by Janet Fitch
I pretended a terrific interest in the beautifully carved plasterwork of the reception hall ceiling, the gilded mirrors still fitted to the paneling. “I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I met Blok on Bolshaya Morskaya and he invited me to come tonight.” Was I boasting, or justifying my presence?
“I just saw him,” Anton said, scanning the crowd. “There. Sans streetlamp and pharmacy.” The night, the street, the streetlamp, the pharmacy—one of my favorite Blok poems. Blok stood directly opposite us in the back of the room, hat in hand, blue coat slung across his shoulders. The famous curls shorn, no longer the masculine angel of my childhood, the face that had once made me debate whether it would be better to be a poet’s Beautiful Lady or the poet oneself. He was in deep conversation with a tall, stooped man with a broad moustache and the heavy-boned face of a peasant. It was Maxim Gorky, whom I recognized from the frontispiece of a collection my parents had had in their library. A long-time socialist, he was supposed to be personal friends with Lenin. I’d read his poem “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” when I was six, and wanted to be like the courageous Petrel, unafraid of any storm. So strange to see him talking to Blok—the proletarian realist and the symbolist stag of the Silver Age. The revolution certainly made strange bedfellows. The light from a dusty electrolier lay upon the proletarian writer badly, accentuating his rough skin, and hair that bristled in every direction without a parting. He was taller than I’d imagined, and almost as weary as Blok.
Around these giants, the buzz of the assembly increased its volume, the way people always grow excited in the presence of the famous—pretending they didn’t notice them. That had not changed with the revolution. A pretty, plump woman with wavy dark hair and a clever face stood at Gorky’s elbow. “That’s Gorky’s mistress,” whispered Inna Gants. “Moura Budberg. An Estonian baroness, they say. His secretary. Or was that translator? They say they’re all living together over on Kronverksky Prospect, the wife and the secretary, plus Khodasevich’s niece, two cousins from Rostov, and a Negro opera singer—so close they all have to turn over in bed as one.”
A Negro opera singer! She was still here? I glanced around to see if I’d missed her, but no, there was no such jewel in attendance. I didn’t know if my poor dry soul could absorb any more. And to think, if I had not left the telephone exchange early last night, sneaking out for horsemeat, I would have just gone on in my death-in-life, never knowing all this existed a few blocks away at 59 Moika Embankment.
“So when did you last see Genya?” The ash from Anton’s makhorka was now at full length. It was dizzying to watch. At least he wasn’t spitting sunflower seeds on the floor.
“Last summer,” I said. I took his cigarette, flicked the ash, and took an awful puff, stuck it back between his lips. “On an agit-train heading for Perm.”
“The Red October? You saw the Red October?” His smirk for a moment dropped into genuine surprise.
I thought again of that poem Genya had left for me before departing for the Urals, his supposed suicide note for his own soul. He never saw the infant who had borne his name. “He left me behind when I went into labor.” Was that unfair of me? I softened my tone. “The battle lines were changing. He had to move on. I assume he made it.”
“He’s back in Moscow.” Anton pulled me to him to make room for another man on my left, then realized what he had done—touched me—and quickly dropped my arm. “He’s got a new collection coming out.”
Inna Gants made a disgusted kh. “The rest of us are reciting in unheated halls, but Kuriakin gets a nice shiny collection.”
Yes, I could imagine if the government had any paper at all, they would make it available for Genya.
“I’m editing it for him, actually,” Anton said. “It’s called On the Red October.”
I had written nothing, and he had a new collection. Iskra had died and Genya’s star had rocketed into the heavens. Well, good for him.
“Come up to my belfry after the reading, I’ll show it to you,” Anton said.
Against the far wall, Blok spoke urgently to Gorky, who kept shaking his head. Perhaps he didn’t want to take Blok’s translation either. The plump mistress Moura said something amusing, breaking the tension between them. Then Gorky and the woman took their seats, while Blok remained standing against the wall near the door. I wished he would stay out of that draft, he looked like he would catch pneumonia if he didn’t have it already.
“I’m thinking of taking Gumilev’s studio class,” I said, watching a bald man swat the snow from his shoulders. “Blok thought I might like it.”
