by Janet Fitch
“Kuriakina, you look great!” Slava reached me at last, grabbing my arm, looking down at my belly. “Where’s the baby?”
A needle in the heart. I’d maintained my demeanor up to now, but my nerves were as thin as Bible pages. I shook my head.
“Oh, poor kid.” He patted my shoulder as if I were a big dog. “But you’re still here. Better days, eh? Where’s Kuriakin? Who’s this clown?” He gestured with a big thumb toward Clyde Emory.
“Englishman. A writer. Genya and I aren’t together anymore. Look, it’s good to see you.” I thought of that girl, bright on the roof of the Red October, roaring into the future, rotund with hope. And now, lost on my own Sargasso Sea. “Who’s guarding Kronstadt if you’re all here, Uncle Vanya?”
“We’re going back tonight—I’m on the Petropavlovsk. Come out for a visit!” he shouted as his group bore him off, a man caught in a tide. “I’ll let you fire the cannon!” And then he was gone. I stared after him as one stares at a ship as it vanishes over the horizon.
That night, Emory and I went to see Aura in Rachmaninoff’s Aleko—the adaptation of Pushkin’s “The Gypsies,” the poem that had once saved my life, letting me climb, hand over hand, out of despair the night I was buried alive under the snow. I hadn’t heard Chaliapin in years, but he was in great voice, his expressive basso the perfect foil for Aura’s rich mezzo. The staging was simple, a few stools and a wagon, the costumes slapdash, the musicians’ formal suits ragged with age, their faces gaunt, but with those voices, these artists at the height of their powers, this Aleko could have been staged in a cowshed and still rivaled La Scala. In the anonymous dark, I wept unabashedly. Oh, the luxury of that! For my family, for myself, for beauty, for the ruin of everything. But they couldn’t kill this music. Not tsars, not Bolsheviks, not Varvara, not the rampant mediocrity of The Mystery of Liberated Labor.
Emory’s tweedy arm came around me, an attempt to console me perhaps, or the first sortie in a seduction. I pretended to search in my bag for a handkerchief, and managed to shrug him off. I didn’t want to be soothed or handled, I just wanted to weep in peace.
Tonight, the old gypsy’s lines after Aleko slayed Zemfira and her new lover seemed a direct rebuke of our Bolshevik masters. Was I the only one who noticed? No, I was far from the only one sneaking glances at Zinoviev, seated with his family, stone-faced and pale in the darkened theater. The political context of Pushkin’s verse resonated across the years:
We are untamed, we have no laws.
We do not torture, execute—
We have no need of groans or blood—
We cannot live with murderers…
And the last line hung in the air
Oh anguish, oh gloom
Again alone, alone…
echoing my own emptiness as the curtain slowly fell.
As we filtered out through the foyer, I saw Varvara, leaning against the doorway. Nonchalant, as if she were just waiting for someone. I could have hung back, I could have hunted for Gorky or someone else to hide behind. But I didn’t. I chose the other door, but I didn’t crouch, I didn’t run. I took one look at her and she at me. She was giving me a last chance. Change your mind? said her naked stare. Ready to play the game?
I didn’t lower my face like a woman walking into a storm. I stared at her over Emory’s shoulder. He saw her too. “Friend of yours?”
“No,” I said. And we walked out into the waning rays of a very long day.
41 Music, When Soft Voices Die
The White Nights came upon us. The barely setting sun skimmed the horizon, sank, and then popped up immediately like a restless child refusing bed. A fuss in the corridor of the flat roused me from a pit of awful dreams. It couldn’t have been later than five or six in the morning, yet voices could be clearly heard. I threw a shawl over my nightdress and cracked the door. Other neighbors peered out from their own rooms. “What’s happening?” whispered Tatiana Glebovna, the clerk’s wife across the hall, the edge of her scarf stuffed in her mouth. As the voices grew louder, tenants slipped out of their rooms in their nightshirts and robes to see what the trouble was. I could see Olga Viktorievna waiting to see who would leave his room unattended, and locked my door behind me.
