this: a storm, followed by wreckage, then a few days of startling blue sky while you hammered the roof back on the house, just in time for the next storm.

  I could smell salt in the air.

  She will never be with anyone. My mother’s curse.

  Perhaps it was true. And if it was, there was nothing to be done about it. I was not afraid of being alone. I would take—white sails.

  I gazed at my great, my one true faithless love, whom I’d wanted since he was a boy of twelve and I a freckled six-year-old. I hadn’t even started school yet when I’d set my heart on him. Now he was mired in a loveless marriage and hopes of gain, Sir Graham this and Chicherin that, immaculate pale suits and two-toned shoes…My dear, my dear, he thought he had it all, and me as well, his dog on a little leash. NEPman with Lapdog. I wondered what Chekhov would make of this.

  I lit one of his Egyptian cigarettes, and considered what he was offering.

  If I had a certain strength of mind, I could do as he proposed. Live in his flat, write my verses, I could hold poetry evenings here as Galina Krestovskaya had once done. And have my love whenever he came through town. We would dance on tables and smash our plates, set fire to the bedroom.

  But I was not so strong. The heartache would break me. If only I didn’t love him the way I did, like a forest fire, I might hold on to myself, live with it. But I could smell the coming dampness. I felt the dark gathering in the corners of the bright and pretty room. I had waited so long for this—just to taste that sweet mouth, feel his body in my arms, urgent, irrepressible. To sleep with him at night and wake with him in the morning. Kolya wanted everyone to be happy, but he made everybody miserable in the end. “Get me out of here, Kolya. On your Dutch ship. I want to be on it when it leaves.”

  “What happened to your glorious future?” he asked, letting the smoke wreathe his hair. “You used to argue with me, heaping abuse on my capitalistic endeavors. Where’s your revolutionary spirit?”

  What irony—Kolya Shurov, proponent of Communism? There’s a role reversal. But I could not stomach a future built on mines in the Urals and the graves of Kronstadt. Without Blok, without Gumilev, without Gorky. The only sound would be the trumpeting of the triumphant rabble. There might be money, copper, and railroads, but where would our voices come from? No sounds could escape the collapsing star. That’s what Blok meant when he said there were no more sounds.

  I turned away from him, moving to the window, gazing at the sunset blush outside the thin curtains. Down in the square, one or another of our watchers would be waiting for us to leave for dinner. I would remain a person of interest. I would not avoid a prison camp, an ugly death. The airlessness closed in on me even before the breathing curtain. Unless I was prepared to do more or less what Genya was doing, my cries would never be heard. I remembered the day I sat on the embankment watching The Mystery of
Liberated Labor. I understood even then that the revolution had passed into the realm of myth, had become a religion, codified, with hierophants and heretics.

  “You ask me what I really want,” I said, watching the man in the straw hat in the shadow of a linden tree. “I want a passport, a visa. And a berth on the Haarlem when it leaves. That’s what I want. You can do this for me, Kolya.”

  He came to me then, pulled me to him, that intoxicating smell, the slight give of his flesh, his breath against my neck. “Give me some time. A few weeks. We’ve waited our whole lives for this.”

  And then I knew he wasn’t going to help me. A few weeks meant never. The Haarlem would be gone. Winter would come, and then spring. The air turned to chlorine gas, it made my eyes smart. He loved me, he wanted me, and he wasn’t going to let me get away. He could, but he wouldn’t.

  This sweet failed life. Soon the birds would be flying south, the winds turning cold. And I was trapped, trapped by my love. This was why Akhmatova had not left. It wasn’t her nobility at all. It was that life caught you. You lived one day after the next, and fought the rupture.

  66 Hey, Little Apple

  Makar was there, right where he said he’d be, outside the Little Brick, in the old neighborhood near the Poverty Artel. Such a long time ago. Music spilled out onto the street, a neurasthenic band braying a version of “Yablochko.” “Hey, Little Apple, where are you rolling? Not to Lenin, not to Trotsky, but to my sailor of the Red Fleet.” I leaned against the building, had to catch my breath. “Hey, Little Apple…” Had it become just a tune? Didn’t people remember the words anymore? Or perhaps there were new ones now.

