Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  “Look, look, look,” he said, kneeling before me, taking my hands. “We’ve been through the worst. Everything’s going to take off now. It’s our moment. They’re allowing private publishing again. There’ll be paper. We can sell our books, make a living. Stay, Marina, please.” He sat on the bed next to me, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. In my new state of cleanliness, I could smell him—strong, acrid. “Who’s going to understand your poems in the West? You’re Russian—you’re no Jack London. Out there, you’re just some beautiful girl who thinks she speaks better English than she does. Here, we know you.” He stroked my hair. “We admire you. We want to hear what you have to say. Your verses speak to us, they feed us. We need you to understand—for us. Look at Akhmatova—is she leaving? No. And Gumilev was her husband. But she’s going to stay and live our life along with us. She’s even got a new poem, I heard it the other night—I’m not a fan, you know, but who do they have like this?

  Dark is the road you travel, Wanderer—

  the bread of strangers smells of wormwood…

  While here, wrecking our youth’s last days

  within the blaze’s blinding smoke,

  we all have steadfastly refused

  to dodge a single savage stroke.

  We know that, in the final count,

  each hour will be justified…

  But no one has wept less than us—

  no one’s more plain or full of pride.”

  How stern she was, how absolute. But I wasn’t Akhmatova. Russia would eat me in a casual bite. Should I let myself be eaten, then, so I could be simpler and more filled with pride? There was nothing simple about the Cheka, and your tears flowed like the Nile.

  We sat, side by side. I could hear him sniffling. “So that’s it? Going to shut the door behind you, like leaving the hospital? ‘Thank God that’s done’?” He launched himself back to his feet, punching the air, kicking the chair.

  “Shhh, you’re going to wake them.”

  “The future’s just opening up. Can’t you wait? You need to be part of it. We need you.” He couldn’t even say I need you.

  He was going to stay in the ward and wait for death. Because he was a coward, and because he loved Russia, and lacked the imagination to see how there might be other lives, that the future here might be more full of ravens than he could imagine.

  Well, I would eat my bread scented with wormwood. Wanderer, be my name.

  68 The Wolf

  The boy and I waited for the Wolf on Krestovsky Island, the deserted south shore of the Little Nevka. The islands, where all dark deeds went unpunished. My pocket once again armed, this time with a gun I’d purchased that day from Saint Peter in his lair on Pharmacists’ Island, along with three boxes of ammunition. I’d long ago learned my lesson, made the old thief fire it himself in an overgrown park with a weedy pond, so I could be assured it wouldn’t blow up in my hand. Makar had taken me there. He’d wanted to fire it too. How he admired himself as he weighed it in his hand, his eyes alight in a way that saddened me. I didn’t want to shepherd him any further into a life of crime. As if my actions could have had any effect on such an outcome.

  I myself fired a round, and felt unjustifiably pleased to have hit the rusted can at about twenty paces. Not that I was going to fight a duel. If I needed to fire it, it would be in close quarters, say, in a rocking boat on the Gulf of Finland, or on a tumbledown dock on the Little Nevka in just a few minutes.

  The boy paced in the tall grass in the last rays of the sun, his hands behind his back, jumping on the balls of his feet. He was half out of his mind with excitement. I’d brought a satchel packed with food, the few things Anton had saved from my room—a comb, a couple of books, my sheepskin coat and fox-fur hat. Brought my new clothes as well, the green dress and the blue. In the hem of the green one, I’d sewn the earrings Kolya had given me, the little emeralds. Esmerelda. That was the girl he loved, the tightrope walker. But the tightropes were higher these days. Two million rubles, half in my bag for the smuggler, the rest stashed away under my clothes—enough to get me to Helsinki, if they even honored our Kerenskys there. I sat with my sheepskin draped over my shoulders, though it was still early fall, the gun loose in its pocket. Crickets began singing in the birches. But winter would come soon enough. Fifteen miles and we’d be in Finland. If it was winter I could walk it over the ice. But I could not wait.

  “It’s so quiet here,” said the boy. “Spooky.”

