Chimes of a Lost Cathedral by Janet Fitch

Author:Janet Fitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Eight inches of snow fell during the night, snow without blemish, calf deep as I left the House of Arts. A sleepy, mystic snowfall, it needed a Blok to sing it—a real prewar snow. It begged for a fast sleigh, a fat coachman, gray horses with dark noses and intellectual eyes. What I would have given for a sleigh ride—rushing behind a feathery-hoofed horse with bells on its harness, snow encasing my collar and dusting my hat, face tingling with pleasure.

Citizens on the day’s snow detail were emerging from the courtyards, preparing to take up their Soviet shovels.

Take your time, Comrades. Don’t be so quick to strip us of our ermine.

I practically waltzed down Bolshaya Morskaya to the telephone exchange, but forgot where the dead horse was and tripped over it. It sent me sprawling, face-first, hands outstretched, into the new snow. Like landing on a featherbed.

Entering the vast exchange, I let the monstrous, oceanic wave of noise pour over me like waves turning stones over on a thousand beaches. Last night, Anton had said that Blok stopped writing poetry after “The Scythians,” because there were no more sounds. He should come here, then—there was nothing but sound, clatter of metal on metal like a hailstorm. But no fine long Blokian ahs and ous and ohs—modern sounds were all consonants, cktcktkttkkkk…I thought that Arseny Grodetsky and his ous and ayas and kayas and katayas would enjoy a class trip to the telephone exchange.

How paltry and inhuman it seemed now, my refuge of these last dry months. I sat down at my station and donned the mouthpiece that rested on my chest, the headset, one of a chorus—Number, please. Number, please. The open mouths of the switchboard sockets—like souls frozen in hell, screaming in the Dantean symphony. Clamoring, all these people, hungry for connection.

Voices echoed along the nerves…

Snakelike twined, in cables cased

Orders, whispers, sighs,

linking leaders to their bureaucrats

Lover to beloved.

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