The Law of Miracles

Moral Problem #7: The Pigeons At Kazan Cathedral

119 Moral Problem #7: the pigeons at kazan cathedral 0 No one asks anymore except the ghosts, but if they did, this is what you would say: You would say that the letter was written by you and by no one else. That you yourself posted it to Leningradskaya Pravda. That you were not and had never been approached by anyone from the Union of Soviet Writers or the secret police. That Comrade Akhmatova’s subsequent expulsion from the writers’ union and the arrest and imprisonment of her son had nothing to do with you. You wrote the letter because your husband died in the war and your baby died during the siege and because you saw her when she returned after the blockade and the sight of her alongside the Fontanka Canal—well-fed, celebrated, alive—angered you. It was summer then. Your knees were still bulbous from the famine, your arms like wands, but you were feeling so much better that you managed to walk the kilometer to the Hall of Columns where you heard some of her poetry read. And there was that one poem about her Leningrad and the war suffering and the pigeonsinfrontofKazanCathedralandthatiswhatyouattacked her for. Because there had been no pigeons in front of Kazan Cathedral during the siege, no pigeons there or anywhere else in Leningrad. They had all been eaten. The pigeons and the crows, the dogs and the cats. You had been there. You had seen it. You had boiled your handbag into jelly, fed your baby the horsehide 120 THE LAW OF MIRACLES paste from off the back of your bedroom wallpaper. Comrade Akhmatova had not. So you wrote your letter and it became part of the uproar, evidence of the famous poet’s enmity to the Soviet order, her antinarodnost. And people knew who you were. They pointed you out. The braver ones asked you about it. That was sixty years ago. Now in front of the Winter Palace half-naked teenagers eat out of McDonald’s bags and listen to Run-DMC. BMWs fly past the Admiralty. You walk through the tangerine- and lemon-colored city in a kind of delirium, talking to the statues, to the ghosts, to the mounded earth in the Piskariovskoye Cemetery. The tourists wonder at you, but they have come to see St. Petersburg and you, you live in Leningrad . In the winter you can still see them, the corpses on the street corners.Theyarewrappedinsheetsorsomeone’sparlorcurtains. Up and down Nevsky Prospekt the trolley cars sit shagged in ice. There is no electricity to run them. No way to clear the tracks of snow. Inside—did they stop to rest and never get up again?— there are corpses seated, facing forward, waiting. They will still be there tomorrow when you pass, and the next day. In Hay Square you can tell the ones who have given in. They have hot eyes and pink cheeks. They sell packets of ground meat for rubles, for jewelry, for your wedding ring. If you ask them, they will tell you it is horsemeat. You cross yourself at the sight of them, step into the street to go around them. A car honks at you but of course there are no cars. There is no petrol . You make your way through the snowdrifts. There is the impossible smell of American french fries. Somewhere a businesswoman is talking on a cell phone. When finally you reach the cemetery the corpses are stacked like railroad sleepers. When you saw her, years later, standing in the market along the Obvodny Canal in a shawl and a karakul coat, sorting through a vendor’s boots—how worn her own were!—should you have gone up to her? Should you have gone up to her and explained who you were, asked her for forgiveness? On Sadovaya Street you walk behind a child’s sled being pulled by two skeletons. Draped across the sled is a woman with frozen skin. She stares up at the winter sky. She has no coat on. Her hair trails behind her in the snow. Back at your flat you lie on your bed. In the next room your nine-month-old daughter lies in a laundry basket. She has been dead for six days. For six days you have not had the strength to get out of bed and carry her across the city to the stack of...