  Volodya and Kolya used to play tennis up here on Krestovsky with their gymnasium friends. This whole island had once been the property of a single family, the Belosselsky-Belozerskys. They had owned mining concessions, and all the streets were named for their mines. I watched the last streak of sun fade from the horizon, and we sat in the gathering dark, listening to the water lick the shore, the splash of an occasional fish. The boy chattered away to fill the unfamiliar silence, like the nervous little kid he was. “After we drop you, we’re going to Sestroretsk to meet the Wolf’s brother. I’m gonna be in. Maybe I’ll end up being partners with them. I could do this all the time.” He tipped his head back and howled as he imagined a wolf howl would sound. I clapped my hand over his mouth.

  “Cut it out. This is not a joke.” He really was so very young.

  Now he looked ready to cry. He lowered his voice. “Sorry.” He managed to be quiet for all of two minutes. “Just think, last week I was selling Pravda and sleeping in a water duct. Now I got two hundred tisich in my pocket.” Two hundred thousand rubles—probably about one hundred prewar rubles, but a fortune for an orphan of thirteen.

  “Better keep quiet about it,” I said. “Your Wolf might get ideas.”

  “Nyet. Him and me are buddies.” He was pulling up grass from around his feet. “I’m his best salesman. He’d be cutting his own throat, wouldn’t he?”

  I didn’t want to disappoint him by saying that the smuggler wouldn’t have to look far to find boys who would do more for less. “As far as he’s concerned, you’re just in it for the ride, understand? Don’t tell him about the money.”

  “How dumb do you think I am? Wait’ll I get one of those little stvoli.” A pistol. “Nobody’ll push me around then. I’ll be Nat Pinkerton.”

  I couldn’t say I was a good influence on him. I worked my fingers through the sheepskin’s fatty curls. The stories this coat could tell, my old friend. How many nights had it sheltered me? I’d tucked Iskra up into its warmth. I’d wrapped it around my father. A gun once again in its pocket. I’d always thought of faith as a positive thing, but faith was a blindfold—you walked along the edge of a cliff at all times. The crickets thrummed in the bushes, knowing their time was growing short. Overhead, the sound of flying geese heading south filled the twilight. A sea wind rinsed the stones. I was as anxious to be gone as the boy. At last, the stars emerged—first in the east, then scattered throughout the sky. With no lights to outshine them, no clouds to blur them, they seemed more populous than the city itself. How lonely we were by comparison.

  Finally, the sound of a motor. Not sails after all. Coming not from the sea but up the Little Nevka. I lit the lantern. The motorboat pulled up to the dock. The Wolf, in knitted cap and leather coat, manned the tiller, while another man hunched over on some crates, smoking a pipe. The Finn brought it up neatly to the old dock, jumped off, tied it loosely to the post.

  “Got the babki?” he said. Little cakes. The money, the dough.

  “Who’s that?” I wanted to know.

  “None of your business is who,” said the Wolf.

  “I don’t know him. Maybe he’s Cheka,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s Joulupukki, the Yule Goat,” said the Wolf. “It’s my boat. Give me the babki.” He held out his hand, snapped his fingers.

  I took out an envelope, that brick of paper notes, and counted out half, put it back in my bag. The rest of my money was neatly secreted in a pocket under my dress, money he didn’t need to know about. “That’s half. You get the rest when we land.”
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  “I thought you had more people,” said the smuggler.

  “No, it’s just us,” I said.

  “Just you,” he said. “Not the kid.”

  Makar protested, rising to his knees. “We had a deal—”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “But you promised!” I could hear the tears in his voice. He might be a streetwise orphan, but he was still a child.

  “I promised nothing. Now beat it. Get back to work.”

  “But you promised!”

  “Did I tell you to beat it? Maybe you’re hard of hearing.” He pulled out a nasty-looking knife, a blade about six inches long. “Can I help clean out your ears?”

  Suddenly I felt the boy’s hand plunge into my pocket and before I could stop him he’d pulled out the stvol. He was up, pointing it at the Wolf. “Want to clean out my ears, asshole? Go ahead. Try me.”

