Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, Page 3

  This was my life. I had no friends besides thirteen-year-old Liza, Styopa Radulovich, and the other boarders. I avoided befriending the women in the queues. It was a gossipy town and they asked all kinds of pointed questions about Korsakova and Liza and the wayward Yulia. You couldn’t give women like that a toehold. Oh, the hours of listening to their chatter! Whose daughter was sleeping with soldiers behind the barracks for a piece of their Red Star rations. Whose daughter had been raped last Tuesday and left for dead. She never could identify the rapist. They wanted to know things about me, where I was from, did I have a sweetheart. It made me wonder why they didn’t join the Cheka if they liked interrogation so much.

  So although I was lonely enough to howl, I kept to Liza and the guests.

  Spring crept closer, then arrived, turning the world to mud. The unpaved roads transformed themselves into deep brown rivers. Icicles crashed from eaves of the wooden buildings, and now the poor city folk had to struggle ankle-deep in mud with their offerings, their patched clothes spattered with Tikhvin. Workers with their sad plunder, and out-and-out bagmen groaning under huge sacks of flour and potatoes, headed for the station, where they’d boldly load the bumpers between cars for the trip back to Petrograd. The air crackled with anxiety—anyone could be shot for speculation, and yet, no one could survive without it.

  I put off registering my presence with the authorities. The more invisible my document-poor life, the better. But eventually, Korsakova too was visited by the local Chekists. Searching—for what, food, weapons, counterrevolution? Or more likely, just to harass the Vikzhel men. Trade unionists tended not to be Communists. Everyone was turned out of bed—the railwaymen, Raisa Filipovna. Every room had to be searched, even the little girlish one at the top of the stairs.

  Luckily we heard them beating on the front door. I turned on the lamp. “Liza,” I whispered. “I need to hide something.”

  She sat up, her innocent face eager for secrets, her hair all tangled above her braids, as fine as thistle floss. I reached under my mattress and showed her the bundle of cloth in which I’d wrapped the ugly hunk of metal that had taken Andrei’s life. “Is it a gun?” she whispered excitedly.

  I could hear the men arguing downstairs now. Trade unionists and Bolsheviks made a volatile mixture. “I’m sorry, I was traveling. I didn’t think—” Strangely, I’d forgotten there was an outside world, with Chekists combing every corner for counterrevolution.

  Liza jumped out of bed and knelt, scrabbling at the floorboards under her bed with her fingernails. She pulled up a board, grinning. I saw something pink in there—a blouse? And books! I’d forgotten, children were natural spies, they always had their secrets. I threw the gun in with them and she quickly replaced the plank.

  We could hear furniture crashing on the second floor, men shouting. Liza rounded her eyes at me, her sharp little chin, her blankets up around her neck. “They’re coming.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re not looking for schoolgirls.”

  The search was messy and frightening. They finally reached the third floor, burst through our crooked door. Liza and I clung to each other as a flat-cheeked dullard with pale blue eyes searched our room, pulling the mattresses off the beds and the drawers from the chest, making a great racket as the men shouted on the floor below. I was as frightened as Liza, but trembling as I was, I noticed the search wasn’t as careful as Varvara’s would have been. He didn’t even look behind the lubok print of the Donkey, the Bear, and the Fox, or run his hands over the wallpaper, feeling for seams, let alone check for loose floorboards. I could have hidden half the Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland in here and he would have missed them. They had no idea what they were looking for, just throwing their weight around to terrorize the populace.

  They herded us down to the dining room and made everyone produce their papers, and thus I was found out. No labor book. No travel propusk, no registration with the housing committee. It was a problem for both me and the widow.

  Styopa Radulovich in his nightshirt, his thick strong hairy legs. “Doesn’t the Cheka have anything better to do than harass housemaids?”

  “Tell us why we shouldn’t arrest her right now,” said the Chekist in charge, a lean small man with one drooping eye. “And you too.” He turned his good eye on Styopa and the bantam and the mechanic Berkovin. “I don’t like the looks of any of you. You Vikzhel men are getting too big for your pants.”

