From the very beginning of the siege, the two main floating fortresses of the Red Army’s Baltic Fleet—the battleship Marat and the cruiser Kirov—cruised in the proximity of the Neva estuary, as if symbolizing the two phases of the Revolution. The Marat, which took up position beside Kronstadt and fired from there with all the might of its 305-millimetre guns at the German forces advancing along the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland, was a reminder of the time when the Revolution had decked itself out in the garb of a sanguinary but philosophically enlightened minority, who had slaughtered a quarter of the country out of logical necessity—those who survived would hold sway over a new earth, in a new heaven; while, the Kirov, the flagship and HQ of the Baltic Fleet at the time of Tallinn’s evacuation, having moved into the estuary and moored at the 19th line of Vasilievsky Island, firing over the city blocks from there, served as a reminder of the phase of temporary restraint, of Jacobinism, of radicalism in words but not in deeds, of the Soviet “imposition of order” that was cut short by the shot in a corridor of the Smolny Institute that ended Kirov’s life on the first of December, 1934. This was, so to speak, the official version of events, differing greatly from the Revolution as seen by Gleb, the Chetvertinskys, and many others who either accepted it or did not accept it. But as long as both floating fortresses, together with the battleship the October Revolution, cruised between Kronstadt and the besieged city, the city was content with this version.
During the final third of September the Germans attacked the Marat from the air with devastating force, destroying its forward turret, powder magazines, and wheelhouse. Badly crippled and with a third of its combat personnel killed, it was stuck on the shoals off Kronstadt, but continued firing from the barrels of its remaining guns, while the Kirov and the October Revolution took refuge in branches of the Neva, merging into the residential areas that were being destroyed, together with their dying palace complexes and parks. The heroic story of the Soviet coup was replaced by a different narrative, far less exalted and immeasurably more terrible—of the reduction of everything still endowed with any meaning to a heap of rubble, to obscurantist gibberish.
“A lousy, stinking city, as cramped as a rear entrance cluttered with garbage, is the only thing left to us, and this is not Petersburg,” Gleb began the latest entry in his notebook, but the fervid heat of his constantly rising excitement, and what he had taken for a new, clearer view of things, proved, alas, to be plain, ordinary flu, extremely dangerous to a starving man. Gathering the remnants of his will into a tight fist, Gleb forced himself to swallow the anti-catarrhal medicine and aspirin he had been keeping in reserve, as well as a certain quantity of homoeopathic pills. Tormented by a splitting headache, drifting in and out of unconsciousness, Gleb remembered—or did he dream it?—Mark coming by and saying he had brought extremely important news, but being unable to bring himself to tell Gleb what it was and just sitting there for a long time and finally leaving some keys behind when he went. Gleb could have accepted that there had never been any visit from Nepshchevansky, that it was his mind’s defensive reaction against the vortex that was sucking it in, except for the keys—there they were, lying in the room on the lid of the grand piano. Beside them Gleb discovered an opened letter, sent by the internal municipal post, postmarked February 20, 1942. In the letter, Vera explained the reasons for her sudden evacuation and informed Gleb that she had also written to Georgii, and “when, in a month or month and a half you receive word from me that I have safely reached the Volga Region, I ask you to go around to the apartment, after first contacting Georgii, and collect the things that I will indicate in my next letter. Don’t bother any sooner, there is no need. May the powers on high preserve you. I kiss you, my beloved. Yours to the grave, Vera.” Thus the mystery of the keys was solved. But what was it that Mark had wanted to tell him? Stunned by the letter in his weakened state, Gleb was certain that the extraordinary news must concern Vera’s departure, but there was no way he could contact Mark. No one answered the phone in Nepshchevansky’s apartment, and the Leningrad office of TASS informed him that Mark had been out of the city for several days.
PRIEST:
Let God arise,
let his enemies be scattered—
CHORUS:
Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
and on those in the grave
bestowing life.
PRIEST:
As smoke vanishes,
so let them vanish—
(The CHORUS repeats the troparion of the Feast of Easter.)
So the sinners will perish
before the face of God,
but let the righteous be glad.
(The CHORUS repeats the troparion.)
This is the day which the Lord has made,
let us rejoice and be glad in it!
(The CHORUS repeats the troparion.)
Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit—
(The CHORUS repeats the troparion.)
Now and forever, until the end of time, amen.
(The CHORUS repeats the troparion.)
PRIEST:
Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death by death,
CHORUS:
and on those in the grave
bestowing life.
Gleb had known the melody and voice parts of this triumphant hymn by heart since he was a little child, from the first time he was taken to a midnight vigil, merging into a long, four-hour matins, but not until his juvenile years did he learn that the hymn’s music was written by the composer of Askold’s Grave—the godfather, in a certain sense, of the last of the Radziwiłłs—and that this composer, Alexei Verstovsky, had been, like Askold, like Savromatov, and like Gleb himself, agonizingly torn between the basic, elemental, magic of the language he imbibed with his mother’s milk and its setting in a hymn of praise transcending spontaneous elementality, “The Sun that was before the sun and Who had once set in the tomb . . .” as the Easter ikos said.
