Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

“Shh… shh… shhh…” I pressed my mouth to his, to stop his questions. What did it matter where I’d been? What mattered was where we were going.

“I saved all your things,” he whispered into my hair. “Your coat, your books… Look.” He handed me a folded piece of paper. The lock of Iskra’s hair. “It was on the floor.” Then he clasped me again, overcome with emotion, hurting me in his awkward grip. “Come back, Marina. There haven’t been any more searches. I think it’s over for now. They’ve made their point.”

It would never be over. Whether it was a matter of weeks or years, they’d be back. And back and back.

He stroked my hair, rubbing his face in it. We sat on the sagging bed in the dim room the color of the inside of a jar. The bedding emitted a lonely, sad smell. I turned the small packet of her hair over and over in my hands. “I’ve missed you so much,” he whispered. The squeak of the bed as he crossed his long legs. I could see his profile as he turned his head to the window. “Every night since you left. I’ve sat in that window. Hoping you’d see me.”

“I have.”

“Sometimes, I think I see you. But it’s the way a woman walks, or holds her head. A word someone says in the street. But you’re always just out of reach, rounding a corner, disappearing into a shop. I’ve been out of my mind.” He laughed, an unnatural, forced laugh. “Like a tormented girl suffering over a crush. My writing is crap. Zhili, razdavili… ” We lived, we crushed. “Look what you’ve done to me! I’ve become Semyon Nadson.”

“I’m leaving, Anton,” I said. “And I want you to come with me.”

The big house creaked, stretching in its sleep. “Leaving Petrograd?” he whispered. How bewildered he sounded.

“Leaving the country,” I said.

The bed squeaked. He scratched, turned toward the window. I could see him in profile, his sharp nose, his hair a messy haystack in silhouette. “When?”

“Tomorrow night. I’ve got the money. Everything’s set.” I took his hand, dry and papery.

“Tomorrow? So fast?” He took both my hands. “What about Anvil ? The first issue’s scheduled for October. Eikhenbaum’s even contributing an essay.” Pleading with me. “It’s not just a Living Almanac anymore. They’re giving us print. You know what this means? It’s the future of Russian literature. Petrov-Vodkin’s doing the cover.” He had a life, right here, that’s what he was telling me. He didn’t want to go. I hadn’t imagined he’d refuse.

“Think about Gumilev,” I said. “It’s not going to stop.”

I could hear him breathing, a rapid pant. There was a catch in his lungs from all the smoking. “Gumilev was taunting them. Wearing his crosses, talking about restoration. He forgot they could bite.”

Anton thought there was a difference between Gumilev and me, Gumilev and him, Gumilev and the rest. There was no difference. We were all only as good as our freedom to think. “There’s a boat leaving tomorrow night,” I said. “I’ve got enough money for both of us. By the end of the week, we’ll be in Finland, Anton. We’ll be free.”

He sucked in a breath. It rattled as he let it out. He stood, walked to his desk, and slumped into the chair. I could see his body against the window, hands rolling another stinking makhorka. The scratch of the match lighting his face, the slope of the nose, the small unhappy mouth. “We’ve got the Blok memorial coming up. We’re just planning it. Akhmatova’s coming—she’s got a whole new book coming out, she’s writing like mad. She and Shileiko split up—”

“Anton, are you listening to me?” Was I shouting? I lowered my voice. “Blok is dead. We lost. It’s over.”

He sat in the chair, smoking and pulling on his forelock as he did when he was unhappy. He blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. “Have you thought about what it would be like, being an exile?”

I hadn’t given it a thought. “I only know I can’t be here.”

“It’s going to be like being adrift on a raft. We’ll be people fallen out of time. Cut off.” His smoke painted arabesques in the windowlight. “We’ll become ridiculous. Who would we write for? Other émigrés? People on the same small, crowded raft? Soon we’ll be the only ones who can understand our antiquated tongue. Growing old, dying a bit more every day. While all around us, people will be writing in living languages. Who would publish us? We’d be as useless as vestigial tails.” He’d thought about this far more than I’d imagined. “I don’t want to be a French writer, Marina. A German writer, Swedish, Portuguese. I’m Russian—I don’t translate. If only we were painters, or musicians, it would mean nothing. We could walk down the Champs-Elysées. But we aren’t. I can’t leave.”

“But if we stay, what then?” I whispered urgently. “We’ll have journals and books, memorials for the dead, but we won’t be able to say anything. We’ll be speaking in code, for people who can understand us. And there’ll be fewer and fewer. We’ll be exiles in our own country.”

He started to pace, smoking, footsteps crunching the layer of sunflower-seed shells into powder. “What would we do abroad? How would we work? How would we live?”

“We’d find something. There’s always work of some kind.”

“Who do we know in Finland? I hate Finland. What’s in Finland? Trees. I don’t even like trees. They give me hay fever. We don’t speak the language, what would we do, raise reindeer?” He was getting hysterical.

“We’ll do whatever we like,” I said. “It’s not the Transbaikal. It doesn’t have to be Finland. We can live anywhere.”

“A couple of exiles. Foreigners. We’d always be foreigners—subject to suspicion. And here, they’ll forget about us. Unknown there, forgotten here—we’ll cease to exist.” He waved his hands like he was dissipating smoke. Poof, we’re gone.

“If we stay, we’ll cease to exist,” I said. In a pool of blood. “And you know what? If I’m forgotten, so be it.” I sat cross-legged on the sagging bed.

“It’s not the same for you,” he said. “You have English and French and German, you could start over like that.” He snapped his fingers. “What are you, twenty-one? You’re a baby. Me, I’m already going bald.”

He was what, twenty-nine? “Your French isn’t so bad. You’d pick it up fast if you spoke it every day. They have bald people in France. You could set up a press, publish what you like.”

“You know that’s not the way it’d be.” I could see his outline, clutching his hair in his hands. “We’d be broke and friendless, misunderstood by everyone, starving in some freezing room.”

“Just like the Poverty Artel. We’ll still be the Transrational Interlocutors of the Terrestrial Now.”

“It would be a desert.” He picked up a thick pile of papers from his desk, and shook it at me. “I’d die without this. In the West, who would I be? Just another Russian crackpot. Ivan the Futurist. A joke. Nobody would understand a thing about new prosody, about our new poets. Nobody needs a lousy translator of Apollinaire in France, do they? I’d be superfluous. The new superfluous man.” He leaned against the window, his lanky frame transformed into just a pair of legs. “Always the extra man. Well, I finally found a place for myself here. I’m known. I’m on the board of the House of Arts now, right along with Chukovsky and Shklovsky.”

He’d come up in the world. Even if it meant Gumilev and Blok had to die.

“I’m from Orel—do you know what that means? A schoolmaster’s son from Orel? I know what it’s like to be circling the outer planets. This”—he gestured to Nevsky Prospect out the window—“this is my place in the world.” He laid his forearm on top of his head, an awkward gesture that was as much a part of him as his stinking tobacco. “We’re going to have a reading at the end of September. Sasha and I are designing the poster. I can’t leave. People depend upon me.”