The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  The cold stopped the Sergeant’s heart. They found him, stiff, and they brought him out of the woods on a sled, like firewood. They whispered in the village that the communications ditch had belonged to the Germans, and so, in a way, the ghost of a German killed in the winter of 1941 crossed over from the other world, grabbed the Sergeant by the leg, and dragged him to his death.

  Kirill learned of the death by accident, overhearing a neighbor’s conversation. The world felt roomier to him, as if the man had taken up a huge space; a menacing cloud gone from the sky.

  But Kirill avoided the goose pond and no longer played in the sand pile. The geese were there, a new gander, Fritz’s son, was the leader, and Kirill was amazed that the geese remembered nothing, just lived their goosey lives in which last summer was far beyond the horizon; no memory—no fear. He wanted to learn not to remember, so he forced himself to forget—he started small, for instance, he tried to forget what they had for breakfast Sunday, and in despair saw that his memory was getting better, deeper, and willful, as if Kirill were its servant. He dreamed of having the power to erase bad memories, destroy places and things that reminded him of fear.

  That was why Kirill ran as fast as he could to the Sergeant’s empty house when he realized it was burning—the path was covered with water, which splashed up into the air, frogs leapt this way and that. He unlatched the gate, the chain clanged, and the dog behind the fence barked at him. Here’s the turn, here are the three firs that survived the storm, and here ...

  A pile of horrifying black logs; the fire was extinguished but below, in the bricks of the foundation, in the coals and ashes, the heat was still alive; dirty and stinking steam rose over the ashes.

  The house had burned to the ground. Kirill guessed that the gas tank had exploded. But to burn to the ground ...

  “It was lightning,” someone muttered. “It hit the antenna.”

  People didn’t seem to know for sure whether it had been lightning or not. But people believed it already; it wasn’t a random coal rolling from the grate—it was lightning, which made it more significant and scarier.

  “You see how God made his judgment,” one of the old men said, without sorrow or sympathy, accepting the higher sentence.

  Kirill stood there unable to believe it. Fedoseyevna wept in the arms of her women friends, while he, even though he knew it was shameful and wrong, thanked the storm. He saw the geese indifferently feeding at the pond, and he thought they had overcome the Sergeant together; there would be no fear.

  But the next week he was traveling away from the village, from the dacha, with his mother. An old man got on the train at the Belorussian station. He was dressed too warmly for the season; he must have suffered from rheumatism. People blocked his view, and Kirill saw only a hand, against the old military coat and raffish boots, the tops of white felt that belonged to a colonel or general, the patent leather, embroidered in triple stitching. Kirill recognized that hand, immobile, wearily lowered, but full of old strength, a strength that is not in the flesh but in the bone, ossified, ancient.

  Kirill thought it was the Sergeant, still alive—or that he’d come back to life—that he’d come to the city, gotten off the train and onto the Metro. Kirill hid behind his mother, peering out: he thought the Sergeant had come for him.

  The crowd eased and Kirill saw that this was a different old man who didn’t look like the Sergeant at all. The old man got out two stops later, leaning on his cane and shuffling his boots; Kirill could still see the hand. It all came back:

  “You grow up, Fritz! Grow up! And then ...”

  He was cold, afraid, had a sense of doom: the renewed knowledge that there are Sergeants and geese Fritz in the world, and they are brought together by life, because they are meant for one another, and nothing had changed with the death of a single Sergeant from the dacha.

  Everything was coupled together and lay in his memory. When there was a rainstorm, with hail—wherever he was, Kirill recalled that night at the dacha, the tempest, falling apple trees, grandmother at the window in fear, the burning smell from the village, the charred giblets of the burned house, Fedoseyevna and the Sergeant, the sand pile where he hid, the dead geese, the Sergeant’s voice: You grow up, Fritz, grow up and then, the Sergeant’s huge hand. It felt as if everyone in the world was an adult and he was still a child, feeling his immaturity; the Sergeant had removed something important for achieving adulthood from him when he killed the geese he took for German soldiers in front of him.

