by Janet Fitch
“Parlez pour vous,” I said, and ducked out from under his arm.
The dinner broke up in disorder. People were yelling. Gorky and Moura left grim faced, steering Wells out from the House. There was no chance to speak further, or inquire about my package. Damn Poliatnikov! I imagined what it could have been, a sweater? Tinned salmon? I’d have to go to the Kronverksky apartment to collect it. The poets continued to argue long after their victim had left, with pro- and anti-Wells factions hurling abuse at one another. Anton was as happy as a bear in honey, reveling in the controversy. He didn’t give a damn about Wells, or the Soviet’s image in the world. He just liked to see people fighting.
I pulled him aside, into an alcove off the salon—I didn’t want the others to overhear, for who was I to be published when Akhmatova was silent, when Blok no longer heard the sounds of life? “Anton, I’m being published in England. I sent my poems off with Aura Sands, and she gave them to Clyde Emory—”
He snorted. “That mediocrity.”
“Listen to me! He sent them to an English magazine, and they took one.” I shook him by the shoulder. “Be happy for me.”
“Which magazine?” He needed to sniff around it, see if it met with his approval.
“Clarion.”
He shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“It’s out of Cambridge. Emory showed me a copy. It’s very good.”
“Sounds like a schoolboy rag.”
He was trying to take the wind out of my sails, so I could be as sour as him. “Schoolboys grow up,” I snapped. “If you weren’t so pigheaded you’d see that you might get a translation yourself. We could send it through Wells.”
“Clyde Emory’s not going to do anything for me.” Anton scowled. “Are you really that dense? He’s not in love with me. He doesn’t want to get in my pants. Or Arseny’s, or Oksana’s.”
“Well, thank you for that,” I said. Of course it was why he was doing it, but not the only reason. “If something’s not your idea, it can’t possibly be any good.” Just when I’d thought he was my friend, my best friend. “Damn you. Just—leave me alone.”
Tereshenko was still hovering, so I took him by the arm and pulled him away with me, leaving Anton to stew in his bitterness and envy. The boxer and I sat on the stairs of the Monkey Hall and drank sweet plum wine from a flask—he’d bought it from some old woman on Sadovaya Street. We got drunk immediately. He was rougher than he needed to be, grabbing me, our teeth clinking together. I couldn’t stop thinking how different he was from Pasha. Ironic, that he was the poet and Pasha the sailor. I had considered taking him back to my room for a moment, but I really didn’t want Tereshenko, I only wanted Anton to stop being such a shithead. The burly poet was angry when I sent him away, but I owed him nothing. I was going to be published in Clarion and I didn’t give a damn what anybody thought.
48 Moscow
The winter twilight already fading at four o’clock, my breath billowing in great white clouds, I hurried along past desolate New Holland, rushing to make my class on the Admiralty docks. I couldn’t wait to see Pasha, tell him about Clarion. I ducked into the warmth of the sailors’ clubhouse, the welcome light. The men were already waiting in the second-floor classroom, but where was the compact, sinewy form that always sat four seats down on the left? Others were missing as well, but I saw only that one vanished form.
“They got summoned back yesterday,” said Barsky, Pasha’s friend. “Return to base.” He shrugged and passed me a note. “It was bound to happen.”
The handwriting was simple, regular and childlike.
Sorry, sweet Marina,
Duty is ringing her bell
and back I go.
I belong to the People
And can’t say where or when
the bell will sound
but when it rings
We go. And so—Pashol.
Yours, P.
I didn’t remember getting through the class, what I taught, what they wrote. That week was a blur. I taught at Skorokhod and Vikzhel, stood in queues, ate my scholar’s ration of bread which was by now mostly sawdust, studded with little rocks. I sat before the frost-fingered window that looked out onto Bolshaya Morskaya. No more would Pasha escort me home, or surprise me by waiting in the House canteen playing cards with Kuzmin—who naturally adored him, having a penchant for sailors. No more would I lie in his embrace, as alive as waves. But he’d healed something inside me—not quite my heart, but that life that had been swirling down the drain. He’d managed to plug the leak. I should be grateful instead of resentful and bereft.