The noise was coming from the front rooms, murmurs and cries. By the entry door, a crowd of tenants had gathered. Russakova was holding her children. “Somebody dumped a body out there.”
“Rang the bell and left it,” said the postman, Vrachkov. “I was just on my way to work.”
I clawed my way through the crush out to the stairway landing, and knelt. My father lay on his side on the filthy floor—bearded, barefoot, hair streaked with gray. There was a clean bandage around his head covering the wound where his ear had been. I wished I could faint, but my body remained stubbornly attached to this waking nightmare. Denied even the mercy of unconsciousness.
I took his hand in mine, pressed it to my forehead. Cold, stiff. People hovered nervously in the doorway. It was clear to them that this was a dangerous death, an official death, the death of a person one should not admit knowing. Such a death had a way of attaching to the living. Yes, stay away, I thought, and the devil take you.
Dmitry Ivanovich Makarov. Famed jurist, author, member of the Provisional Government, liberal counterrevolutionary. This was how it ended, on this broken tile, a stair landing in a broken building in a city that had lost its name, in a country that had lost its soul. His poor face, the chestnut hair frosted white. The last of his kind. Every hope for Russia was embodied here, in this broken body, this discarded bundle. Misguided, foolish, and faithful. Papa…Even now I’d half believed Varvara might relent, her fury spent, that she might have been satisfied with the mutilation. But she’d waited, holding the blow until it could be delivered with maximum cruelty.
Why did they say inhuman when they talked about monstrous acts? When cruelty was every bit as human as mercy, this human instinct for revenge, hatred, envy. The hot, smoky taste of power.
His beard had been trimmed and his feet were clean. She must have believed I would relent eventually. Believed I would come bearing betrayal like a great leaking basket of heads to lay at her feet. My hand pressed to my face as if to erase my mouth. She’d kept her side of the bargain—got him a doctor, cleaned him and fed him. He had a new eye patch instead of that dirty bandage. How angry she must have been that I had refused her deal. “Papa,” I whispered into the bandage. Pressed my forehead to his stiff, cold hand again, watering the knuckles. To be so erased from this world, wiped out like a badly cleaned chalkboard. And so it ended—a man of courage and energy, his biography closed with murder. Never again the downward tilt of his chin when he prepared to say something weighty, which could also be contradicted by the laughter in his eyes. Eyes I would never see again, rich brown, with little lines at the corners and underneath etched deeply now. He and he alone had made me. Everything I was, and did, and thought, I could trace to him. Why did we have to be at war, Papa? What had cursed us so, to be born at this time, what evil fate had decided that our paths would be separated, and what furies came together to make them cross again?
“I got the morgue. The cart’s coming,” said the Communist from the Sobietskys’ room who could never get his stove to draw. He always sent his wife to fetch me. A kindness, as it was clear this was a dubious death, full of meaning. The tenants got tired of the show and went back into the flat to prepare their meager breakfasts and ready themselves for the day, feed their babies, draw water, get laundry started. But I stayed where I was on the floor next to my father. Like a dog on a grave, I would not be moved.
I examined him tenderly, lifting his head, ever so gently. Blood on the floor. He had been shot, a small bullet wound to the base of the skull. So, they’d made him kneel. No exit wound. Had she done this herself? Made him kneel in the basement or in the yard. You did this, I could hear her saying. No. I had just refused to stop it.
Eventually, men arrived with a stretcher. They brought a coffin they’d ren
t me for one hundred rubles. Was it the same cart that had come for Maxim, for Iskra? I wished I could pick him up and bear him away as I had my daughter, but he was too big to shoulder and there was no fog in which to vanish with him. It was a bright May morning. And he was not mine the way Iskra was, not mine alone. He belonged to this city and it would be an insult to bury him anonymously. He deserved his name, his rightful place. He had given everything he had for his Russia, his idea of it. He deserved to be buried amid the illustrious dead.