“You can’t work with Gumilev.” Anton was outraged. “He’s a monarchist. And a womanizer. Plus, he hates vers libre. Plus, he thinks he’s God.”
“Blok is God,” I said.
“No, Shklovsky is God,” said Anton.
“I think Gorky’s got the title locked,” Inna said.
I imagined the House of Arts must have ferocious politics. Like a cave in a snowstorm, all the animals had gathered here. I gazed around at faces I didn’t recognize but they all had that air of belonging to someone. Ah, the luxury to still have a face. Litso, Lichnost’. Personality, Identity. To be one recognizable thing, and continue to be that, put your name to it, your signature. Like Gumilev’s starched collar.
But maybe I was wrong about having no face. Anton had recognized me. I tucked my arm into his, and felt his shocked stiffness. But I was half in love with him tonight. Despite his tough pose, he knew me. And I’d introduced myself to Blok with my true name. Maybe this was the start of a restoration. I would pick up the shards, glue them together once more. I didn’t know how they would fit, but there must be some motif that would encompass all the half-truths, the eighth notes. I wanted to live in the whole house for a change, not just the legal nine square meters. I’d been pretending that it was safer, to take up the least possible room, but it wasn’t. It was dangerous in a very private way, like dry rot, like termites.
A cheerful blue-eyed man mounted the podium. He had the round bald head of an egg.
“That’s Shklovsky,” Anton whispered proudly. As if we’d come to the point of this whole excursion. “He lives here, right on my hall. We speak every day.”
The critic made a few announcements: about an upcoming lecture by Eikhenbaum about the Young Tolstoy, a Dobuzhinsky exhibition opening next week in the front gallery—Dobuzhinsky! He was still here?—and a reminder that the Poets’ Guild had moved to the Muruzi house. Then he introduced Bely.
Every cultured Russian had encountered Bely’s novel Petersburg in installments before the war. The risk of it, the intricate jokes, his portrayal of the city! The work delighted us as it had shocked others, the absurdity of its presentation of deadly serious issues—a bomb-throwing son assigned to assassinate his own father with a sardine-can bomb. It was hard to really know what Bely’s politics were. There was a big dose of Gogol—even I had tried a bit of fantastical prose under its influence.
And here was the man himself. All of them were here, in this icy heaven: Blok, Gorky, Gumilev, Bely. All that was missing was Akhmatova.
Bely was balder than his photographs, and what hair he had was white and uncut. But it was his eyes you remembered, their mad blue flame. Bely took the stage to applause that seemed faint compared to the thunder that had once met Genya when he alit from the Red October to address the agitprop crowds. But these lucky eighty or hundred souls weren’t just any crowd. They were the remaining intelligentsia of Petersburg. And, of course, most of us still wore our gloves.
Bely explained that his new work, Notes of an Eccentric, was a memoir, very direct and simple. He had repudiated skill and craft forever! I was sorely disappointed—that’s not what we’d loved about Bely. Had he surrendered so utterly to our spartan times? But when he began to read, I realized he either had been joking or really didn’t understand how strange his own language was, his native mode of thought. The made-up words, the cadences of imagistic prose. His skill, his craft, was h
is face. He could no more write without creating new language and sounds and strange encounters than breathe without lungs.
The phantasmagorical tale, this supposed memoir, was populated by dreams and doppelgangers, a gentleman in a bowler hat, a mysterious brunet spy. And of course, bureaucrats. The section he read concerned a train trip from Switzerland to London on the eve of the war. It felt like a novel, except its hero was no longer the hapless son of Petersburg carrying a sardine-can time bomb. Bely himself had become the bomb. I supposed that’s what he meant by memoir.
As he read, I had the strange sensation that the House of Arts was moving, that the whole building had swung out from its berth on the Moika Embankment and set out to sea. We were on a journey together, setting forth to some port as yet unknown, with Bely as our captain. He described the beginning of the war, and in his mind the war and his own inner conflicts had become fused. In fact, the war was the result of that internal turmoil. It reminded me of Andrei Ionian, who had believed that the civil war was a result of a struggle in the upper dimensions, manifesting itself here below. But this was an even stranger expression of the idea, more personal, more terrifying: “Explosions in me thus became explosions of the world; war crawled out of me—circled me.” This was true horror. His own contradictions had caused the war.