Tonight, the electricity was off again, I wrote by kerosene lamplight. Outside, snow sifted past the lighted gape of the window across the street, where someone else was squandering their lamp oil. I’d had a dream. A man was pouring blackbirds into an intricate chain-driven machine with swinging compartments like the cars of a Ferris wheel, climbing and falling. Men came carrying bushel baskets of blackbirds, and the worker fed them into the hoppers. Don’t! I begged the feeder, an ordinary worker, potato-nosed in a corduroy cap. All these blackbirds, killing them for what? He wouldn’t listen. He fed the blackbirds in, and the machine froze them, one to a compartment. All those blackbirds, each in its block of pink ice. Then someone came and took the blocks to the shore, where the sun melted them. And to my amazement, the birds thawed and came back to life, walking around on the grass with their black bead eyes.
They feed the machine on—blackbirds
Bushels of glossy breasts,
Handfuls, baskets
That terrible fodder.
Poor birds.
The poem’s a machine
for the processing of
—blackbirds.
Freezing us solid.
Later
Frozen chunks of us
Thaw in the sun
We walk around alive
Squawking
good as new.
That good as new was off. Tsvetaeva wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with it. But how to capture the horror, then the surprise of the resurrection. And who was the workman feeding the machine? The Muse? God? I could see his baggy corduroys, his bulbish nose, his cap. He was more accurate than they, but that might bring the figure into too much prominence. You might begin to think more of him than of the terrible feeding. And I hated good as new, but what to replace it with…
A rap on the door interrupted my struggle.
Tereshenko. He’d begun to drop by late at night. News must have gotten around that Pasha was out of the picture. I waited for him to go away—what a pest. But he kept on knocking. The venerable Shafranskaya was deaf enough, but Petrovsky on the other side was ill. Irritated, I threw down my pen and unlocked the door, a voyage of a single step.
To my surprise, waiting in the doorway wasn’t the pugnacious Tereshenko but Anton Chernikov in all his tall and awkward angularity, unshaven and haggard, his overcoat draped around his shoulders like Oscar Wilde. What was he doing down here visiting such a mediocrity whose poems were going to be published in a schoolboy rag? “Stove still not working?”
He stared at me as if it was I who had interrupted him. What did he want now? Though I was still irritated, I stepped aside and let him in. He’d never been down here in the Monkey House before. He gazed at Sasha’s sketches pinned to the walls, my boots by my sagging bed, the desk cluttered with papers. The lamp, the window, the small pile of damp firewood on the grimy parquet. What was he looking for, Apollinaire?
He picked up my poem, began to read it. “Garbage,” he pronounced. He sat in my desk chair and bent over the page, pulling a pencil from his pocket, and began circling and crossing out, adding words. “I can’t believe they’re publishing you. They must have assumed something was lost in translation. At least use hard instead of solid,” he said. “The abstraction undercuts.” His brow knotted as if ropes were being tied, painfully, behind his forehead. “And cut some of these blackbirds. Poor birds—Christ, you want to write
for the women’s section of Pravda? Frozen chunks thaw is all you need.”
What on earth was he so agitated about? “Is this what you came to tell me?”
He kept reading, flicking the pencil against his teeth. “Squawking good as new? Unbelievable.” He circled good as new. He could always see what wasn’t working, but I wasn’t ready for him to critique my newborn.
“Why are you trying to strangle my poem?” I tried to take it from him but he pushed my hand away.
“Because it’s crap. Who is this they anyway?”
“It’s a first draft. I was just trying to get at the feeling—”
He threw the notebook on the floor. “Get the language, get it on the page. Who cares about feelings? Do something interesting with the line.”
I snatched up my notebook and pressed it to my chest. I had not been prepared for an assault. Now I wished it had been Tereshenko. “Why are you being such a govnyuk?” Shithead. “Is this what you came to talk about, my poem?”
He looked around at everything but me, as if indeed he’d forgotten what he’d come for. With a shuddering sigh, like a man throwing himself into a well, he said to the calendar, “I thought you might like to know. I’m moving to Moscow.”