“Take him to Tikhvin Cemetery.”
The carter gazed at me skeptically under eyebrows like black caterpillars. Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery was for Petersburg notables. He didn’t budge, folding his arms across his chest. His partner, with the stretcher, waited patiently for our negotiations to complete themselves. “Who’s gonna pay for it?”
“You’ll get your money, Comrade.” Capitalist vampire. “It’s the Makarov plot. I’ll show you where.”
A doctor on the second floor had a working telephone, the only one in the building still in service. His wife hated the tenants continually asking to use it, but they were bourgeois and vulnerable to complaints, and as this was an emergency, I pushed myself on her. “Number, please?” the girl on the line asked. I had the uncanny experience of speaking to myself. My father was murdered and I was speaking to myself. I gave her the number. When she put me through, Moura answered. “Marina?” I didn’t identify myself, just asked for Gorky, my voice as flat as an overcast day. When he came on the line, I said, “He’s dead. They dumped him in the hallway. The carters are here. I’ll need to pay them, and the gravediggers. We’ll be at Tikhvin Cemetery.”
A pause. “Courage, my dear. I’ll meet you there.”
We stood at the Makarov graveside, just me and Alexei Maximovich under the new green of the ancient trees. We watched the laborers down in the friable earth, making the deep furrow for planting my bitter crop. Thank God Gorky made no move toward conversation as we watched them dig. It was a beautiful, tender day. A breeze rippled the boughs overhead as the shovels bit the damp earth. All around us waited my silent family, Makarov grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, babies dead in infancy. Alexei 1841–1842, aged nine months. Tamara, one and a half years. But no Iskra. No Antonina Nikolaevna Shurova, July–October 1919. But now they would be together on the other side, all my loves, Papa and Seryozha and Iskra. And someday I would join them, perhaps very soon. Perhaps today.
A flight of swallows darted and wheeled as the gravediggers took my father out of the rented coffin. I kissed him, let them lower him into the grave. In the absence of a priest, I recited the Shelley poem he’d loved most:
Music, when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
He’d given me everything, and I had given him this, a miserable Bolshevik death. I could not bring myself to weep, for him or myself, or the tender leaves that too must die.
42 The ABC of Communism
When I returned from the monastery, Russakova, whose large family occupied the front salon, handed me a bulky package, my name on the brown paper. She averted her eyes. I could only imagine who had brought it. The tenants watched me as I carried it through the flat under my arm. I knew what they were thinking. It won’t be long before that room comes open. Maybe our Masha…Safely locked away, I tore the brown paper open. The same paper that wrapped our bread rations, and the ear. Inside, rolled leather side out, rested my sheepskin. She’d sent it back, a gesture of what? Regret? Pity? A coup de grâce? I sat down on my bed and pressed my face to the leather, the wool, to see if I could smell him. Maybe, I thought, maybe…There was blood on the collar. They’d shot him in it. I unrolled the coat and out fell a pair of slippers and Bukharin’s The ABC of Communism. I threw the latter across the room. It hit the baseboard with a satisfying thwack, losing a few pages from its cheap binding.
Curled on my side under the sheepskin from which I could imagine I smelled cherry tobacco, I shivered, clutching the slippers he had worn. She’d given him slippers. Rocking myself, I tried to remember what Gorky had said—that my abandonment of him had let him know I had not abandoned him. But compared to these slippers…Look, she was saying. I kept all my promises. You let him die, you asked for it.
A conversation was taking place just outside my door. An argument in lowered voices. A rap. Not commanding. Muted, apologetic. “Marina Dmitrievna? It’s Korbatinsky.” The domkom. I hauled myself out of bed, opened the door.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve been informed that your room…” He twisted, he chewed on the ends of his moustache. The house committee must have decided—no, there hadn’t been time for a meeting. He’d been informed. “A couple is coming in…You understand? It’s not my doing…”
I was to be removed. First she’d taken my job, now it was my lodging, for which I was legitimately registered. “How long do I have?”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Really, I argued with them…” His eyes pleaded for understanding.
