Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  I smoothed out the blankets on the unmade bed as Anton fiddled with the lamp. Its wobbly flame cast its light on the mess of his table, the untidy piles of letters and manuscripts, books. Books—a good sign. They’d not yet been forced to burn them. Perhaps they received firewood from the House as well as their daily bread. It was cold enough in the room to see our breaths curl whitely into the air. Anton moved to the stove and attempted to light it, but these temperamental little goddesses didn’t favor brusque treatment, and the smoke of its disgust immediately began to spill into the room.

  Sometimes I really did feel like a peasant, watching urbanites struggle against their sullen material objects. I squatted next to him. Shutting the bourgeoika door against further pollution, I rolled some paper nuggets from pages of an old “thick journal” he was using—Russkaya Mysl’. Russian Thought. A Chekhov story, alas. I didn’t have my hatchet but used one of the orphans’ penknives to peel a shard of wood from a rough plank that looked like it had been torn off a fence. The revolution’s forbidden fuel. I lit the end of the stick and shoved it up into the pipe to warm the freezing air. In a few minutes, the little goddess was happily humming.

  “How do you do that?” Anton frowned, rubbing his badly shaved jaw like he had a toothache. He threw himself into the one chair. Always the good host.

  “Witchcraft,” I said, dusting the soot from my hands. “I sold my soul to a man on a staircase.”

  “Hope you got a good price,” said Anton. “I’m going to put you forward for membership immediately—no one can get these stoves to do anything but stink.”

  “Nice to have something to offer. ‘She writes a certain incendiary line.’”

  He laughed. “Yes, that was always your way. Leaving a swath of smoking rubble in your wake. Our own little Helen, toppling our towers of Ilium.” Was that how he saw me? The femme fatale? And what did he mean our? But he was digging through the papers on his little table.

  “Here it is.” He handed me a stack of typewritten pages. On the Red October by Gennady Yurievich Kuriakin. Moscow, 1920. Government Press.

  As I sat on the hard little bed, I saw he was nervous. Meeting my eyes by accident, he quickly busied himself with his books and papers. He’d seemed happy enough a moment ago. I took off my dirty mittens and blew onto my hands. The room was warming. I couldn’t see my breath anymore. I began to read.

  It was a long poema about the journey of the Red October, pencil-marked in the margins in Anton’s small neat hand. I could hear Genya’s voice—of course he would write an epic. A train demanded it, one car linked to the next. Here were the sailors and the crowds and the stupefied peasants, the steppe nomads, the leather-clad commissars, Gaida and Kolchak out in the distance. Matvei the journalist, Yermilova, even Trotsky was there. Everyone made an appearance but a long-lost beloved found in Tikhvin living with a one-armed man, a woman pregnant with another man’s child. She who had to be put off the train in the middle of nowhere to give birth to her only child. “Funeral for Myself on the Tracks at Kambarka” didn’t make the cut.

  It was strong, beautiful, and thunderous, immense and iron wheeled. What place could the fate of one confused woman and her infant have on a stage so grand? I’d left no trace. Gone was the man who wrote Who would have dreamed / I would / drop / my own heart / from the gallows / pull the rope myself. It was as if he had scraped off half of his face—the tender one, the lover, the boy who couldn’t bear the sight of cruelty. He’d erased that self, chopped him up and fed him into the boiler of the Red October. He’d cut out his own heart for his enormous beloved, Russia, as she rolled out before the train hurtling along the vast steel cables of its tracks.

  I caught Anton watching me again, his intelligent hazel eyes, the pugnacious mouth. I wouldn’t cry. Life was as it was. And we would all be erased soon enough—except Genya. It was sad that he’d erased me, but I would do my own remembering. I would have to cut my mind into the stone of the world just as he had done, if I wanted to leave some trace.

  “It’s good, but hard,” I said, handing the pages back. “When did he get so hard?” Anton the faithful, Anton the believer. “I miss the old Genya.”

