Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

“Almost a million and a half.” I’d sewn myself a wallet I could wear under my clothes, where I kept the bulk of the funds. He was an impressive salesman. I should introduce him to Kolya. I’d told him if he could find enough traders to empty the Preobrazhenskaya Square flat in two days, I’d give him ten percent. I’d been skeptical, but he said, “Give me one day.” All day yesterday, he’d brought people up to the flat, and today was even richer. How could an orphan know so many people with money to burn? I supposed that’s what you got when you moved from newspapers to galoshy. Two million would get me all the way to Helsinki. But I would be happy with Kuokkala, and had other plans for that extra cash. In just two more nights the moon would be dark. That’s when the Wolf did his fishing.

The portable phonograph and two pairs of silk stockings sold to a NEPman, Makar’s best condom customer, so he said. The man also bought the pretty dishes. He counted out the money with a flourish before his moonfaced girlfriend as my partner played lookout, watching for bandits. “How about the telephone?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought about it. Private phones were still rare. Kolya used it for work, but it was a traitor. Don’t answer the phone. “Two hundred thousand,” said the boy without blinking an eye, a boy who’d never held a thousand rubles of his own.

“Little swindler. I can get one for eighty,” the man said. “Real Ericsson, straight from Sweden.”

“So get one,” the kid said.

I was scared sick with what the Cheka might be thinking about all this coming and going in the apartment of the Angliysky spy Nikolai Shurov, furniture and rugs leaving out the front door in his absence. But the birds were flying, I had no choice. I had set my course.

In the end, he didn’t buy the telephone. But the woman came back for the liquor, with a bosomy girl in tow carrying two canvas bags. Did she want the telephone?

“I’m tapped out,” she said, as she filled her bags with bottles and handed them to the girl to lug home. “For God’s sake don’t drop them, Mila, whatever you do.”

The girl meekly carried the bags away.

We sat eating in the emptying flat when a knock on the door made us jump. Makar pressed his ear to the wood.

“It’s me, idiot.” A man’s voice. “Open the fucking door.”

He let in a burly man with a salt-and-pepper beard and heavy black eyebrows. I almost dropped my glass when I saw him, caught it before it fell. A face I never wanted to see again. Borya, Arkady’s lieutenant. Saint Peter at the gate. He wasn’t nearly the man he’d been, but who was? I still had the scar on the palm of my hand. Would he remember me, the girl locked in the room overlooking the Tauride Gardens, the one he almost threw out the window? Or that night in the woods when they shot at me as I ran?

He spat sunflower seeds onto the parquet, denuded of its rugs. “My friend says you have some goods to off-load. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“I remember you,” I said.

He gazed at me, not trying to place me. “Yeah, so what?”

“How about a telephone?” Makar said.

The big man glanced at the machine on the wall in its black lacquer case, curled his fat lip, shrugged. “How much?”

“Two hundred,” Makar said.

“Stop wasting my time,” he said. “You’re on my list, malysh. ”

Something was wrong with his leg. He was sparing it. “What happened to you?” I asked.

He fixed me with a terrible gaze, an Evil Eye stare. “What do you think, shit for brains?”

Arkady. The men deserting him, he must have shot him, struck him, beat him. But this was the world I was moving back into. The world where anything was possible. “Listen, I’ll trade you that phone for a gun. Something small. And ammunition. A straight-up trade. Something that won’t blow up in my hand. Can you do it?”

Makar stared at this woman, his little comrade matron. He didn’t know me after all. Borya laughed, a small and joyless snort. Can I do it? Yes, I’d asked the right man. He turned to Makar. “Ten tomorrow.”

I lifted the telephone down from the wall, held it out. The big man took his knife and cut its throat.

“You still out on Kamenny? St. John the Baptist?”

He hoisted the phone under his arm. “The kid knows where.”

I stood out on Nevsky in the dark, watching Anton in his lit window. I knew he’d be up. The other passengers already asleep, only a window here and there still glowing in the velvet night. He didn’t sleep soundly, and so preferred to work until he was exhausted, then slept hard, grinding his teeth, well into the morning. I wondered if he could see me down here, though I knew the reflection of himself and his own flickering lamp in the window glass would be his only view. I wanted to touch him, to put my cool hand on his hot brow, lead him to safety. Soon this whole ark would list, would founder, and drown in the rising waters of control and mediocrity. I watched and waited, but I saw no one. I was betting the Cheka didn’t have enough manpower to surveil the House of Arts all night. Not for one girl poet, one insignificant nobody.

I slipped into the sleeping house through the Bolshaya Morskaya entrance. I wondered what the Cheka had been looking for in my room, searching my papers that night. Some link between me and Gumilev and Pasha. Actively helped create counterrevolutionary content… Something on which they could base a case against me. Or strengthen the one against Nikolai Stepanovich. And yet, what corroboration did they really need? Their law wasn’t the foundation of a civil society, it was simply pretext, as easy to shift as a pair of slippers.

As I quietly threaded my way through the halls, I wondered again why Gumilev had picked me to teach at the sailors’ club. We weren’t close, I wasn’t one of his students, there were certainly more masculine poets than me. Was it because I was expendable? Because we didn’t have any connection? Or had he seen something else in me, something more incendiary? Or was it just luck? I remembered how he’d pretended indifference to the sailors’ plight during the siege. He was telling me, Don’t moan, don’t wring your hands. Watch, hang on to yourself.

Up the stairs and down the hall, the route I traveled in my dreams. These halls, these doors, the heaven of my poet’s life. Here was Khodasevich, there Kuzmin, a light wheeze. And Inna… I prayed that anyone who saw me now would wait until tomorrow to gossip about it. One more day, and the dark face of the moon would turn to this earth, and I would be gone. They had an informer here—how else would they have known about Pasha? But I doubted anyone would be energetic enough to call the ravens tonight. Human torpor, that great Law of Laws. One more day, and I would be gone. In Finland, or robbed and thrown overboard by the Wolf into the deep and silent waters of the gulf.

When I got to Anton’s, I silently pushed open the door and I found him just where I’d seen him from the street—at his desk, lantern fluttering, working in a haze of foul tobacco. When he saw me, he stopped his pencil, cigarette dangling from his mouth. Whiter than usual, the color of paper. He stood as if levitating, the smoke still rising.

“Turn off the light,” I said softly.

He doused the lamp.

I walked to him in the illumination from the street. He was just a silhouette, tall and thin. Under my shoes, sunflower husks—up to his old tricks. I pulled him away from the window, plucked the burning cigarette from between his fingers, took a puff and ground it out on the floor. I kissed him, his ashtray breath. He seized my hand, pressed it to his mouth. “Marina,” he breathed into it. “I saw you at the funeral.” He held me as if he thought he might break me, one arm around me, the other hand buried in my hair. “Are you real?” he whispered, his unshaven cheek against mine. “I wanted so much to talk to you that day. It’s been absolute hell, knowing you were somewhere, but not being able to see you. Where’ve you been all this time, at the orphanage? Why didn’t you contact me?”