Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

I heard singing through the open windows, the Orthodox liturgy. People entered and left by the main street door. Did I dare go up? Who was I? Just another dreamer whose life he’d touched. One of millions. Millions, alone and lost on this earth, and just a few angels. They show us how we must live, breathe life into the mud we are, and give us—beauty. Colors to which we would otherwise be blind. Light blue and silver and lilac. His, the snow falling. His, the fog. His, the masquerade. His Twelve, that blizzard, that mystery, with Christ leading the parade. But for me, he would always be the lover who sends roses to the mysterious woman in a restaurant, a woman with a feather in her hat who nods and says to her friend, “He’s in love with me too.”

I wasn’t planning to go up, and yet, I went. The door was open. After the greenish summer-river smell of the Pryazhka, it was hot and close in the apartment. All was just as I remembered, the door, the stairs, the striped wallpaper in the entry. The flat was full of people, a service going on, the heat and smell of flowers overpowering. A man was leaving. He passed me by, wiping his face with his handkerchief, overcome with heat or emotion. I stopped in the doorway of the dining room, where Blok was the guest of honor as well as the host, on the table in a white coffin and, oh God—in death he looked nothing like himself. I remembered him tall and golden, but the corpse was slight and dark, with a dark stubble of beard and dark hair. Death changed a man. Illness, suffering—though who of us had remained unchanged? An old lady hovered nearby, his mother maybe. And two other women. I recognized his wife, Lyubov Mendeleeva, and a woman I realized with a shock was Lyubov Andreeva-Delmas, his Carmen. He had written an entire cycle of poems about her. Now she was just an ordinary stout middle-aged woman, but the poet had made her immortal, the voice that had driven him mad. His fourth muse, or his tenth. Lyubov i Lyubov. Two loves among the many.

And here was Kuzmin, and Inna Gants, and Zamyatin with his sophisticated face, his moustache. People I didn’t know, but who knew each other, from his precious life—not long, but long enough to mark a country. The singing went on and on. It lulled me as I listened, just outside the doorway. At one side of the dining room, standing with a woman friend, was Akhmatova. She rolled against the wall, leaned her cheek on it as if it were alive. So much suffering in this world. Enough to go around for the rest of time. Bely arrived, white-haired in a black skullcap. Seeing Blok, his blue eyes grew so wide they were squares. How strange that death admitted all, opened every door. People who had not the sense to gather before had gathered now. Blok, where did you go? We were orphans without you, starving, lost. I’d cut a pine bough across the street. You could see the light green of the new growth. I held it to my nose. Like Blok, it freshened. Like Blok, tall and ever green. I laid it with the flowers. Someone, a girl—I remember having seen her but not who she was—told us the funeral would be tomorrow at ten at Smolensk Cemetery, up on Vasilievsky Island. A breeze blew the curtains. It was still light outside. How could that be?

More people arrived. It was time for me to give up my place. I shook his wife’s hand, said something, even curtsied—my God, where did that come from?—and rushed out, back down the stairs, onto the Pryazhka Embankment. The green freshness of the river calmed me. I found a little copse of trees down by the water where I could sit and watch the ripples, the silver and rose of the Petersburg twilight, hear the plash of the water, a flash of fish, and remain with Blok a little longer, in sight of the lit window. No point in walking all the way back to the orphanage. I lay down and fell asleep to the singing on the air and in the mouths of frogs.

I woke in the morning stiff and rumpled, leaves in my hair. Old people and girls with flowers had already gathered on the Pryazhka Embankment above me. A bright, clear day, without a cloud, inappropriately halcyon for a poet whose preferred moods of nature were fog, gloom, and storm. I shook my hair and my dress, tried to smooth myself out, relieved myself behind a bush, washed in the water lapping the embankment, and joined the others who waited on the corner—forty, fifty, a hundred souls. More kept arriving. I could smell the flowers—lilies—in their hands. Suddenly the sound of singing swelled, loud and full throated as the gates to the courtyard were flung open and the white coffin emerged.

They bore him aloft at shoulder height, so that all could see his profile against the sky, whittled to dark wood like a mannerist Christ. Carrying the coffin seemed surprisingly light work for such as Bely, Zamyatin, others I knew or didn’t recognize. In the crowd was every last remaining member of literary Petersburg, all but Gumilev. I wonder if anybody had told him Blok had perished. Here were Delmas and Lyubov holding up Blok’s mother as we began our march in the morning sun, and Akhmatova, in a black veil, as if she had been the wife and not Lyubov. But where was Gorky?

The corpse seemed happier in the open air, and the choir’s voices swelled as if unloosed from the walls. I tied my white matron’s scarf around my hair, peasant style, low on my forehead. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me. I only wanted to be close to Blok in these last minutes, as long as he remained above soil. It made me feel like a nun as I followed the procession, several modest lengths behind the notables.

So many women followed that procession! His poetry hadn’t been written for women any more than for men, but it spoke of us so passionately. I wondered if he had ever had that rumored affair with Akhmatova. She could barely walk from grief, clinging to her female friends. Here they all were: Benois, Ivanov, Volynsky, Shklovsky’s bald head, Anton, saying something to Tereshenko and Arseny. Here were the boys from the second floor, Zamyatin’s crew. And Gumilev’s studio. We were all here to bury our souls, following the white coffin up Ofitserskaya, turning at the Mariinsky, where more people joined us, singers and actors. Perhaps some had performed in his productions or just wished to pay tribute to the true heart of what had been and would never come again.

By the time we crossed the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the procession had lengthened to a full city block, a thousand people at least. It hadn’t been mentioned in the newspaper, and yet the whole city seemed to know. A carriage followed behind, empty, the pallbearers clearly set on carrying the coffin all the way. Gorky’s absence troubled me. Was he too ill to come? Had he been arrested? Summoned to Moscow? Was it political? But Blok had done nothing wrong, except talk about inner freedom.

At last, we stood outside the small chapel of the Smolensk Cemetery, a vast, silent crowd, as the choir of the Mariinsky Theater sang the service for the dead—Rachmaninoff, and then Tchaikovsky. One last explosion of sound, like red and gold flames.

Then we followed the coffin through the unkempt little lanes to his family plot. No one spoke. The birds were silent. The wind had ceased its rustling in the birch trees. No more sounds. A thousand people bent their heads. Silently, the gravediggers lowered him into his berth in his white ship. And silently, they filled the grave, burying the sun. Safe journey, Alexander Alexandrovich. May the immortal poets rise to greet you.

Across the city, Iskra too, lay in her grave. Papa, Pasha. All the dead, welcoming him. Our loss was their gain.

I hid myself in the crowd, not wanting to talk to anyone. The small sun of the poet was a secret still alive inside me. I didn’t want him to spill out of my mouth. Luckily Shklovsky was easy to see, and tall Anton with his shock of black hair. I hid until they were gone. Although I hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before, I was in no hurry to return to the clamor and suffocating closeness of Orphanage No. 6. Air and silence were what I needed. Wasn’t that what Blok had been complaining about—airlessness? The pillow of the times pressed to his nose and mouth.