  The night at the dacha . the tempest . The sound of water falling heavily into the rain barrels.

  He fell asleep, like diving into the dark whirlpool of the barrel, the swirling foam and fallen leaves.

  ***

  Kirill woke early, it was just getting light. He wasn’t hungover, but he felt weak, as if the past had sucked out his strength through the narrow straw of memory. He had a powerful sensation of something squeezing his right wrist—as if the Sergeant’s stone hand had caught him and wouldn’t let go.

  Kirill pulled his hand out from the blanket, afraid he would see the bruises made by the dead man’s fingers.

  No, nothing there. It was memory. The memory of handcuffs.

  Kirill realized with indifferent surprise that last night was the first time in six months that he had not thought about what had happened. The arrest. Imprisonment, which was commuted to not being allowed to leave the country. He no longer pictured himself without those thoughts, used to running through all the events and their consequences, testing every point—could he have done something different then, foresee, avoid? But on the way to the dacha Kirill forgot. He had not been here for a long time, the house remembered him as a free man, and the air in the rooms was locked since fall, slightly sour, cold, redolent of mice, dried St. John’s wort, old wood, as well as something lingering from earlier times, like the antique furniture in the rooms and the black-and-white family photos; a thick, magical brew of oblivion.

  But his thoughts ran in circles. A May afternoon, a rally, thousands of people; flags, posters, a naïve feeling of victory to which Kirill succumbed, even though he had gone there as a historian, to see live what he studied; then—police, shields, helmets, truncheons, dozens of telephones filming the mass of people, the tangle of arms and legs, the smoke from burning flares, someone being dragged, someone fighting off the police—and somewhere in the midst of bodies and faces there was an unnoticed video camera held by an operative dressed in civilian clothes; there, captured by the lens, was a miniature, digitized Kirill running around, trying to cry out to his life-size self, to warn him of the danger.

  The airport, the flight from Berlin, the strange holdup at passport control—the border guard spent a long time flipping through his passport; at last Kirill was let through and he was immediately approached by a policeman; “Let’s go,” and he went, asking “What’s the problem?” but he was walking ... The questioning, the road to the detention unit, darkness, he remembers nothing, as if his inner light had been put out; all he saw before him was the luggage rolling on the baggage claim belt.

  Once again the rally, faces, more faces in the camera’s eye, from which the investigators would choose the accused, charge them with resisting the police; and once again the thoughts—why did they pick him, for which secret reasons? Kirill knew it was random, but believing in pure randomness was even scarier than thinking that he had made a misstep somewhere, had behaved incorrectly somewhere, and that was why events turned out as they did.

  He had that feeling again that had tormented him in jail: the arrest and imprisonment weren’t happening to him, Kirill, but to some component part of him as grandson Kirill, great-grandson Kirill. Not an individual, but a unit of the line, the heir to the family fate. Sometimes Kirill even thought that this feeling was saving him, it explained what happened, it answered the question “why.”

  When they announced that he was amnestied, incommensurately and inappropriately, Kirill recalled walking through the woods a
lone as a child, and suddenly being overwhelmed by an inexpressible fear. He thought that someone enormous, bodiless, and blind was moving through the woods, and that the enormity had sensed Kirill’s presence inside itself, the way a human feels a prickly fir needle under his shirt; the thing stopped and tried to feel him; the cool forest air blowing on his skin became the touch of that creature. A second, two, three—and it moved on, dissolving into the forest, leaving only the memory of touch and fear.

  With the news of the amnesty, Kirill experienced something similar; the same blind something had touched his fate and then was gone, but he remained standing and listening to the sounds of the forest.

  Kirill slowly walked through the house and looked into the study where he had been working on the computer the night before.

  In the light of day, the study looked different. The oblique sunshine illuminated books, copies of documents made in libraries, files, photographs, maps—his work, his project of the last few years; retyped and revised ten times, familiar in every dog-eared page; everything that he could find about his family history.