  “She’ll come tomorrow,” said Korsakova, deflecting the attention from her precious boarders. “I’ll make sure of it, Comrade. You have my word.” She was as white as white paint, there in her dark shawl and her nightgown.

  “We know where you live,” said the lead man. “All of you.” They left with a great clattering on the bare wooden stairs, a crash as they knocked one of the prints down. The statement hung in the air long after they’d gone.

  2 The New Soviet Woman

  The Tikhvin Soviet was housed in a fine yellow building on Svobodnaya Square, a surprisingly elegant structure. Clearly Tikhvin had once been an important commercial center before its present decline. I languished there for most of the day, standing in long queues, leaning against the walls, my ankles and calves killing me. People coughed, they scratched surreptitiously. Would I be able to get papers as a proletarian this time? Marina Kuriakina? Allowing me a life of some kind or condemning me forever—no rations, my child permanently branded as a member of a counterrevolutionary class. Or would I simply be arrested, taken away to some Cheka cell? I couldn’t bear that again, not ever.

  Dusk had gathered outside the windows by the time I received my permission, my propusk, to move to the desk at which I would receive my labor book. I didn’t complain—I just prayed I wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow. Propusk in hand, I approached the wooden desk of a humorless woman behind a typewriter and, more importantly, the tray bearing its array of precious rubber stamps. After standing all day, my legs felt like watermelons, my ankles like logs. There was only one chair and the woman was sitting in it. Her mouth was wide but pinched, it looked like her teeth hurt her.

  Slowly, carefully, I answered her questions. Sticking to the truth in all the small details, lying only in the large ones.

  Familia:

  Kuriakina.

  Imia:

  Marina.

  Otchestvo:

  Dmitrievna.

  Mesto Rozhdenia:

  Petrograd.

  Data Rozhdenia:

  3 February 1900

  Obrazovanie:

  Primary.

  Professia, spetsialnost:

  General Labor.

  Klass:

  Proletarian.

  Semeinoe Polozhenie:

  Married.

  Sweat poured off me in rivers, even in this unheated office. The woman worked in knitted gloves, coat and hat, the tips of her gloves cut off. In demeanor, I did my best to straddle the line between Bold Proletarian and Supplicant Peasant as I described the robbery on the train from Petrograd. A bourgeois bagman (describing Kolya in every specific) had made much of me, and then stolen everything—my papers, my money. I hadn’t even known it was gone until disembarking at Tikhvin, when I found a bag of small rocks and an old calendar instead of my belongings. To weep for this woman was no difficulty. Then I praised the widow Korsakova in quasi-religious tones, which I then “remembered” was un-Bolshevik. What a performance. Komissarzhevskaya herself would have called for an encore.

  “And where is your husband now?” asked the woman, who looked like a raw-boned cow.

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. He was leaving for Moscow last time I saw him. Looking for work in the Information Section. He has a friend there. He was going to send for me, but I waited and then got tired of it. Maybe he’s in the army now, who cares. Anyway, I thought, it’s a new world. I can go places too, can’t I?” Trying to breathe energy through my pores. The class-winnowing process had reached the provinces, and I had to consolidate my proletarian status. My mouth was dry, my h
ands shook. Three nights ago, I heard in the queues that the local Cheka had boldly arrested six monks from the Uspensky Monastery, suspecting them of being nobles in hiding. Was no one safe?

  “What are you doing in Tikhvin?” Her watery eyes, that frizzy hair. Her mouth was a line, protecting bad teeth.

  “My factory closed,” I said. “People said things were easier away from the city. Thought I’d give it a try. Though there’s nothing here either, just charwoman.” I craned my neck to see what she was typing, the way illiterate people did, in awe that someone could put one letter after another. “Not that I’m complaining. Work is work and the widow’s fair.”

  “You didn’t come for speculation?”

  Why else would anyone move to this godforsaken burg? I wanted to yell. But a certain story was called for here, and I had to tell it, keep the mournful look on my face like a beggar pretending to be blind. It was Kolya’s peasant wife all over again. “I wanted to try my luck. But it’s all the same. Nothing in the foundry. I got this job, good as any. Place to live…The Cheka came and threw some furniture around. She said I better come over and do the necessary.”