That stopped me cold. Had he lost his mind? Anton hated Moscow. He hated everything about it, its antiquity, its forty times forty churches, its housewifery. He examined the dusty plasterwork on the ceiling. “I’ve applied for my travel propusk. Glavlit can damn well pay for the ticket.” The administration for literary affairs. “Petrograd’s over. It’s done for. You can’t take a breath for all the old farts here—Gumilev and so on. It’s getting to be that I don’t dare light a match, the place might explode for all the loose gas.” He took out his makhorka, and a piece of what looked like a letter, and began to roll himself a cigarette, messily, spilling tobacco.
“What are you talking about? Are you crazy?” I said.
He tore the paper trying to roll it, tried again, snorting with frustration, his hands shaking. I could feel the scent of electrical smoke, like a burning cord, coming off him as he struggled. I would have helped him but was afraid he might strike me.
“This place is dying—don’t you feel it? We’re clinging to the shreds of our culture. In Moscow, things are coming to life again. There are poets’ cafés, a real scene.”
What did Anton care about cafés and scenes? “What about the Squared Circle? What about your studio?” Was this about my being published in Clarion? Was he that envious?
“I’m sick of it all. We’re just parading around to ourselves here, telling ourselves that we matter. But we don’t. We’re dead. This whole place is one walking mausoleum.” He couldn’t get that cigarette rolled, just kept crushing half-made ones and scattering tobacco everywhere.
It was insane. He loved it here at the House of Arts, as much as Anton was capable of happiness. He had his own literary studio. His hero, Shklovsky, lived right down the hall—he saw him five times a day! There were twenty people he could talk to about the things that mattered to him. Was this Genya’s doing, denigrating Petrograd? Mayakovsky’s? Anton was pale and sweating. Maybe he had a fever. Typhus. I’d never seen him in such a state. He was the one who looked down on the rest of us for our dramas and passions.
Finally, he got that cigarette rolled, put it in his mouth, and turned to me. His mouth twitched, his hazel eyes were full of tears. He tried to light his hard-won cigarette, but he broke the match, then a second.
I took the box from him and lit it for him. “What is it, Anton? Is it Genya? The studio? Is someone pressuring you?”
He turned away, filling the room with smoke. He laughed, wild, almost a sob. “You really don’t know.”
“How could I?” I made the mistake of putting my hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me!” he roared. I moved away as if from a hot stove. Then he groaned, leaning with both elbows on the desk, grabbing his dark messy hair, rocking back and forth like a religious hysteric.
I sat on the bed behind him. Something terrible was happening, and I wanted to soothe him like a child, but he seemed so beside himself I was afraid to try. “Anton, just tell me. Give me a hint.”
He shook his head. “I have to get out of here. Tomorrow. I’m going to Moscow. Or Vladivostok—or Peru! I don’t give a damn! I’m going to ship out on the first rotten scow that’ll take me.”
Anton Chernikov, man of the sea. If he was in any other mood I might have teased him about it. But this was no time for a joke.
He bent over, gasping, choking. “Don’t you see? You’ve ruined my life.” He smacked his forehead on the table, was about to do it again, but I put my hand over his forehead. He struggled, shaking me free of him. “Ruined it! I can’t stand it anymore!” His tear-stained face was unrecognizable. “First it’s the sailor—all right, I understand. I’m sure he’s very good at knots. But Tereshenko? His knuckles drag on the ground! How could you? You whore! You look right through me. Just like that. Like I’m a hat rack. I am not a hat rack! I AM NOT A HAT RACK!” he roared, his eyes so full of suffering I could barely look at him. “Am I just a place to hang your coat? A useful bit of furniture?”
His explosion was so unexpected, words abandoned me. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with shadow. I thought of the months I’d slept in his room, and he never once tried to touch me, kiss me, watch me undress, nothing. I thought back to the night I came to hear Bely. Our own little Helen. Oh no. Exactly as if he were a hat rack.