  But now, thanks to the bright sunlight, Kirill felt that what had happened to him cast an altered light on the past, a sunspot that shifted the shadows; the letters, numbers, and images under the covers seemed to wake up, sussing out among them new connections of connotations that had not existed before; they formed themselves into a book that he had been wanting to write and was unable to begin.

  For many years he had been in the position of an author who collected other people’s lives and had a retrospective view of the past. But, like his characters—his ancestors—Kirill was blind regarding the future, the new future that did not continue the past but eliminated it. The moment had come when he had learned everything he wanted to learn and was ready to start the book, but at that very moment he moved from author to character life picked up his text and willfully added a new chapter.

  He had not yet decided whether he would leave the country or stay. But now he clearly sensed that the path to the future lay in the book.

  Here, in this house outside the city, were papers from family archives of various years, letters, diaries, photographs, the materials he had collected: documents, articles, extracts; thousands upon thousands of pages, handwritten and printed, still open, ready to talk to him, connected to him by thousands of threads of memory, retaining a conceptual unity, preserving the misunderstood and the unseen, waiting to be learned and to perform their duty. He needed to follow the path of the book—from the origin, from his childhood when he first felt his special connection to the past—in order for the family fate to let him go.

  With a cup of coffee, Kirill came out on the porch.

  He took a sip and lit a cigarette. He had to combine all the plotlines, facts, his own recollections and those of others, surrounding him like a galaxy; a galaxy that takes its start and spreads to the four points of the world from a single milestone that connects time: the old limestone monument, covered in green and black moss, at the German Cemetery in Moscow.

  ***

  In his childhood, once a month, not less, Grandmother Lina told Kirill: “Saturday we’re going to the German Cemetery.”

  She packed her bag ahead of time—a trowel for the flowers, a stubby broom for sweeping leaves, a box of tooth powder to polish the marble that darkened quickly from the damp and rot. Grandfather suggested going by car, Grandmother refused; for some private reasons she preferred walking along the road that led from the highway.

  Grandfather, Mother, and Father rarely went with her. Once Kirill started school, Grandmother Lina started asking for his help, without pressure, almost shyly, saying his going would make things easier for her. His parents and grandfather did not contradict the plan, and Kirill, while feeling it strange that Grandmother had chosen him as her constant companion, found the mysterious attraction of ritual in these trips.

  And so they walked down Aviamotornaya Street past the unusual houses of postwar construction: four stories high with sharply steeped roofs, subtly German, and Kirill thought that this previously German neighborhood was spreading its imperceptible influence and changing the local architecture. Lettuce green, with slate roofs, these houses had formerly had tile roofs and were painted white, according to his grandmother.

  Then they turned left, walked past the school and the ponds with non-working fountains. Through the thick poplars encircling the pond, there were glimpses of a high wall, puce, Kirill had never seen that color anywhere else, and it seemed alien to him, brought from abroad. Three rows of shallow brick niches were set in the wall, resembling crosses and also abstract human figures—many buried souls. The same kind of trees grew behind the wall, but a sensitive heart ascribed a different meaning to them—these were the poplars and lindens of the cemetery, looking down from the crowns into the dark abyss of the graves.

  One more turn to the right, along the asphalt path, and beyond the stands with artificial flowers, the gates: red brick, with five pointy towers and silver-plated spires that resembled the façade of a Catholic church.

  Kirill shuddered going through the gates. The city in which everything was familiar, including the old mansions and the new concrete buildings, remained outside, beyond the cemetery wall. Inside the gates a new space revealed itself, one that was entirely unfamiliar, as if an unknown power had brought a huge piece of land from far away, and Moscow grasses grew upon it, Moscow lindens set roots in it, but still you could tell: this was foreign terrain.

  Your own, but alien. Alien, but your own.

  Following the example of his elders, Kirill never told anyone that their family plot was in the German Cemetery. That was the custom in the family; Kirill valued being privy to the mystery that resembled a curse.