  The woman was unimpressed, her wide mouth set. There was something bothering her about me. My palms sweated, my eye twitched, but I resisted swallowing or biting my lip. I had to win her over. How? She saw liars every day. It better be good. Not too baroque. Maybe she liked it here, maybe she was proud to be from Tikhvin. “Sometimes I think I should’ve gone to Moscow with my old man. But I don’t think Moscow’s any better, do you?”

  Wrong. Her expression of tired suspicion turned to one of open-mouthed astonishment. Exactly the way one of Chekhov’s yearning sisters would have responded, had someone ventured such a ridiculous notion, preferring this railroad backwater to the capital of Soviet Russia. I saw. She had hoped for something better in life. She had yearned, dreamed, and ended up here, behind that typewriter, with her wide, sad mouth, and the power to refuse lying little cheats like myself entry into the working class.

  “I’m not complaining,” I backtracked. “If only I’d never met that lying, thieving son of a whore—I hope he falls off the train. Men like that, they think they can just take what they want and leave you for dead.” She was nodding, ever so slightly. Now I saw how the land lay. All men are lying bastards. Okay, Comrade, I could sing that song. How Kolya would have enjoyed all this, he would have laughed himself sick. “And me in the family way—I mean, what kind of soul does a man like that have?” My belly fluttered. I had to pee. I put my hand on my belly for the extra sympathy. I couldn’t have knocked myself up just for proletarian papers, could I, Comrade?

  Finally, I heard those musical sounds, the loveliest in the world, the sound of round blue stamps striking the pages of a brand-new labor book. One, two, three.

  “Now you can register your housing,” she said, holding out the little pamphlet that meant a new life for me. “There are lectures for our Soviet mothers at the Women’s Club. They’re very educational. I hope you’ll come.”

  “Oh, I will! Thank you, Comrade.”

  Of course, I avoided the Women’s Club like typhus. I didn’t relish the prospect of running into Lyuda the new Communist or someone else who knew me as Marina Makarova, barynya, granddaughter of landowners. And I had plenty to do at the boarding house. Korsakova might be a good woman, but she wasn’t exactly kitten-hearted as advertised. Pregnant or not, I worked like a mule. Boiling sheets and tending to the single toilet we all shared—beyond execrable. But for me, the worst was beds. In the Republic of the Future, there will be no beds. We will sleep standing up, like horses. So many beds, heavy and awkward, mattresses that needed beating, frames that needed wiping. The widow was a crusader against lice, a veritable Chekist, Dzerzhinsky himself. It was downright heroic of her to even attempt to run a clean household, let alone succeed in keeping house and tenants free from insect incursion. But it was my back that did the lifting.

  Making beds perpetually frustrated me. Sheets never lay flat for me the way they did for other women. It seemed a judgment on my womanliness that I could not make a bed that didn’t look like it had already been slept in. As a child, I’d often watched our maid Basya lay out a sheet with a simple snap of the wrist, making it float over the bed like a cloud, hovering for an instant before it settled perfectly. For me a sheet became a white dragon, twisting and bucking before coiling itself in a sullen heap. How I resented beds. What a waste of time, when they’d be ruined all over again in the morning. The entire category of housemaid was the most reactionary of professions. My back hurt, my hips and my legs.

  Every morning before dawn, I joined the others, ready to measure out my next hours in three-foot intervals from the end of the queue to the blessed splintery counter of the bakery, each of us clearly the least valuable members of our households. Grandmothers, maiden aunts, teenaged daughters, cripples. We freed the able-bodied for worthier tasks. In some glittering Soviet future, you wouldn’t have to wait like this, you’d sign in on a sheet and go to work, come back to find your rations all wrapped and waiting for you.