I closed the door and locked it, sat on my bed. Even this little room, where I had lived with my baby, was to be denied me. I looked at the pipe that stretched across the ceiling. How hard was it to hang oneself? How long would it take to die? It was what she wanted. To force me to take my own life, the thing she didn’t have the nerve to do. In the corner sat the broken book, The ABC of Communism. I picked it up. Perhaps they had given it to him as an attempt at reeducation, or just to torment him. It was divided into neat sections and subsections like an algebra book: “Capitalism Leads to Revolution,” “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” “Communism and Education,” “The Organization of Industry,” “Subdivision 5: The Scientific Character of Our Program,” “…the marvelous leniency of the workers’ courts in comparison with the executioners of bourgeois justice…” A catechism, a handbook for spacemen who could not see the difference between words and reality. Once I might have read this and thought, Yes, yes, of course. This is how it is. This is what must be done. How reasonable, how self-evident.
I tore out the first page, used it to light the lamp. I held it until it burned my fingers, dropped it into the ashtray. Then one by one, I tore the pages out and lit them, letting them burn. I renounce thee, I renounce thee. All the spaceman theories, the little tables of declining production, Bukharin’s theories of agriculture. I renounce thee. No more spacemen. No more bibles. No more ideologies, no more programs. No more pointing to cruelty and calling it justice. I believed no more in this bastard, this Smerdyakov our revolution had become. I would believe only in pity and compassion, poetry and weakness, and the truth as I saw it through my own two eyes.
Then I packed up my few things in my carpetbag, my books, my knives, my hatchet, then rolled my winter clothes, the sheepskin, my blanket, up into my bedsheet, tied it in twine. I stuffed The Valley of the Moon and my translation into my Izhevsk pail.
There was still one place in Russia where a human being might be allowed to stand. And I went there.
43 House of Arts
Anton took one look at my face and asked no questions. I set my things down, the bundle on the bed, the bag and pail on the floor. “I buried my father today,” I said. “It was a rented coffin. They dumped him in the grave and took it for the next guest.”
“You can have the bed if you want,” he said.
He accepted my presence as one accepts rain.
The Valley of the Moon stalled midtranslation. I couldn’t imagine a circumstance under which that book would be worth the paper it was printed on. I lay on Anton’s bed under my sheepskin, listening to him write—he was lecturing on formalism—reading sections to me, pacing the small room. Poems circled in my head…Mu
sic, when soft voices die…and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King:
And indeed He seems to me
Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight,
“Who reverenced his conscience as his king…”
Days passed, bright without notice. Anton slept on the floor and brought me food, ate what I did not. Who reverenced his conscience as his king…Conscience was no meadow, pierced with shining streams and ripe with birdsong. It was a trench-filled battleground strung with wire, an iron mountain against a starless sky. Conscience was the hardest master of them all. There was no rest, no congratulations, only a long march from dawn to dawn.
One afternoon he came in, excited despite his attempt at casual nonchalance. He tossed a letter onto the bed. “You’re in. Chukovsky, Gorky, Blok, Shklovsky, all signed for you. And guess who the fifth was? Gumilev. Can you believe it?”
Five signatures, officially admitting me to the House of Arts. How kind of our elders to have taken such pity on this wretched flotsam. They knew the price of conscience in today’s market. I was by no means their equal. Nevertheless they’d offered me shelter, a place to root in the gale of my life.
As a member of Dom Iskusstv—the House of Arts, which the inhabitants simply called Disk in revolutionary preference for acronyms in all things—I was entitled to receive a scholar’s rations and a room if one turned up. The most important part: I was officially in residence. I had a place in this world. I could hear the music of official stamps. And I received my first assignment, to teach a women’s poetry circle down at the Skorokhod factory. “They want a woman,” said Ksenya Alexandrovna, a sort of house secretary who handled such requests. She held out a ticket between her fingers.