The imperative of recovery, thoughts of salvation, and Vera jostled with each other in his agitated awareness. But now that Vera was far away, Gleb could at least place the final dot in the music of the aria with a clear conscience.
The bombing raids and artillery bombardments were especially intense on Easter eve. Despite an immense desire to go to church, which had been growing insistently since Evdokiya Alexeevna left him, Chetvertinsky decided not to take the risk, knowing what a long and dangerous road it was. From early in the morning the guns fired their rumbling shots, sparsely and methodically, with a maddening regularity, in time to his own slowed heartbeat. Five minutes before seven in the evening, when Orthodox Christians prepare themselves inwardly, mentally, for the midnight service, reciting prayers, and the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great begins in the churches, there was an air-raid siren, and the buildings in the part of the city where Fyodor Stanislavovich lived shuddered as the bombs dropped, scattering stone chips, structural debris, and glass from the windows that hadn’t already been shattered. During the raid, the enemy’s artillery carried on pounding the residential districts with the same loitering rhythm, sometimes coinciding ominously with the explosions of the bombs, sometimes generating a savage counterpoint. Massed, intensive return fire from our anti-aircraft guns—shooting up at targets invisible to the eye—as well as our own planes cleared the sky after an hour. When the curfew came into force, excluding the very idea of any Procession of the Cross (although in a city shattered by bombs and flooded with blood and sewage, that would have been a powerful spectacle—if, that is, anything could still impress people after all that they had been through), Chetvertinsky, like many others, stayed awake until midnight, then broke his fast with the vodka he had been saving specially for Easter since it was issued as part of his academic ration, bundled himself up tight in the blankets that gave only a meager warmth, and lay down on his dirty bed without getting undressed. He had a good, warm feeling and felt less lonely. But no sooner did Fyodor Stanislavovich nod off than a new, even fiercer raid began, right on time for the Easter matins (the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock showed one in the morning). The all clear for the city wasn’t sounded until a quarter past three.
In the morning, the frosty, frozen streets were covered with new puddles of blood from the dead and wounded. So some people had defied the prohibitions and gone to church as twilight drew in after all. A cold wind was blowing from the gulf. The German heavy guns were still thumping in the same rhythm. The only planes that could be seen were ours—the enemy and his hellish legions were not in the sky on April 5, 1942, the day of Christ’s Radiant Resurrection. The sight of the destruction and the large number of bodies in the streets on this cold day, which was nonetheless a holiday for many—although a working day in the Soviet calendar—was depressing. Aware of the German respect for precise schedules, Chetvertinsky was certain that the raid hadn’t been improvised. He pictured to himself an air-force officer—somewhere in Tsarskoe Selo or Gatchina—who had invited a priest for a formal consultation, jotting things down in a notebook: “Evening service at seven, you say, in all the parishes? Procession of the Cross at midnight? And matins at one? Timber for heating the church buildings? Very well, we’ll bear your wishes in mind. Please, have a coffee and a biscuit. What, today is a strict fast? Well, we respect the local customs.” With someone else the same officer would have discussed the late quartets of Mozart. With Chetvertinsky he would probably have discussed linguistics, the common Indo-Aryan legacy—with insistent emphasis on the “Aryan” part—of our languages. This much-vaunted cultural veneer was merely the camouflage of an arrant cannibalism implanted by the victors even among the tribes they enslaved. Chetvertinsky shuddered once again at the thought of the suspicious meat jelly in the patties that were sold on the underground black market. It was easy to imagine the unbridled barbarity that would triumph if the absolutely inconceivable occurred—Fyodor Stanislavovich was more convinced than ever that it was inconceivable—and the National Socialists, these bards of tribal nirvana, were triumphant. The only point that still agitated the scholar’s inquisitive mind was the stubborn rumors that had been circulating for several months concerning certain former acquaintances and students of his, who, finding themselves in the German zone, had sided with these crusaders against godless Bolshevism—a likelihood that could not be entirely ruled out, in view of how rapidly the enemy had overrun the outlying suburbs in August and September. “The German regime is every bit as godless as our own,” Chetvertinsky told himself, “but we’ll sort ours out after the war. All these people do is hammer away sadistically, day and night, at a city, the equal of which they could never hope to build; all they do is suffocate us slowly with the garrote of hunger and flood the streets with blood—and when, of all times? On the day of the Radiant Resurrection.”
As we walked past the Lithuanian Castle,
magnesium started flashing,
as if the clear, bright sun of August
was inadequate for the infamy
with which the entire ritual has been tainted
since the times when the bullheaded
God of the Neva’s (Nile’s) waters
was interred, hewn asunder:
the body, wrapped in the hieroglyphs of songs—
into the ground with it,
so that later,
in time’s fullness,
it will splash forth
through harmonies agitating the air,
through rows of typesetter’s lines
in a wind of numinous pages.
These lines from the second page of Tatishchev’s Lightsound could only be a description of Blok’s funeral.