  But that was a dream born of useless hours, weight on one leg, then the other, trying to relieve aching hips and backs. Rations would always be too valuable to entrust to bakery workers, or really (considering my hunger) anyone besides a family member. You had to keep a sharp eye on every bite. Each gram of bread was the difference between queasy health and weak, shivering faintness. Give us this day our daily bread, and you hoped it didn’t have too much straw in it. Also our daily vobla, that little bony fish, if you could digest it. We had no fragile people living at Korsakova’s, only workmen with good rations. I shuddered to think of the old people, like the Pulkovo astronomers, or the chronically ill, like poor Solomon Katzev. The cereal cut into our guts. And there were no fat rations at all. I still had to go to the illegal market by the east wall of the monastery and trade for small bottles of oil from local peasants. If I were arrested, no one else would go to jail, no one else would be interrogated as a speculator. Only the least valuable member. Me. And who knew what would even be in those bottles—sunflower oil, hempseed, linseed, castor—a couple of times I’d sworn it was kerosene. In exchange, I offered bits and pieces of hardware the men brought home from the railroad—nails mostly, rivets, every worker managed to take a little something. A wonder there was a railway left to run, considering the pilferage, but the peasants didn’t want your money, they wanted hard goods—fabric, metal, anything manufactured. Such was the dearness of fats, you always wondered when you fried the potatoes, the bits of sausage, whether you’d poison everyone in the house. Once I was so hungry, I drank an inch of cod liver oil right in the street and struggled not to belch in front of the widow.

  I stamped my feet in the queue and exhaled white breath, waiting for dawn, in boots that had been resoled by Bogdan Ionian, and tried to keep my legs from cramping. I wished I had a book to read. I wished it as much as you might wish for a nice steak with a pat of butter on top. Not a newspaper—Zinoviev thundering away—but a real book. A novel, a big fat one. Tolstoy. Or Dickens, I would die for Dickens. I’d read everything at Korsakova’s—the ragged Nat Pinkertons in Mikhail Gendelev’s room, and Berkovin’s copy of Gorky’s Luckless Pavel, all of which I’d “borrowed” several times. Perhaps Korsakova had something in her room, but I’d never been invited in. Aside from the men’s reading, I fed off Liza’s small threadbare cache of schoolbooks: an old biology text written about the time William Harvey cut up his first frog, a basic mathematics, a collection of Afanasyev’s folk tales illustrated by Bilibin, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” and a book of morning and evening prayers, which I never saw her open. I impressed her by reciting the “Horseman” from beginning to end from memory as she followed along in the book. “I love you, Peter’s creature / I love your strong, terrifying gaze…” And better, I had a chance to examine the collection beneath the floorboards: a clandestine copy of The Tale of Warlord Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in a
cheap clothbound edition, and a translation of Edgar Allan Poe by Balmont. No wonder Liza had trouble sleeping.

  Now, in the cold half-light pushing toward dawn, I had nothing but my heartbeat and Pushkin to keep me company: I love you, Peter’s creature…But I wouldn’t be going back to Petrograd anytime soon. At long and blessed last, the sun rose, and in the morning light, like warming birds, the sound of women’s chatter began to fill the silence. Somebody was making eyes at someone’s husband. A commissar’s wife was taking French lessons. Somebody was pregnant again. Someone’s baby was sick. Someone’s daughter was running around with a mechanic. I didn’t know anything, and if I had, I wouldn’t share it with these old girls for love or money. Why hadn’t I gone abroad when I had the chance? I could be at Oxford now, studying English literature and publishing my poems.

  Abroad. Was it still there, abroad? My nightly fantasies swirled around the sound. Not in three years when this war would certainly be over, the way Varvara and I had dreamed it, after the world revolution. But abroad as it always had been for us—everywhere that was not Russia. The place where people were educated and read new books and hadn’t had a reactionary monarchy sitting on their heads for three hundred years.

  I saw myself at twenty-one at a café in New York, the bourgeois young lady, wearing a coat that was sometimes sable, sometimes gray chinchilla, eating a steak fried in butter. I imagined myself half naked in California, sunbathing on a rocky shore. Or in Buenos Aires, dancing a tango with Kolya Shurov, finally together the way we should always have been—not in a wagon scratching our fleas but in the great world. In my fantasy, how he begged my forgiveness, how he wept on his knees! And eventually, when I did forgive him, we would laugh to remember how we’d been peasants together, a world ago.