“They know everything, they know that I am not me, but the bearer of an enormous ‘I’ stuffed with the global crisis; I am a bomb, flying off to explode; and exploding, explode everything there is; this they would not allow, of course; to restrain us with hugs…They know that the nurseries were warm and bright: the baby in me lowered into the thunder of the world’s speech.”
Oh that beautiful thunder!
“I hear distinct whispering all around:—It’s—Him!” A momentous thing, to be so greeted into the world. What would it be to feel that you mattered so much? No ordinary human being, but a symbol, a mythic figure—It’s Her! That would never be me.
The crowd blended into one, following this astonishing invention, the language, the philosophical position. Blok, standing across the room, watched his old friend the way you’d watch a tightrope walker crossing an abyss—admiring and terrified. I could see, he loved him still. I was less worried for Bely than Blok. He seemed exhausted—so the opposite of his friend, whose blue eyes held the crackling intensity of a downed electrical line. Who dared to walk out onto thin air, supported only by the force of this language. Stroking his bald head, sweating, stammering, as if his words could even now explode the Eliseev parlor.
He moved into imagining his birth, birth as the soul falling into the Void, into the disgusting, robotic abyss of the body. No, I would not agree with him there. The body was no Void. I had seen the Void—and it lay on a sidewalk on Mikhailovskaya Street. It lived in the barrel of a Mauser pointed at your head, in the greased eyes of a provincial Chekist unbuttoning his pants. The Void coiled in a cellar’s bloody drain. And it hung between the fingers of a dangerous man simply playing with a string. Not in the waiting flesh of an infant body.
It was wonder I had seen in Iskra’s eyes, wonder at the things of this world. I tried to imagine it Bely’s way, entering this heavy, confused thing—incarnation—this peculiar fragment of spirit being shoehorned into the swollen fleshy form. But I found it repugnant. Certainly an infant might be frightened, but what of wonder? To me, all this revealed a generalized horror of life. No matter what had happened to me, I still pitched my tent on the side of the living. I had seen those green trees in Iskra’s eyes.
Perhaps my brain had been blunted by all I’d been through these last months, but I had to apply the greatest concentration to follow Bely through the symbols and figures of his story, like translating from a language half learned—Hungarian, or Greek. I couldn’t be sure I understood him or the very opposite of what he’d intended. The shattered form, the tricks with language, the invented words. Was I fatally damaged? I had been more clever at fifteen. Anton was in his element, needless to say, standing next to his hero Shklovsky. Khodasevich tapped his foot in time to the rhythmic beats. I wove in and out of the story, returning when the images grew more concrete—the brunet man and terrorist bombs on the train, and a delicious series of scenes as Bely arrived in England. His humor as his alter ego scurried around to the various subdepartments of the English bureaucracy, trying to get stamps on his papers to declare he was
—In London
—In London
—In London
—In London
—In London.
The sweet music of stamps being pounded onto one’s documents was a sound that everyone in the audience could recognize. The man was a poet, more a poet in prose than a novelist. Certainly it was the strangest memoir one could image. Anton chewed on his cuticles, his arms folded in front of him, making comments under his breath. Moura Budberg whispered to a woman in a black coat and a hat with a broken feather, who became increasingly animated. Gorky scrawled something on a notepad.
Finally, Bely read a section describing his return to Russia, where he found that our very souls had been blown out of the tops of our heads with the explosion of war, leaving us so many empty grotesques. “Like a corpse—the only thing that remained as before: arms, an abdomen, I seemed to myself to be an abdomen irresponsibly propped up on legs: the rest—a chest, throat, brain—I felt just emptiness. I monstrously shot all this from the split darkness into the sky. ‘That’ was…a nonliving, dull, deaf abdomen of a body.
