Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

Iskra’s lips were moving. I turned my ear to her, seeing if I could overhear her secrets, but she gave up nothing. The wonder of her—her breath, her golden eyelashes, her bowed lips, her beating heart. I hadn’t known how ferociously I would love a child. I lay with her nestled in the curve of my body, wrapping myself around her. It was so hot, why did they wrap her like that? But I was afraid of waking her.

For the rest of our lives, this creature and I would know one another. It was almost impossible to take in the reality of that. First you were one, then you were two. Crazy, when I was no different from the woman they delivered to the midwife, carried off the train, fellow-traveler and nuisance. And now, mother. This body, with bursting breasts and torn loins, where was the I of me now? There is no you, the body said. Only me. This body, these breasts, my flaccid belly—hot, weeping, empty and full, it belonged more to Nature than to myself. You could say there was no me, ultimately, only this body, and its primal urge to make other bodies. Like the Cosmic Egg—first there was nothing, and then desire.

I had to pee. I needed to get up but wanted to stay here, watching her, smelling her hair. I wasn’t ready for time to begin, for things to start happening. Give me a moment to understand. She was frowning, making little sounds. I held my breath. Don’t wake up. Please, I’m not ready… She would see me buried. What if we didn’t like each other? What if she judged me, what if she saw everything that was wrong with me—the gaping abyss of my flaws? And of course she would—what daughter didn’t? She squeezed her eyes, wrinkled her nose. Her voice, like a creaking door. Don’t cry, Iskra. Please, God, I don’t know what to do with you.

She fell back to sleep.

Thank God. I could pull her back from Death itself but didn’t know what to do with a dirty diaper. I was terrified of her, and my terror made me laugh. This redheaded riddle. Kolya never wanted children, never wanted this permanent tie. Would he be furious? But Genya would love her, protect her. He was a man for the future. He had longed for a child to carry on his shoulders, and would help her touch the stars.

She was talking again. What was going through her newborn mind, that galaxy, what tides did she recall? What dreams could she have? Did she remember the Dark Virgin by an open door, the fallen lantern? That the witches had put her in the oven? I lay curled around her, like a nebula curled around its brightest star.

Thank God to be off the Red October, away from the pinched face of Yermilova and the glowering mien of Antyushin, the actors, the politicals, the crowds, and the soldiers and the talk of atrocities. I could imagine Genya, mad with worry. For the first time I wondered, how long had I been here? Were they still waiting for me? Or were they already thundering east through the Urals, bringing the word to the benighted? Genya the Agit-Evangelist.

I leaned over to drink from a jug. That creaky cat’s cry. Oh no—her face all crumpled and red! Shhhh. Such a little bundle wrapped up like that, her head popping out. Now she was awake and furious, shrieking. What was I to do with her? I patted her back but it didn’t help. What did she want? Diapers? Feeding? I started to cry too. I tried to put her on my big hard breast but she kept turning her head and screaming like I was trying to kill her. Please stop, Iskra. Oh please, baby, your stupid mama doesn’t know what to do. She already didn’t like me, this poor thing wrapped up like a little loaf. We both lay there weeping.

Finally, the midwife came in, smelling of hay, sweaty from labor. “Look who’s awake,” she beamed, washing her face and hands at the basin, drying them on a white towel. Her old face’s network of lines grew bolder with her smile.

“What’s wrong with her? She won’t stop.”

“She’s just hungry, milaya .”

She held the baby snug in the crook of her arm as I used the chamber pot, unsteady. I washed my hands and arms and face while she clucked at my daughter, quieting her. It should have been Avdokia. How I missed her! I imagined my own mother at my birth—had she felt this helplessness? But no, she had been through it before with Volodya. To think that I was even more ignorant than Vera Borisovna… But she’d had the luxury of the Furshtatskaya Street flat, not a peasant’s izba, doctors and nannies and relatives all around. Yet this izba was a good sight more comfortable than that breathless black nightmare of a bathhouse…

How alone and very far from home we were.

The midwife guided me back to the bench, my cunt on fire, plumped the pillow behind me, and helped the baby onto my enormous hot breast. Swollen, immense—my God, where had that come from? How could she get her mouth onto that? The midwife showed me how to coax her mouth open with a little milk on her lips, to hold the breast flat with a finger so I wouldn’t smother her. We sat watching her feed—an everyday miracle, nothing more mundane or astonishing. The air through the window cooling our damp faces.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“She came a fortnight ago Sunday. You were still screaming and raving the Sunday after that. What a week that was, the Lord be praised, we had to wrap you in sheets and douse you with water.” She touched her face. There was a bruise. Had I struck her? “Tomorrow comes Sunday again.”

Two weeks! And I didn’t even know where here was. Alone with my newborn, not a ruble in my pocket, not a soul who knew my name.

The big woman stroked my hair with her work-calloused hand, smelling of hay and sunshine. And where was the train?

“Any word from my husband?” Two weeks… he could be anywhere.

She nodded, rose, wiping her hands on her apron. “A soldier came. He brought you a letter. You’ve been so sick, we didn’t want to bother you.” Reached up into the red corner, and there, propped against the icon of the Vladimirskaya Theotokos, a wrinkled green envelope. She held it out to me, but I was afraid of dislodging Iskra. I had no idea whether she was even getting any milk, but she had stopped crying, so she must be getting something. “Open it for me,” I told her.

She tore it open with a big blunt forefinger and extracted the letter, handed it to me.

It was a poem. In Genya’s unmistakable hand. He lettered like a madman, cubo-futuristically.