  The boy was selling something to a worker and his flushed girlfriend on their way home for a late-night tryst. I waited until they were done before I approached him. “Hey, Makar,” I said. “How’s business?”

  “Ne plokho.” He shrugged. But he touched a bulging pocket. He must be cleaning up.

  “Listen, I need you.” I pulled him to one side, out of the light from the streetlamp, and spoke into his dirty ear. “I need to talk to your Finn.”

  The orphan frowned, folding his heavy brows until they formed an unbroken line. “What Finn?”

  “Your friend. The fisherman. Who brings the necessary, to capture the white sea.”

  The boy laughed, startled that one of his old orphanage matrons would make a dirty joke. “What do you want with him?”

  “That’s between me and him,” I said.

  He shook his head, lipped his faint moustache. “That’s not how it goes. I set something up for you, I get a piece. You can’t cut me out.”

  “I want him to take me to Finland.”

  Makar’s eyes opened wide, gave me a look of admiration that I would venture such a bold move. And perhaps pride that I trusted him with such an illegal activity. Well, who else did I have these days? My rich boyfriend had gone down to Moscow to show his wife around. There would be no visa, no first-class ticket or even a berth on a cargo ship bound for Amsterdam. I would have to take it into my own hands.

  “Maybe I’ll go with you,” he said. “I was never on a boat before. I’ve just been here.”

  “Let him know. I’ll be back tomorrow night.” I turned my face from the streetlight so I wouldn’t be seen.

  “Wait, just a minute. Wait there.” The orphan disappeared through the curtain of the Little Brick, into the din.

  I waited on the street corner through several rounds of crude advances. “Come on, kitten, I’ll pay your ticket.” “Milaya, you’ve been waiting for me all your life.” “How much for a quick one? We can go in that courtyard. Fifty thousand? I’ll get a scumbag—what do you say?” The inflation was prodigious. A match was two hundred fifty rubles now.

  Eventually the boy emerged from the rust-colored curtain, leading a tall, ginger-haired man who didn’t look much like a fisherman—too tall, too slouchy, with a red beard, a long sharp chin and long nose. His eyes were very dark under pale brows, level and dangerous, like the barrels of two guns.

  “This is her,” Makar said. To me: “This is the Wolf.”

  So this was what had replaced Arkady von Princip, a lean, voracious redheaded Finn of twenty-five or so with a fresh scar through one pale eyebrow. He held his sharp chin in his hand. “The kid said you want to take a tour,” he said.

  “How much?” I said.

  He looked at me closely, squinting at my dress, my boots. I’d changed back into my old clothes—if I’d worn the things Kolya had bought me, the price would be double. “A million,” he said.

  I was blown backward as if in a strong wind. “Where is this tour going, Africa?”

  “Sestroretsk.” Just over the border.

  “That’s not far enough. I could walk there and keep the million,” I said.

  “So walk.” The Wolf turned to go back into the nightclub.

  “You really a fisherman?” I called after him.

  “Fisher of men,” he said. And laughed and stepped back toward me. “And you, you’re really a teacher?”

  “In the school of many sorrows,” I said. “How about Helsinki?”

  “Two million,” he said.

  What a disgusting fellow. “It’s not that much farther.”

  “I have no need to go to Helsinki. It’s more complicated all around.”

  A million, two million—it made my head swim. Everything was so expensive now—yet, the new people had bathtubs of money—for restaurants, for nightclubs, and beaded dresses and silk stockings. How in the world could I raise that kind of money? A million. He might as well have said ten times that. “I don’t like Sestroretsk. It’s too close. Too many eyes on the border.”

  “I know a customs officer,” he said. “My brother Ahti. You know who is Ahti?”

  I shook my head.