  I heard someone moving around on the other side of the wall, the scrape of a chair. I’m sure he or she was surprised to hear a woman in Anton’s cell. I examined his oddly shaped room, his piles of books and solitary bed, the one strange window. Perhaps it had once been a passage between two other rooms. On the walls, grease-pencil drawings had been applied directly to the plaster—cubo-futurist objects and portraits and letterforms. Yes, here was Anton scowling, and other people—Nikita Nikulin, the broken angles of his body; Galina Krestovskaya: hair, one eye, music. I recognized the style. “Is this Sasha’s? Do you still see him?” The handsome blond painter who was so in love with Dunya Katzeva.

  “He was in the army for a while. Got wounded in the Ukraine. Also in the ass.” He was smiling, a Mona Lisa hint, and yet I saw it. “They shipped him home. He’s living down the hall. Shall we get him? He’s teaching at Svomas, living with that girl—the Katzev girl…”

  Dunya! They were here! But I thought of that terrible day when Mina threw me out with my child in my arms. How could I face her? I didn’t want to have to tell her what had happened to my girl, that I had not kept her safe. “No, let them be. It’s good to see you, Anton. Really good.”

  He seemed uneasy to be alone with me, without other people to throw between us. He shuffled nervously, touching his papers, leaning on the window, scratching at the frost flowers. He rubbed his cropped hair, as abashed as a small boy, and irritated at his own awkwardness as only Anton could be. He sat back down at his scarred table, edged in cigarette burns—desk, dressing stand, dining table all in one—his long legs crossed before him. Our feet almost touched. He fished through the papers, looking for something, putting some aside, collecting others. I wondered what he’d been doing for female companionship—still going to the whores? Or maybe Galina Krestovskaya had taken him up now that her husband had been shot. She might need some sort of anchor, and Anton had always appealed to her for some reason.

  He read some poems aloud by people in his circle, some I knew, some I didn’t. Most had a strong element of the sound poetry he loved. Arseny Grodetsky was still around—I remembered him from our evenings at Galina’s, the sixteen-year-old radical who still lived at home with Mama. But such wonderful sounds. Ou ou ou, aya, kaya, kataya. There seemed to be room for everyone at the House of Arts. Perhaps even me.

  We talked on, joyously, seriously, on an infinity of subjects, I felt as though I hadn’t spoken for years. We talked until it was far too late to try to get home, not in that snowstorm, and my head drooped like a dandelion. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I dreamed I was on the Red October, and I kept trying to jump off, but it was moving much too fast.

  Eight inches of snow fell during the night, snow without blemish, calf deep as I left the House of Arts. A sleepy, mystic snowfall, it needed a Blok to sing it—a real prewar snow. It begged for a fast sleigh, a fat coachman, gray horses with dark noses and intellectual eyes. What I would have given for a sleigh ride—rushing behind a feathery-hoofed horse with bells on its harness, snow encasing my collar and dusting my hat, face tingling with pleasure.

  Citizens on the day’s snow detail were emerging from the courtyards, preparing to take up their Soviet shovels.

  Take your time, Comrades. Don’t be so quick to strip us of our ermine.

  I practically waltzed down Bolshaya Morskaya to the telephone exchange, but forgot where the dead horse was and tripped over it. It sent me sprawling, face-first, hands outstretched, into the new snow. Like landing on a featherbed.

  Entering the vast exchange, I let the monstrous, oceanic wave of noise pour over me like waves turning stones over on a thousand beaches. Last night, Anton had said that Blok stopped writing poetry after “The Scythians,” because there were no more sounds. He should come here, then—there was nothing but sound, clatter of
metal on metal like a hailstorm. But no fine long Blokian ahs and ous and ohs—modern sounds were all consonants, cktcktkttkkkk…I thought that Arseny Grodetsky and his ous and ayas and kayas and katayas would enjoy a class trip to the telephone exchange.

  How paltry and inhuman it seemed now, my refuge of these last dry months. I sat down at my station and donned the mouthpiece that rested on my chest, the headset, one of a chorus—Number, please. Number, please. The open mouths of the switchboard sockets—like souls frozen in hell, screaming in the Dantean symphony. Clamoring, all these people, hungry for connection.

