Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

“You don’t have to do without anymore.” He cupped the back of my head in his hand. “It’s the least I can do. And the apartment, that’s yours.”

How could he give me an apartment? It wasn’t London. People had to be registered, the domkom kept records. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand?” He shrugged, adjusted his boater. “A man gives a woman a flat. You’re the only girl in Petrograd who wouldn’t understand.” The way he was smiling, sweet, I sensed a joke he was having with himself. I’d been on that cart through a thousand muddy villages. I’d learned a thing or two about my clever man.

“And where will you be?” I asked.

He looked like a schoolboy, swinging along. Like Tom Sawyer, chewing on a piece of straw. When he looked the most innocent, that’s when Kolya Shurov was sure to be up to something. “Me? I’m the Holy Ghost. Everywhere and nowhere. Decisions are made in Moscow. Coal in the Donbass, mines in the Urals, gold in Siberia. Famines in the Volga. And in Petrograd—my Beautiful Lady.” He stopped and bowed, pretending to doff a plumed hat.

“Not so beautiful anymore.”

He rubbed his smooth cheek against mine, lime and fresh linen. “Always beautiful.” He held my face in his hand. “Don’t you see? I’ve designed this whole business so I could be with you. I could have done a million things. I’m not here because I missed Lenin’s borscht.” He kissed my eyes, my mouth, softly. “We’re no good apart. Look what happens—all hell breaks out.”

We walked to Novodevichy, stopping on Moskovsky Prospect for peaches, and flowers. He wanted little white roses, tinged with pink, wrapped in ivy. “Daisies were more her flower,” I said. “She was so bright, so gay.” He bought both, peeling off banknotes—he didn’t even bargain. As we continued to the convent, eating our peaches, holding our flowers, I thought of that girl I’d been in the days after Iskra died—Vintovka up in the corner room overlooking Moskovsky Prospect, waiting for the Whites. Everywhere, ghosts and more ghosts.

Finally, we entered the shady, moist precincts of the convent, moving along the overgrown paths alive with buzzing cicadas. It still bore the feel of abandonment, more melancholy than Smolensk. Some of the headstones had fallen. I searched for the four-sided plinth that marked the spot, picking my way through the vines and tall grass that knitted the cemetery together in burgeoning green. Finally, I saw it, the gray mossy granite. I led him through. He had to hold on to his hat not to lose it to low-hanging branches. To the right of the tall column marked SVORTSOV, I showed him where I’d buried our child. Her patch of earth, indistinguishable from the rest of the graveyard, the grass starred with tiny flowers. I knelt. “Iskra, it’s your papa.”

He lowered himself next to me, handkerchief on the grass under his knees. “Hello, sweetness,” he said to the earth. “Dearest. I didn’t know. Forgive me.” Tears rolled down his face. He put his roses on the grass and I scattered my daisies. His grief was unfeigned.

Perhaps we should have another child. Perhaps we could start again.

My apartment. My kitchen, my bath. I worked at the gateleg table as the sun filled the room, the pretty windows overlooking the trees and the Preobrazhensky Church, with its eagles and chains. I wondered who had lived here before us. Perhaps someone Kolya had known from before. I imagined a woman—the one he’d brought to the ballet that night when I was still a girl with a bow in my hair. How I had wanted to tear her hair out, or his. The low back on her dress as he led her away. Her perfume, L’Heure Bleue.

I kept thinking people were watching the flat. I couldn’t help noticing a bald man in a light-colored jacket. A neighbor? Or something more sinister. And a small man in a straw hat, cigarette holder in his mouth, seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time waiting for someone across the square.

When I pointed them out to Kolya, he shrugged. “Don’t worry. No one’s looking for a little girl poet.”

The flat had two exits—stairs to the street and back stairs that led to the courtyard. I promised myself that if anyone came up those stairs, I would be out the back like a shot. The lipstick and new shoes were lovely, coffee and butter, the brass bed, the taps that issued hot water just for the asking, but all was a dream, I had to remember that. Reality was still out there, whatever Kolya said. I had to take care not to fall asleep inside this fantasy.

On the other hand, my passion for Kolya hadn’t faded a bit. When he returned from his bizniss, I never could wait for him to make a leisurely drink, put his feet up, tell me about his day—all that domestic rigmarole. We made love like a hurricane. The top of the mountain blew off and spewed lava, created new islands, new continents. I smelled him on me as I wrote, when I read, as I made my lunch. We couldn’t be in that room together for five minutes without our clothes flying. We made love on every piece of furniture, in the bath. We tore the bed to shreds. Only then, exhausted, could we eat and talk.

And how he loved to talk, to share the grand exploits of his day. I privately called these monologues Tales of Brave Ulysses. His glee at receiving two pink marble urns right out of the back of the Hermitage. The tense negotiations for a bauxite concession in Murmansk. A comradely meeting with the commissar for transport. He never asked about the poems I wrote, more interested in whether I went out and spent some of the rubles he’d left me. It hurt that he was not interested in my work, but I had to accept that this was not part of our shared life.

Every night, we made love, bathed, and set out for the evening, to some restaurant or nightclub—a new city was springing to life, full of people I’d never seen before, thuggish men and their girls. How could they have sprung up so quickly? Five months since we’d had the NEP, and the gangsters were already triumphant. I couldn’t get used to it. I couldn’t get used to any of it. The phone rang at odd hours. I hadn’t lived in a flat with a working telephone since before the war. Kolya and I had a special signal—ring twice, ring off, ring again. Otherwise I let it go. Kolya told me to ignore it. “If you start taking messages, I’ll have to return them, track people down, blah blah blah. I have better things to do with my day. Best to keep my sense of mystery. I’ll call them when I want them.”

A flood of presents crossed the threshold. He was always a generous man. Blue satin shoes, a pair of emerald earrings. “For the lovely Esmerelda.” A dance dress sewn with silvery beads shimmered and hissed when you shook it. It looked just like water. That color… reminded me that Blok was dead, that silver and lilac world. I was happier with the simple cotton dresses Kolya reluctantly produced, one in green with red chevrons, the other, navy with a white collar. A pair of leather pumps, scarves. But he loved buying me underwear, and silk stockings. I had been wearing my underwear for so long, sewing up the holes, that my body couldn’t imagine such luxury. He teased me when I protested about silk underwear. “When did you become practical?”

What a question. So many things we still didn’t know about each other. I had no faith in his unreal world, no expectation it would continue. What would I do with a silver dress when the trapdoor gaped and all this disappeared? Yet… a beauty shop opened in a courtyard off Manezhny Lane, and I finally succumbed. Unreal to see myself in the mirror, my hair newly cut, knowing that people still didn’t have tea, or shoes, that the Povolzhye was shriveling. I felt ashamed of having the money to have my hair styled. It cost ten thousand rubles—the denominations exploding. How long would a worker at Skorokhod have to labor to see that kind of cash? The Kerensky bills didn’t even seem real, nobody had accepted them in years.