  “The God of Water. It’s good luck for us, Sestroretsk.”

  I didn’t like it. I especially didn’t like the brother. Too many heads to get ideas. Like taking my money and dumping me right back into Russia—why not? Or worse, into the hands of the Russian border police. Or into the sea. No, I could see it as clearly as if I were Vera Borisovna. “How about Kuokkala?” The former Russian artists’ colony on the gulf a couple of miles northwest of Sestroretsk, a place I actually knew. My Uncle Vadim once rented a dacha there, next door to the artist Repin.

  The Wolf considered it, rubbing his chin.

  I wondered if the painter had remained after that coast was returned to Finland. Seryozha had adored that old man, as did Vera Borisovna. We went visiting as often as she would allow it. My brother in particular had been fascinated by a half-finished portrait of a young man in a black suit smoking a cigarette.

  “Nothing’s going on in Kuokkala. Sestroretsk, that’s where you want to be. Catch the train for Vyborg.”

  Those afternoons at Repin’s, painter of The Volga Boatmen, and the famous portrait of the barefoot Tolstoy. All of us had posed for him. Those pictures, where had they gone? Sold for grain to the Volga? My mother, knocking sweetly on his door—she had the perennial entrée of beautiful women everywhere. Seryozha watching the artist with the same concentration with which the artist studied him. Surely there were still some Russians left in Kuokkala. If I couldn’t get to Helsinki, I’d rather land on familiar terrain. Somewhere without the Wolf’s brother.

  The Finn gazed at me, stroking his little beard. “I like you, Teacher. You find two more people, I’ll let you go for eight hundred thousand.”

  “Each?”

  “No, just you. For them it’s the regular price. But it’s a bargain. People will cross you on foot for two million, and you’d have to take the train, hide in the woods. This is a hundred percent safer.”

  “I don’t know anyone else,” I said.

  The Wolf sighed. Makar was back, stuffing cash into his pocket. “So when do we go?”

  “Thursday,” said the Finn.

  Three days to collect a million rubles. But I had an idea how I would get it.

&n
bsp; Our brass bed was the big seller of the day. I felt I was killing swans, selling it. That bed was our love, where he’d hoped we’d spend the months and years ahead. We would never sleep in it again. Forgive me, Kolya. But I’d told him plainly. I could not be his toy. I could never put my life in his hands after that duplicity. I watched the two metalworkers break the bed into parts—footboard, headboard, frame, and springs. All around me, the empty places where our love nest had been feathered. It was so soon, but if I waited, it would be too late. Don’t hesitate, Arkady taught me. In a few months, I’d be accustomed to our lives—the comings and goings of Mrs. Shurov, waiting for visits. Perhaps I’d buy cocaine through the Wolf. Drink. Make interim arrangements. It would be the death of me.

  The metalworkers didn’t want the mattress. I could sell that separately. They would cut up the brass for rings and pins, belt buckles. The iron they’d do God knows what with, the springs they’d sell individually to upholsterers.

  “They’ll make four times what they paid,” said Makar, counting out the cash and handing it to me. My little assistant was proving his worth. The wad of Kerenskys was growing as thick as a Bible. A couple bought the rugs, Makar talked the price up. I sold the curtains, the pillows, the mirrors, the pink champagne glasses. The groceries went to a woman wearing the ugliest hat I’d ever seen, someone the orphan knew from a brothel near the Little Brick. Sugar and sardines, quail eggs, salt and caviar. He counted the money twice, held it up to the light. She’d wanted the wine and the brandy, the whisky and the vodka, but didn’t have enough money. “Put it away for me?” she purred to Makar. He looked at me quizzically, as if asking the adult what to do, but crossed his eyes when he did it. No.

  “I have another customer,” I said.

  “How much? I’ll double it.”

  How much would this nonexistent customer give us for bottles of vintage wine and cognac, English whisky and vodka? “A hundred thousand,” Makar said.

  “You little runt,” the woman replied, resettling her hat. “Go jump off a bridge.”