  Voices echoed along the nerves…

  Snakelike twined, in cables cased

  Orders, whispers, sighs,

  linking leaders to their bureaucrats

  Lover to beloved.

  “One moment, please. Sorry, yes. Number, please.”

  Sonya, my switchboard stall mate, cast sidelong looks in my direction. “What’s wrong with you?”

  We were supposed to be as much a part of the switchboard as the switches and sockets, with skins of steel, the wires our nerves and blood vessels, connecting the city through the strings of ourselves.

  But the more I listened to the poetry of the telephone exchange, the worse my performance grew. I disconnected calls that were not yet ready to terminate, or forgot about them when the light signaled that the call had ended. I accidentally connected people who had never met—and laughed out loud at the mischief of my hands, capable of introducing perfect strangers. Well, there was too much disconnection in our city.

  Who’s to say the connection’s wrong?

  Perhaps he was someone

  you should know.

  Or one to whom you haven’t

  spoken for years—

  “Milashkov,

  From Kirochnaya Street?

  Gerasim Milashkov?”

  “It’s he.”

  “My God! It’s Dmitry Grushin!”

  “Dima? With the pretty big sister?”

  “Well, yes! Though

  she’s as big as a horse now,

  God bless her.”

  Sonya stared at me, walleyed. Why on earth could I be laughing? What could there possibly be to laugh at nowadays, in this kingdom of cold and hunger? I was not doing my job and I was laughing. I clearly must be drunk, or mad.

  Yes, I was. Drunk to be back in the world where people knew things, had ideas. What didn’t we talk about last night in that odd little room? About sound, I recalled, and the elimination of the hard sign. About Notes of an Eccentric, and Blok’s “Retribution,” and the Red October. The sound of it—Genya on top of that train, the wind in his ears, all of Russia rolling out before him. The poem matched that scale, gigantic. It straddled the world, hurtling the times ahead like a giant relay from stop to stop. All uncertainty and loneliness left behind with the miles. In the end, I forgave him the absence of “Funeral for Myself.” That’s what happened in life. You held funerals for parts of yourself.

  Number, please.

  Anton had railed against the Gumilevs and Khodaseviches, sure they would dismiss Genya’s epic out of hand as mere agitprop. “They’re worried that he’ll show them up, that’s all. Genya doesn’t have time for their minuets.”

  But I was from Petersburg as well as Petrograd and had time for minuets as well as locomotives. Was tenderness only a side dish? Perhaps it would return when this was all over, when the souls that had been shot from our heads had found us again.

  Number, please.

  I should write a poem about the switchboard: “Who’s to Say the Connection’s Wrong?” All these Soviet young ladies with wires coming out of their heads. I’d recited poems for Anton last night, but they were old, and so much had happened since then—the Five. Ionia. I had not written yet about my father. I had not written about Iskra, or the orphanage that was Russia.

  “I wasn’t joking about your joining us,” Anton had said. “We need you. A woman writing stuff that’s not about love and Mama and the time a Red Guard smashed my doll. They need to hear you.” He rubbed his face, embarrassed to have let such a personal statement escape his lips. “You should be here, not working in some telephone exchange. Putting wires in holes when we’re making the literature of the future.”

  “You just want someone to take care of your stove,” I teased him.

  “You have that book. You’re Genya Kuriakin’s wife—”

  “I haven’t seen him for a year.”

  He’d rubbed his forehead, like a schoolboy over a mathematics problem. “But you’re still married, da? Everything is political. We can’t afford to be naive. Plus my recommendation, your publications in Okno…and Blok’s on the board. We’ll get Shklovsky, that’s three, surely there will be two more…”

  Would they ever consider me as a member of that august league? Gumilev lived there, Shklovsky. Who was I? The biggest nobody.

  The switchboard’s lights blazed, everybody with such important calls to make. Astoria to Smolny. Second City Soviet, a commissar looking for a lost load of fuel. Number, please. Number, please.

  Honey oozing from the boards

  paints the arms

  of the Soviet Young Ladies

  stickysweet.

