Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

I lay on the bed, still thinking of Gumilev’s requiem mass. Of Akhmatova’s mute presence. Such grief, all we could do was hold it, our piece of it. It was too heavy a cloak for any one of us to bear alone. And seeing Anton…

But something about that phone call began to nag. Tell him Adela’s arrived…

Why would Sir Graham call Kolya to say that Lady Stanley had arrived safely? Kolya often took an interest in old people, I knew. Perhaps they were fond of one another. Yet it didn’t feel quite English. Sir Graham referring to his wife as Adela. He would have said Lady Stanley . I wondered… Kolya had said nothing about going to Moscow.

I went back to the telephone on the wall, lifted the receiver. I’d never placed a call from here, only accepted them. Ring twice, ring again. Don’t answer.

I depressed the cradle a couple of times. “Number, please,” said the operator. I could see her at her station surrounded by hundreds of other girls just like her.

I took a breath. “Hotel National, Moscow.”

“Connecting. Please stand by.”

I waited, listening as the operators on the trunk line forwarded the call, the hailstorm of clicking at phone exchanges from Petrograd to Moscow. How I wished there was something like this that could connect people through layers of time as well as miles. Layers of secrecy and misdirection.

At last, the Moscow operator came on the line. “Hotel National, go ahead.”

“Hotel National,” said a nasal, official-sounding hotel operator.

“Yes, could I have the room of Adela Stanley, please? Englishwoman. Just arrived.”

“No Adela Stanley. Sir Graham Stanley… Oh, here. Shurova, Adela . Same suite. I’ll connect you now.”

Shurova. Of the Knock-Me-Down-with-a-Breath Shurovs of Petersburg, London, Nottingham, Hell, and beyond. “No, that’s all right—” But the phone was already ringing. I was paralyzed. No! I did not want to hear her voice.

“Allo?” Youthful, high. Just a girl.

“Eto Meesis Adela Shurova?” My strangled voice, it would not cross the hurdle of its last jump.

“Da?” Her voice warbled, a bit impatient. Spoiled.

My arms felt weak, my throat narrowing. “Velcom Moscow Gotel Natsional,” I said in the heaviest accent I could muster. “The gotel wish you fine to stay with us.” Tears burned my face. “From Petrograd, message to Meester Shurov. Call Petrograd office at earliest convenient? You tell?”

“Yes, I will. Budu. Ya budu skazat’ evo. ” I will to tell his. She’d been studying, so she could talk to her Russian husband.

I hung up the handset, my arms so weak I almost dropped it. Shurova. I fought to catch my breath. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Someone should tell her he wouldn’t give a damn if she spoke Russian or Swahili, as long as she was beautiful, as long as she liked a good fuck. What went on in her head mattered not at all. To him a woman was an animal, a glorious one, but anything else about her was simply the difference between a brindled roan and a bay with black socks. Bile filled my throat. In the same suite. I saw it all now. Even if she was a cold English fish with eyes on the same side of her nose like a halibut, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was related to Sir Graham.

Not his wife, his daughter.

I collapsed onto the bed, clutched at my head. Sir Graham’s interest in this deal includes Kolya Shurov. My brain exploded, coated the striped wallpaper in blood and gray goo.

I thought I knew him, knew the shape of his deceptions. But there were dimensions, whole universes I had yet to suspect. And I’d told him everything. About Pasha, and Iskra, and Gorky, and Father. And he’d given me nothing.

Don’t answer the phone. I don’t want to have to chase my messages.

Married. I should have known something was wrong in all this bizniss. He was playing everyone. Why did I think I would be exempt? No, Sir Graham would never trust just any Kolya Shurov riding in on a rented horse… He had probably gotten her pregnant too, to seal the deal.

I had to think fast, but my mind was up circling the pattern of grape leaves around the ceiling light. I could kill him. I could slit his lying throat when he came in the door. I could wait until he was sleeping.

Don’t do anything rash .

But Shurova . It kept shocking me, like a bad socket on a lamp. I couldn’t resist putting my wet finger on it. We could have another child… How could he have said such a thing with a secret like this up his sleeve? To think how long I’d waited for him, the way other people wait for the Messiah. When was he planning on telling me, after I’d borne him another little redheaded baby?

I rolled from side to side, trying to find a place to rest. I felt like my ribs were broken. I could do nothing for him, none of the things she could do with her name alone. What could I offer—a poet with one dress and another woman’s boots, this restless orphan—besides love him as richly as any man could desire, and remember him, an officer in a sleigh, a fattish boy with a top hat and a pony whip? No wonder he was so sure they wouldn’t arrest him. No wonder.

That gap between my ribs, a heart-sized bruise.

I could imagine his reunion with his wife. How he’d make love to her in their room at the Hotel National, Moscow. Maybe not passionately, but with exquisite tenderness. She would probably undress in the bathroom. And he’d be the perfect gentleman—why not? It wasn’t love, it was diplomacy. He’d be all charm, so she would come to him, binding herself with each surrender. He’d be her guide, his tutorial hand light at the base of her spine, the energy radiating… Oh, I knew that pleasure. He’d show her the twenty towers of the Kremlin. But not the grave of Seryozha Makarov, hard by the Kremlin wall. He’d walk her into Red Square, tell her to close her eyes, and he’d position her before St. Basil’s Cathedral. “Now look.” Her gasp, her joy. As if he’d built it for her. They’d stand, hand in hand as he relayed the story—how after it was completed, Ivan the Terrible put out the eyes of the Italian builders, so that they’d never again construct anything so beautiful—astonishing her with our cruelty, our sense of iron destiny.

That fist in my ribs would not stop.

And she’d beg him to bring her to Petrograd. She’d heard so much about it from him when they were together in London. But now she was here, he’d discourage her. How he loved a side deal. Me, his redheaded mistress in Petrograd, and Adela, his English wife in Moscow. And London. And the world. No wonder he didn’t want to get me a passport.

I could smell him in my hair, on my hands. I felt his kisses even now. He’d filled me with such visions of the future. While all the while, it was just the mirrored box of a magician’s act, gently lit in fantasy light. Worlds and worlds. In this world, there were nightclubs and silver dresses and impossible sex morning and night. In this world he adored me, was going to protect me, was going to get my papers, we would have another child. Then, in a world parallel to it, one floor up or one floor down, there were his wife and Sir Gram, contracts and copper and Lady Stanley and her gum boots. In that life I was simply a sensual memory, a city he could visit when he had time.

Ukashin had taught us the spiral of worlds, the vertiginous layered dimensions of cosmic reality. People had dimensions as well, stories in which they were heroes, stories in which they were the devil himself. In one of those worlds I could cut his heart out and eat it raw, still beating. In another I could bludgeon him to death with a bottle of wine. In a third, I’d strangle him with a silk stocking. In a fourth, lie sobbing and screaming on the floor. And in a fifth, just an empty room. Table, bed, chairs. A phone ringing with no one to answer.