Where was it, that Lithuanian Castle that was burned in the revolution? Gleb remembered so clearly the procession passing by its desolate walls on August 10, 1921. Where were those who walked along its walls, now that the entire city had become that Lithuanian Castle, an oppressive, dismal torture chamber, first erected on the shoulders and bones of Gleb’s own generation, then burned and bombed to pieces in the hurricane wind of war; now that the rite of Egyptian burial, prophetically foretold from the year 1921, had become an everyday commonplace, and the lines of carts, sleds, or simple pieces of plywood with ropes tied to them—and with lifeless bodies, wrapped in sheets, lying on them—had stretched along broad October 25 Prospect for so many long months; now, when rumors of the ritual partial dismemberment of bodies had long ago ceased to alarm (Gleb himself had seen stacks of these mutilated, frozen bodies, with their thighs and other edible parts cut away—human beef for cannibals); precisely now, on the threshold of spring and a new blossoming, on the eve of the world’s inevitable rebirth, Gleb began to realize the true scale of the collapse that had occurred, a collapse that made any past reality, even the most unendurable, seem like paradise. The wreck suffered by man this winter was total and irreversible—and his place had been taken by someone new, who had nothing in common with the beautiful city’s former occupant aside from the details in his passport. And it must be admitted that Gleb himself dreaded this newfound trans-human power that now dwelt within him too. It wasn’t physical, but a power of some other kind. What manifested itself at the physical level was a profound exhaustion from the flu he had suffered at the end of the hungry winter.
Radonitsa, the day of remembrance, arrived—the day on which, as Gleb’s mother had taught him, one should visit the graves of one’s parents. And Gleb set out to the devastated Vyborg Cemetery, where his father, Vladimir Georgievich, had been buried in 1915, and before that his grandfather, Giorgio Alfani. Gleb didn’t remember his grandfather very well.
The site of the cemetery was now occupied by an iron foundry. The Gothic bell tower still thrust its pinnacle up into the sky. And although the guards kept squinting suspiciously at Gleb as he wandered along the factory wall that once bounded the cemetery, and there were only a few gravestones that had survived inside the wall, Gleb still managed to peer over it and make out the spot where his grandfather and father had once lain, and in his thoughts he asked God, if not to grant peace to their disturbed remains, then at least to make their inevitable meeting in that place a happy one. “But with Granddad I’ll have to strain my knowledge of Italian to the limit. Oh, what nonsense! Does anyone really care what language you speak there?”
On April 15, the trams finally started running. It was time to fulfill the request Vera had made so long ago. In a strange way, the absence of news only reassured Gleb. It meant that all was well with Vera, that everything must definitely be well.
Early in the morning, Gleb got into a tram crammed to the very limit with people (it was route number 7), which ran through Labor Square and across Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge, with the steel colossus of the cruiser Kirov glinting a little distance away, then along Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment, and on along the 8th and 9th lines of Vasilievsky Island and Mussorgsky Prospect— how many times he had walked this way in the winter!—until it reached the tramline loop near the 24th and 25th lines, beside the tram depot. Vera had lived quite close by.
Ten minutes later he was already turning the key in the door of the Beklemishev residence (the electric bell still didn’t work, and no one answered his knock), and a minute after that he was standing in the hallway. Everything was still just the way it had been, and it seemed as if Vera had only just gone out, although she hadn’t been in the apartment for about two months. Lying beside the hallstand was a rather down-at-heel pair of women’s winter shoes and several bundles, tied in thorough male fashion, of warm winter underclothes and other, lighter garments (Gleb noted to himself with the first stirrings of jealousy that only Georgii or Mark could have tied them up like that), as well as a little bundle of papers and two books. Simple items of makeup—a powder puff and pencils—had been left in front of the mirror. Gleb drew air in through his nostrils, catching a smell that definitely boded ill—the smell of rooms abandoned a long time ago, suddenly and in haste. He stepped into the living room, where a medium-sized canvas with orange hippopotamus-zebras and winged Cerberus-Semargls beside the Bank Bridge caught his eye, glittering in the rays of morning sunlight. Standing on the woven red-check tablecloth covering the table—from the Volga estate of Yulia Antonovna’s father, as Vera had told Gleb during one of his evening visits here—was a half-drunk enamel mug of hot water that had frozen long ago. The handsome metal stove, acquired by Georgii Beklemishev at the beginning of autumn, was full of burned-out ash. No explanations were required. Now Gleb was certain that the news Nepshchevansky had brought for him was truly exceptional. But why, why, has this happened to me? Why has it happened to us? And why am I the last to find out about it?
How was Gleb to know that Beklemishev had been lying in one of the besieged city’s hospitals for several weeks with a severe concussion? (The icebound ship in the Neva estuary, on which Georgii transcribed and translated the enemy’s radio communications, had been shattered by intense bombing and shelling.) Or that Nepshchevansky had been killed by a sniper during a photo session at the Oranienbaum Bridgehead, and now there was no one left to hear the details from?
In the drawing room, Gleb lowered himself heavily onto a fine carved-wood chair that had somehow avoided being burned for heat during the winter, and sat there until twilight fell.