  Evidently our group’s literary output had not vanished from the earth. Rooting in his boxes, Anton had produced miracles. A copy of Genya’s Red Horses. Also the first one, Chronicles of a Misspent Youth. Here was Anton’s finished Apollinaire, and eight issues of Okno. He still had his copy of Khlebnikov’s poems, hand-lettered by Guro. And, the most startling revelation—a little bound volume, the sky-blue cloth cover, my name on the spine. This Transparent Hour by M. D. Makarova.

  The delicate pages, slightly edged in mold. I turned them with such tenderness, as if this was my very self, my youth. So outspoken! So fiery, so in love with the idea of greatness. One page had been turned in—a poem in imitation of Pushkin by way of Akhmatova, about a man walking through a field, still in love with a girl of his youth. How he regretted their separation! Wondering what had become of her, how she’d marked him forever.

  Where is she, those eyes of liquid night,

  the thick red hair that curls upon her dress?

  My heart, circling, cries like a gull for her caress

  On her lost shoulders the map of my hopelessness.

  And Anton had read and reread it.

  Anton the futurist, the soulless beast, had carried this along with him all this time, this bit of retrograde romance. And here I’d always thought he considered women merely annoying, especially me—an unfortunate appendage of Genya’s. Yet how pleased he’d been to show it to me, despite his nonchalance, as if it were proof of something he could not say.

  Our own little Helen.

  I had to be careful. I wanted no more toppled towers, I had witnessed enough destruction.

  32 The Golden Fleece

  The temperature dropped down, down into the sarcophagus of negative numbers. Minus 30, minus 40, minus 50 degrees. On Shpalernaya Street, all the tenants dragged their mattresses into the front parlor, where we slept pressed together for warmth, pooling our wood, breathing each other’s breaths, sharing each other’s lice. When the wood was gone we tore up floorboards at the back of the apartment. A dying city eats itself alive the way a starving body consumes its own flesh. Every day, people died in the street, just dropped as they walked along, or fell in the queues. Nothing could be done.

  Queuing was brutal. Like everybody else, I did it during the day when I was supposed to be working. Come nightfall, no one remained outdoors. No more evenings at the House of Arts. Only mandatory street-sweeping duty and a house-sentry shift could force me outside of this packed hellish room. I wished I still had a little of that confiscated marafet to steel myself for the horrific obligatory night shift stuck inside the dvornik’s shack, watching the gate, holding a rusty pistol I was sure dated from the Crimean War. I would never forget being forced to let the Cheka in to search in the building, and watching them
drag a fellow tenant away after midnight, an older man, his wife trailing him in 30 degrees below zero, keening like a pietà.

  Otherwise I sat on my mattress in the airless room with the other tenants, chockablock, wrapped in all my bedding and every shred of clothing I owned, even my boots, a brand-new notepad open on my knee and a shaved pencil in my hand. I worked in the wavering light of my small lamp, which I would not turn off until I was ready, no matter how the neighbors complained. I fixed their stoves, they could give me this much. I smoothed the page of my precious notebook, my prize.

  I’d gone to the registrar to see if I could trade Wednesdays for Sundays, as Anton’s studio met on Wednesday afternoons. The registrar was an original employee left over from before the revolution. Most of them had refused to abet the Bolsheviks in any way, and struck—but there were a few old girls like this one for whom the telephone exchange was a sacred trust. This was her Temple, and she, loyal Vestal, would not leave it in its hour of need, no matter who ruled the city—the tsar, the Bolsheviks, the Germans, or Bannik the bathhouse devil. I couldn’t imagine what she had been like before the revolution, but her Soviet role had shriveled her into a bitter, brittle leaf blowing down the center of a vast, deserted square. Just opening the big work schedule book for me seemed a violation of its sanctity.

  She gazed at me through her pince-nez, outraged that I would put my own needs before the needs of the exchange. In that, she fit in with the Bolshevik project perfectly. “You think this is all just for your convenience? That I can just switch Wednesday for Sunday at every girl’s whim? You lot take off whenever you like it anyway—there’s only half of you here on any one day, the rest are ghosts. But you all come to work when we hand out the ration cards, oh yes, you can count on that.”