  Oh God, was he going to ruin this? “Give it to me, Makar. It’s mine. Don’t do this. It’s fine. We’ll take you, I promise.”

  But he wasn’t listening to me, he had eyes only for the Wolf, who’d wounded his pride. “Come on, fucker,” he said, laughing. “My ears, I’m not hearing very well.”

  “You’re dead, Makar,” spat the smuggler. “Nobody pulls a stvol on me.”

  I was going to lose my captain, my ship, my chance to get away. All of it because of this newly sprouted little man. “Just put it down,” I urged the orphan. “Everybody calm down. It’s going to be okay.”

  Makar clearly didn’t know what he was going to do next, hopping from one foot to another, giggling. And neither did the Wolf, standing with his hands half up. He obviously could not believe one of his own street boys would produce a firearm and train it on him. It still all might have sorted itself out, except that the man on the crates lurched for shore, or maybe just for cover, and the movement startled Makar. He fired, striking the Wolf in the shoulder. The tall ginger-haired thug came at him with the knife, and the boy kept firing until both men lay dying, and the woods were full of sound.

  The noise radiated out and out, rolling across the water. The faces of the men, pale in the dark. Startled, eyes open. I blew out the lantern.

  I wanted to vomit. I only hoped the strange man was one of the Wolf’s colleagues and not another citizen hoping for escape. I waited in the dark for my senses to return to me. I waited for shouts, for running footsteps, arrest. I wanted to run, but where? Back to Petrograd? No.

  Makar sat next to me in the darkness. “He was going to cut me out.”

  Was that an apology? “You didn’t have to shoot him.”

  “I didn’t know what the other one was going to do.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  It was hot and I could smell the sulfur. By touch, I reloaded it from the box of ammunition in my other pocket, the cylinder almost too hot to handle, then I returned it to its home. Luck has not been your friend. So what were we going to do now?

  Makar was crying. “We were going to be partners.” This poor crazy kid. His big chance just a fantasy. Nobody likes having to look at themselves in the spotlight and see the gull, the fool. What the Wolf didn’t know about the human heart. I felt like crying myself, but I patted his leg. We had to pull ourselves together. We had to think.

  “What’s in the crates?” I asked. Trying to sound practical. “Go look.”

  He stumbled over to the boat, shook a crate. “Vodka, I think,” he sniffled. “He shouldn’t have tried to cut me out. He shouldn’t have done that.”

  I couldn’t begin to count the ways this thing was going wrong. All of my hopes had been pinned on the ginger-haired man now dead or dying on the dock. After a while, I relit the lantern, gazed down at the victims. The Wolf on his back, his pale eyes staring. The blood-soaked shirtfront black in the faint light. The other man lay draped, half in, half out of the boat. He didn’t seem like a smuggler, but how did a smuggler look? He wore city clothes, a black coat, shirt, dark pants. Dark hair. His cap had come off along with the top of his head. No satchel, no luggage.

  Makar was already searching the dead men. From the smuggler he produced a lighter, some cigarettes, gold coins that flashed like fire between his fingers and disappeared. He held out my bills, which I took and replaced in my bag. He wrestled and rolled the Wolf out of his jacket, put it on. He took off his mismatched boots and slid the man’s sturdy ones over his bare feet. They were enormous. He took his belt and cap and grinned, as if he hadn’t just killed two men. “Pretty nice, eh? I never had a leather jacket before.” The Wolf’s knife he also kept.

  “The other one. Who is he? Does he have a labor book?”

  He checked the man’s pockets. A few rubles, a lighter, a bag of cheap tobacco. No labor book. No papers. Nothing to indicate whether he’d been an innocent man whose life we just ended, or a smuggler, or both. All of my volition had drained from me. I felt as weak as an invalid. Nevertheless, we had to get rid of the bodies. Two splashes, we didn’t even bother to weigh them down. “Sorry,” I said as the passenger sank into the little Nevka.

  Breathe. Breathe in calm, breathe out chaos. Breathe out wanting to throw that kid into the Nevka.

  “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or grab him by the throat. “Do you know how to drive a boat?”

  “How hard could it be?”

