Джанет Фитч - Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

“So-called. He was afraid of a Soviet replacing him. The Freikorps also crushed the Munich Soviet. Did you hear about that?”

I shook my head, wiped tears from my eyes. I’d heard on the Red October that a Bavarian Soviet had been declared in April. And by September, it was gone.

Blau leaned forward, his bony hands clasped together between his knees like a penitent in a Lutheran church. “Thirty thousand Freikorps, with enough armaments to retake France. The soviet was no match for them.”

“And the Kiel sailors? Bremen? The Ruhr?” This was our hope, that these workers’ strongholds would come to Russia’s aid.

Blau shook his head. Gone.

I sat back in my seat, knocked down by the news. Why hadn’t we heard this on the agit-train? No one had told us that the revolution was finished in the West.

“There’s still agitation in Turin and Milan,” said the woman. “But Poland’s gone, Romania—”

“Hungary?”

Four heads shook in unison. “Also the Slovak Republic—the Czechs took it in July.”

My head swam with the news. It had been so long since I knew anything of the outside world. I propped Iskra in the crook of my arm, fussed with her hair, trying to take in the enormity of these reversals. “What about America? The miners. The steelworkers. Seattle’s general strike.” On the Red October, we’d drunk in these stories—strikes and struggle worldwide. The textile plants of France and the mines of Wales, the factories of Glasgow and the steel mills of America, the world was rising up all around us. And we’d been sharing this information as fact to crowds in the thousands. Everything that Moscow had been radioing us. All dissolving like a pretty frost.

The German with the knobby face and heavy brow presented his view. “You have to understand the frenzy in France and England to revenge themselves on Germany. Their socialists are either jumping on the cart or warring among themselves how best to use the knout of your Soviet Revolution to win concessions from their own governments.”

“And America?”

He grimaced. “As long as the worker in America can buy bread to feed his family, we’re not going to see socialist revolution there. We were the closest in Germany, but our timing was off. Comrade Liebknecht said it was too soon, and sadly, our socialists were too willing to settle for what we could get. Now it’s over, at least for a while. You Russians, you’re going to have to go it alone until we catch up with you.”

My mouth filled with dust. No world revolution. No workers of the West coming to rescue us, no flood of industrial goods, no help. We were alone. The only Red Republic in the world. We had been lying to the people all this time. Because horses have to be fed, where men can live on the hope of it. All those discussions with Varvara, how the revolution may have begun in Russia, the least industrialized nation in Europe, but we would be the spark, and Europe would catch fire. Without world revolution, what did we have? What were we going to do?

We’d been abandoned by the world’s proletariat like children in a train station.

I looked down at the baby in my lap, loosened from her cloth, gazing up at me with those green eyes as if I were the eighth wonder of the world, Hera of the mountainous breast. Then she closed her eyes, her face went red, and I realized I had more immediate problems than world revolution. The poor Germans! The foul diaper had to be removed and the baby cleaned in sight of all, which I accomplished with foreseeable clumsiness. They were so kind, holding their gaze out the window, now full of twilight. But what to do with the remains? The stink was unbearable. Of course, it couldn’t be one of the compact variety.

The German SD woman, Lise, volunteered to hold Iskra— Danke! —while I went out in the corridor and tried to address the problem. I would have liked to just throw it out the window and been done with it, but I couldn’t afford to lose any diapers. It might be years before I could get more.

I waded through the passengers clogging the passageway, hanging from the windows, smoking and spitting sunflower shells on the floor, until I found a family, the woman with an infant in arms. “What do I do with dirty ones?” Holding up Iskra’s little present.

She shrugged. “Put it away until the next station,” she said.

Not likely. I waited my turn at the unspeakable convenience, where I knocked the remains as well as I could out of the offending linen, poured water from the tap into my bucket, rinsed and dumped it down the hole—you could see the tracks down below—rinsed and dumped again. In the end, it wasn’t too bad—stained, but when it dried, it might be useable, and in any case, wouldn’t make everyone ill. Halfway through the operation, someone began banging on the toilet door. I hurried to finish, and the moment I opened it, a heavyset man pushed past me, I could hear him vomiting. There was a samovar with boiling water. I threw a little of it into the bucket for good luck, rinsed, burning my fingers, wrung out the cloth and threw the water out the window, hoping it wouldn’t spray the people in the next car, before I inched back through the shuddering train to our compartment.

Now Iskra was on the lap of the quiet German. Both were all smiles, she was reaching for his cap. “Eine was für kleine Miezekatzekatze? Ich habe meine Frau in den Monaten nicht gesehen.” He sighed. “Meine Kinder. Zhena moya. Deti.”

“You are lucky to be raising her now, in a Soviet society,” Lise said over the noise of the car. “Women are going to benefit from this revolution like no women in the history of the world. If only we could accomplish what you have accomplished here.” I nodded. It made me proud, but also anxious. I certainly hoped that the Petrograd Soviet had made some inroads into building those crèches and kindergartens by the time I got home. I was going to need them.

The train rattled and screeched and jarred its way through the night.

In Vyatka, we said auf wiedersehen to the German comrades. They were taking another train, zigzagging their way to Moscow. I was sorry to see them go. I brought my pail to the engineer, who filled it with boiling water straight from the engine. I gave Iskra’s diapers a real wash—God bless the factory committee and their gift of a simple pail. Now I felt bad for being so irritated at their enthusiasm. I laid the cloths in the sun at the end of the platform, weighing them down with rocks, and got talking with the railwaymen, broad-faced workers in grimy overalls, as they serviced the train and loaded wood and insulted the railroad Cheka climbing aboard to search for contraband. Iskra’s charm won them all. Funny, I’d only imagined her presence in terms of difficulty. I hadn’t realized how everyone would fall in love with my redheaded baby. They invited me to join them for lunch, where, over a meal of soup and cucumbers, I repaid their generosity with stories about the Red October and having the baby and working in the fields—making a pretty tale of it. That was me, the Scheherazade of the Russian rails.

Back in the switching house, I noticed a chessboard on one of the shelves by the stove. “Who plays shakhmaty ?”

I spent the rest of the afternoon playing chess with members of the Vyatka rail crew. I beat the first two, and then excused myself to nurse Iskra, covering her with the long cloth that was also her hammock. I’d bet one of my packages of cheese against three bread cards, and then the bread cards against a lighter, and walked away with all of them. “Where’d you learn to play like that, devushka ?” the foreman asked, smoking a pipe, still staring at the board in disbelief, as if the pieces had moved by themselves.