My one friend in the world, my comrade, my editor. How awful. What a disaster. I could hear Petrovsky coughing through the wall. Love was a cosmic eagle, raking us with talons and beak as we lay helpless in our chains.
He started laughing, the most painful laughter, as if it was tearing his throat. “No. The idea is abominable to you. Repellent. Look at you! You can’t help me. Nobody can help me. I’m a joke, a clown!”
Petrovsky banged on the wall with his cane.
I knelt next to my suffering friend. “No, you’re not a joke. Look at my face. Am I laughing?”
He wept, tears streaming down his lean stubbled cheeks. “You don’t think of me as a man. I’m just the fellow who reads your poems. Just answer me one thing, though. Why Tereshenko? For God’s sake, why him and not me?”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I drew him to me and held him, his head against my shoulder. He didn’t fight me. I rocked him like a child as he sobbed. Why him and not me?—a question man has asked since love began. “I never slept with Tereshenko. Is that what you want to know?” Anton was a difficult man, cutting and angular, ironic, biting, desperate. But he wasn’t a hat rack. “I do what I want. But I’m not a whore.”
“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean it.” Rubbing his face into my coat, drying his tears. “I was never going to say anything, I swear. I just can’t stand it anymore. It was one thing when you were with Genya, or when it was just you. But—Tereshenko is telling people you’re his girl. It’s too much.”
I sat back. We were knee to knee. I cupped his cheek in my palm, and kissed his wet eyes, wiped his tears with my thumb. Those hazel eyes, the rumpled black hair, the sharp nose red from weeping, the petulant mouth, the argumentative chin. All those contradictions. “You want me so badly? Just as I am?”
He nodded, the downward U of his mouth quivering.
“There will always be other men.”
“I don’t care.”
Maybe this was what I really feared, being loved so completely by someone I cared for, someone made vulnerable by his love. Genya had the party, he had his ideals, he was handsome and well liked. He had somewhere to go with his pain. If I’d been made of sterner stuff, I would let Anton go to Moscow and be rid of me. Or have him right now, cruelly, hot enough to burn, as Arkady had once burned my hand on the stove. But I did love him in my way. And cared how he felt, and what happened to him. I would be bereft if he left for Moscow or Peru. His presence was like the good steady bass of an orchestra, or maybe the
bassoons—the music of my life would sound paltry and thin without him. That too was love. Perhaps a greater love than passion.
I kept thinking of the blocks of ice where the blackbirds froze, and how they somehow came out alive. “I’m willing to try,” I said.
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with me,” he whispered, his face pressed to mine. “Stranger things have happened.”
He wasn’t much of a lover. He came very quickly. I supposed he’d spent too much time with prostitutes to even notice my lack of satisfaction. There was a lot I would have to teach him if we were to go on. “I never thought this would happen,” he told me afterward, stroking my hair. “Really, I just came to say goodbye.”
What an odd creature to have come for shelter in my arms. I’d known him so long—I’d seen his displays of peevishness, rage, his sulks, the moments of high wit and even thoughtfulness, but never had I seen him in such a naked state of desire. It made other things so clear. How he’d argued with Genya the night he threw my mother and me out into the storm. The way we’d been before Genya returned. Why he’d been so uneasy with me at the Poverty Artel whenever we were alone—he was at his best with a third person in the room. I recalled his outrage when I returned from the yellow mansion to the Poverty Artel—the more you hurt us, the sweeter we sing. Us. I should have heard him better.
“Remember when I first came to the flat?” I said. “I thought you hated me. You couldn’t have been nastier.”
His pale face, his burning eyes. “You were like a sunset. Everything suddenly looked shabby by comparison, and I saw my life as it was, moldy as an unaired closet.” He touched my face tentatively, tracing my profile with the tip of a finger—forehead, nose, lip, lower lip, chin, the length of my throat. “The room was too small with you in it, I had to go out in the hall. I had to go somewhere to get away from your happiness.” He lay gazing at me as if I were an unfamiliar poem, his head propped on his hand. “Of course I was nasty. Who wouldn’t be?”