“And so—I saw that picture of myself multiplied into millions of darting bodies in greatcoats everywhere: deaf, dumb, abdomen bodies moved all over, shooting into space, like nuclei, their human I’s; these I’s flew out of the bodies; and the body, unloving and mindless, walked everywhere:—Has Russia not shot its ‘I’ into the great void? Did the shot of the world war not leave a totally dull ‘It’…?”
We’d been deafened by war, the war had shot us from our souls. Grief washed over me. Yes, we had not been killed—we lived on in a city of ruin and aftermath that was “nothing” and extended over the whole earth. People reduced to legs and stomachs. I looked for Blok across the room. Surely he was no abdomen on legs. How sad he looked. I saw, Blok felt this too. That he had shot his I out into the void, and what stood here was a shadow. Dying.
No, not dying—dead. Literally, I was looking at a dead man. All at once, I saw it. Oh God, please not Blok.
But I saw it as clearly as Bely had seen the brunet man on the train, as my mother had seen me in the forest. I saw that Blok had died. Hollowed out. I clapped my hand over my mouth. Carrying the weight of my own dead child was heavy enough, but to see Blok staggering under the weight of his own corpse, it was like watching a horse falling in the street, struggling to get up, but not having the strength. What terrible bravery dwelled in that tall gray figure! How horrible to still have to walk around in public, as if one hadn’t passed away. Didn’t anyone else see it?
I looked around at the others of his generation, Kuzmin, and Bely and Gorky. All of them, hanging on by a thread. Come back! Who can take your place? We were ants by comparison, Genya, Anton, me. Though there was still Mandelstam, I told myself. And Tsvetaeva, Pasternak in Moscow. Mayakovsky. Maybe this sniffly girl with the handkerchief would be the next Blok, or the young man with the broken nose.
I would not accept that our souls were gone forever. It could not be. If it was so, what would you call this, this House of Arts, and these intelligent, cultured people who’d come to listen to Bely in this freezing hall, who had stood for nearly two hours, listening to his shattered, difficult story? Had their souls blown out, leaving them only their stomachs on legs? No, they were fighting for their souls day after day, fighting for the soul of Russia as I’d once fought for Iskra in a village bathhouse.
At last the reading was done. I felt as though I’d run a marathon in a lightning storm. My head still buzzed. The heroic audience rose from their seats, or stretched in the back, lit cigarettes, and the hall rang out with their talk a
s they greeted one another and congratulated Bely, who seemed if anything more animated than when he began. Most of all, I wanted to talk to Blok, to tell him what he meant to me, tell him not to die.
But already a young woman was at his side, speaking quickly, animatedly. Blok was listening but with such weariness—he hadn’t the energy to fly from the leaden circle of her chatter. I stopped where I was. I didn’t want to approach him, one more person who wanted to bathe in the last glow, like light from a dead star. What need did he have of my pleasantries? He needed the very angels to come and take him home, to pick him up and wrap him in his broken wings, and lift him into a sky of immortal blue.
He looked up and saw me, where I stood halfway across the hall, and smiled at me. And death slipped away from his features, and he became himself again. Not quite dead, his smile seemed to say.
I found Anton in a hallway off the dining room where a number of young people had taken refuge. It was warmer there than the formal rooms, where the Eliseev servants were passing out cups of weak tea. Here were the other members of Anton’s literary circle, some who lived here, some who had come to hear Bely. The boxer, Tereshenko, I recognized, and Nikita Nikulin from our old days as the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.
I had to be at work tomorrow at nine, but I was shimmering, dazzled by the company, and could not imagine leaving to slog through the blizzard that was now hurling down snow out the windows. “I’d love to see that manuscript,” I said to Anton.
And I let him lead me deeper into the House of Arts.
31 The Towers of Ilium
What a vast beehive it was, a warren of art, an ark, an ocean liner. I would never be able to find my way out again. Anton opened his door, a narrow door someone had marked with the letter ZH in chalk—for Zhenshchiny, Women. Cold poured out as if he’d opened a sluice. He stumbled in and lit a lamp with the skritch of a match. The room proved cluttered, with a strange window that began at floor level and ended around chest height, where one could presumably sit cross-legged and gaze down Nevsky, were it not for the frost flowers blooming on the panes.