  We examined the vessel. One bullet had gone through just below the oarlock on the starboard side, but the bottom seemed untouched. The motor? I lifted the lantern but it was hard to tell. Well, I couldn’t go back to Petrograd and I couldn’t stay here. I’d said my goodbyes, I’d sat on my luggage, so to speak. I climbed into the boat and the boy followed me. Now I was grateful Anton hadn’t come. Panic was a disease that spread faster than cholera. He would be accusatory by now—This is what leaving gets you—on his way to venomous hysteria. Makar was still a child, he would follow my lead. He held the lantern, peering over my shoulder as I explored the boat’s mechanisms.

  The tiller jutted out from the frame. The skiff’s motor had a kind of spool and a handle—a crank of some sort. The petrol tank was easy to identify, and a flat metal tongue poked out from under the spool. I shifted it from left to right, but nothing happened. I felt like a monkey looking at a gramophone. If it had sails, I could get us to Finland. Damn this kid, and that dead bastard Wolf. All the boy wanted was respect, how hard would that have been, just to include him? They’d both be alive, and we’d be on our way.

  The boy knelt in the bottom of the boat, holding the lantern so I could see the motor’s levers and spool and not my own shadow.

  Please, Theotokos, help this poor sailor. I grabbed the knob on the spool. Clearly, it was designed to be spun. “Well, here goes.”

  It only rotated a half turn, but when it sprung back it cracked my knuckles hard enough to break them. I yelled as the motor sprang to life, the spool racing around like a fishing reel. How noisy it was! The boat lurched and strained against the rope.

  “Slip that off,” I said, trying to ignore the fiery pain in my hand. I held on to the boy’s belt as he leaned out and slipped the rope from the mooring. Then we were chugging out into the dark channel of the Little Nevka, the motor spluttering and stinking. He looked down into the water as we left. “We did have a deal, motherfucker.” And he spit into the slow current.

  “Kill that lantern,” I said.

  He did as he was told. I took the tiller and headed west.

  The sea roughened as we left Krestovsky Island and entered the gulf, waves slapping the bottom of the small skiff. “Hey, is it supposed to do this?” Makar grabbed the sides.

  “It’s fine,” I said, hoping it was true.

  The wind was cold. I was happy for my sheepskin and my hat. I turned north, trying to follow the shore. We struck something, there was an ugly scraping against the hull.

  “What’s happening?” Makar cried. “Watch out!” But there was nothing to watch out for on this moonless night, that was the point. I had t
o do it by feel. I pulled off the rock or whatever it was, turning out deeper into the gulf. All I could see were stars, thick above us, and the dark mass where the trees were pasted against them on the starboard side. As I steered away from the hazards of the shore, I noticed the tree-line shadow diminish. When I came experimentally closer, I watched it rise up again. If I could just follow the line of darkness, I could navigate without running up on anything.

  There was a bit of a chop, but it wasn’t terrifying, except when a wave lifted and dropped us unexpectedly, and the boy cried out. I found that by turning the lever to the right I gave the engine more petrol; turning it left slowed us down again. Better to go slow, save fuel, and arrive closer to dawn when I could see the shore better.

  There was also the problem of the dead smugglers. And the boy. The liability of him was becoming more clear, and in any case I couldn’t take him to Helsinki with me.

  “I never had a leather coat before. It’s so warm.” The Wolf’s pelt, with its blood and bullet holes. “Can I steer?”

  I tried not to think bad luck boy. If it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be out here tonight, trying to steer by a dark strip against a vast sky of stars. But there was no such thing as luck, only fate, which could not be outrun. “Come over here, then.”

  The boat shifted. I heard him fall to the deck. “Careful!”

  I wondered if he could even swim. He crawled to me on hands and knees, and I slowly moved over on the bench, gingerly balancing our weight, helping him settle himself. With him and me in the stern, the boat rode differently, nose up, striking the water more forcefully, I could feel the roughness in the tiller. “This is how you steer.” I put his hand on the stick, and my uninjured one—the left—on top. “It goes the opposite of how you think. If you want to go left, push right.”