  Grandmother Lina never led him to the grave by the direct and simple path along the main allée. She turned left then right along narrow paths among the decrepit, shuttered vaults and listing memorials with inscriptions in German, English, and French. Sometimes she stopped to catch her breath—the paths clambered the slopes of a hill over the Sinichka River where the water had been channeled into pipes—as if paying the tribute of memory to some unknown person. Kirill quickly realized that she always stopped in the same places—either her strength gave out at exactly the same distances or she truly was silently commemorating someone. Kirill started looking closely at the spots, but he didn’t understand a thing: black diabase monuments resembling slabs of darkness, dug out of the grim depths of the night, bore foreign names that said nothing to him, and with all his imagination he could not connect the names with his grandmother.

  Then they came to a low border sunken into the ground; among the ferns stood a small tombstone of gray marble: Sofia Uksusova, 1884–1941. This was the mother of Grandmother Lina, Kirill’s great-grandmother. To the left and right—also inside the border—were two limestone monuments. The one on the right looked like a chest of drawers, the Gothic script, worn by frosts, rain, and wind, barely visible. The left was like an altar; the stone table was covered by a stone altar cloth with tassels, with an open book of stone on top of it.

  Kirill did not understand church symbols, no one in the family prayed or went to church. He felt the heavy significance of the stone book, and when his grandmother turned away, he stole furtive looks: were there letters on the stone pages? Kirill knew there weren’t, but he believed that the letters existed and would appear someday.

  He never looked closely at the inscription on the right obelisk; he felt the letters repelled his gaze, did not allow themselves to be read, as if the person beneath the stone was locked in his death and wanted nothing from the world of the living.

  The book. He was deeply moved only by the stone book in the edifying simplicity of its empty pages.

  Kirill felt a vague challenge coming from it: the one who has the right can read it. He went to the cemetery with his Grandmother for the sake of that book, as if it were calling him, reminding him, in some sense cultivating him for itself
.

  Kirill could not understand why his great-grandmother was buried in the German Cemetery. In foreign soil. Who had led her soul through the foreign, turreted gates?

  Grandmother Lina always said: great-grandfather had worked in the military hospital diagonally opposite the cemetery. The family lived in the hospital wing. When Great-grandmother Sofia died, she was buried near the house, where the authorities had allocated space over the old graves.

  The explanation seemed believable: among the old grave markers there were many new, Soviet ones—generals and officers who died in the hospital, engineers, professors, actors; Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Jewish names mixed with German ones in a multilayered, squabbling palimpsest.

  Kirill believed the very convincing explanation—yet he did not believe it fully; the stone book hinted at another truth. Kirill waited for that truth to be revealed, in letters on the limestone pages.

  Sometimes, his grandmother would go to the Donskoy Cemetery the next day, on Sunday. She did not take Kirill with her, and his parents rarely accompanied her. It was just “a trip to the cemetery,” not to visit anyone in particular, just a pastime. Grandmother said that friends from her youth were buried there, but she did not name them; of course, she did not go often. Only once, in early autumn, she took Kirill along; it must have been in 1982.

  They took the tram from Shabolovskaya. Grandmother, usually careful with money, even stingy, bought a big bouquet of red carnations. Kirill carried it. He felt the weight of the fading flowers that had drunk the murky water in the store’s vase, poisoned by that water, already invisibly rotting; he felt the weakening stems, losing their firmness, and he thought the carnations would liquefy and pour from his hands in a sticky goo like slippery bark.

  They headed straight for the crematorium. Kirill had seen it from afar: an industrial death machine, a modernist pavilion crowned by an evil crenelated tower. Funereal lanterns at the door, a heavy crude archway leading to the twilight of the portico; a construction that seemed completely opposite in form and sense to the light and festive Metro pavilions ornamented with columns and plasterwork, flowers and garlands. Kirill recognized it—the grim entrance to the underworld, to the Metro of the Dead.