Kirill took out a penknife to cut the twine around the stems. The knife slipped and cut his index finger, and a drop of blood was released. Kirill stared at the blood—for the first time it was not simply a physiological substance, the crimson, innocent moisture of the body, but the concentration of dark secrets. Before his blood had been his own blood, but now it was someone else’s, flowing in his veins but not fully his own.
He now saw it as a mixture of bloods carrying different inheritances, different possible destinies, boiling from contact with one another, eternally arguing for primacy. This argument suddenly explained why his life was so unstable and drifted in multiple directions, why he did not know how to apply himself, why he was so restless and wasteful of time.
Standing by the border around the grave, he saw the stone book on the altar, the one from which he had expected a miracle, believing that letters would appear on the empty pages. As a child he thought it was the only one in the world; now he knew it was a genre of memorial, there were others in the cemetery exactly like it, with a stone altar cloth and woven tassels in the corners. But either through an amazing accident or through oversight, the pages in the other books had edifying inscriptions, for instance, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” or “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground from which thou hast been taken.” But their book, his book—the only one!—was blank.
With a grown-up’s heavy feeling, he understood that his earlier presentiment was right: the book that revealed the secret of the Schwerdt family, that brought together everyone lying here at the German Cemetery and in the soil of various countries, who died on the ocean floor or who dissipated into smoke, would have to be written by him.
Looking away from the stone book, Kirill suddenly saw the cemetery with new eyes. He used to see it superficially, noting and remembering forms and colors: trees, paths, vaults, obelisks, flowers, crosses. Now, as if his grandmother had wiped away the patina, the gray moss from the space, giving his view sharpness and depth, he began to make out what he had never seen before. The cemetery tried to speak with him, to reveal its hidden symbols. They were everywhere, peeking out of the shadows, from behind branches and on monuments.
The first one he noticed was a Masonic triangle with the All-Seeing Eye, the eye of God, in the center of a stone sun with sharp rays resembling ancient swords; overgrown with reddish and greenish mosses, the Eye—the size of a hand—hid under the monument’s relief arch that cast it in shadow.
Kirill shuddered: he thought the stone eye was looking at him. Having met the stony gaze, he began making out other signs scattered about.
Stars inside a circle; stars in bas- and haut-relief; crosses, Gothic, Roman, Celtic, carved in stone; crosses entwined with fabric and ribbons; crosses entwined with vines; wheat sheaves and grape clusters; chains; medallions with angel wings; leaf and flower ornaments; marble wreaths in which every flower was recognizable—here’s a daisy, here’s a rose, here’s a campanula; trident anchors suspended from the wreaths; amphorae, the vessels of grief, tapering toward the bottom and tied by ribbons on their narrow throats; majestic cubes; six-pointed stars inscribed into a wreath; laurel branches, olive branches, palm branches, also tied by ribbons at the cleanly cut stalks; colored mosaics—blue squares, green rhombuses, black triangles, blue triangles; crossed swords and crossed scimitars; lions roaring and lions sleeping; eagles with wings spread; swimming fish; hammers, axes, and picks; interwoven rings, arrows, quivers, bats; other signs whose meaning Kirill could not decipher.
These symbols were as distant as Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian cuneiform; he was mute in this language, he could name the signs—ivied cross, cloverleaf, amphora, crossed swords—but he didn’t know what they meant. He was seeing the cemetery with his grandmother’s eyes for the first time, and for her these images were a natural part of life, but for him, born in the Soviet Union and knowing only red stars, hammers, and sickles, they were dead.
He understood Soviet symbols; reading the tombstone “First Deputy Minister of Medium Machine Building,” he could decipher the abracadabra of MINSREDMASH, which in the language of state secrets was the minister responsible for the atomic project, and he could weigh the place in the hierarchy of some lieutenant general by the orders incised into the stone; but even though he had read the Bible, and could tell the meaning of a cross covered in ivy, he could not accept it in his heart.
Grandmother gave him more than unexpected ancestors. The world of another culture appeared before him, a silent but living world to which he belonged by inheritance, by the right of wild, inexhaustible blood in which all eras and the starry sky flowed. Kirill would have to learn that old language, speak it, for it was the road into the past, where the shadows of Balthasar Schwerdt and Clothilde Schwerdt wandered in the pale asphodel meadows.
Grandmother was watching Kirill in expectation: Would he hurry to ask questions? Would he rebuke her silently? Even though the words were on the tip of his tongue, he said nothing, knowing that it was not only his grandmother evaluating him now—there was the Eye of God, and dozens of other invisible eyes. Is he the one? Will he manage? With great conviction he promised himself that he would manage—the last of the line, who now knew why he was born, what life had been preparing him for, sending signs and setting out the nets.
Grandmother signaled it was time to leave; Kirill shut the iron gate, looked back at the rose bouquet, red at the foot of the monument that had been simply a mound of stone half an hour ago and was now the axis of the world.
She went down the paths where she used to take Kirill as a child, stopping seemingly at random in several places. Kirill now guessed that each stop had indeed meant something, marked something. The cemetery was turning into a mysterious labyrinth, into a spectral reunion, as if all of Balthasar and Clothilde Schwerdt’s friends and relatives, whom they used to see in Moscow and were now also lying here, had awakened and were reaching out to the living visiting their kingdom.
Leaving the underworld of Erebus,
The souls of people who had left life came to the pit.
Women, youths, old men who had seen much grief,
Tender maidens, feeling grief for the first time, Many men fallen in cruel battle, with wounds from sharp spears,
In bloody pierced armor.
This horde of the dead thronged to the blood from everywhere ...
The Odyssey, Homer
Kirill recalled the lines. With his perfect memory for texts, his best university skills, when he got a boring question on the oral exam on The Iliad and The Odyssey, he chose instead to talk about Homer’s metaphysical topography, how his heroes as they die move from the upper world to the lower one and how we can imagine a narrative where men who have killed, betrayed, poisoned, dishonored each other meet again—and this meeting is eternal, for they have nothing but eternity before them, an eternity without Christian suffering.
At that time he merely sensed the divine ease of his memory and sharpness of thought. Now, for the first time he thought of how many ancestors had studied Homer in different languages, sharpening the skills he would inherit; how many had hoped for the future, prayed for it, lived for it, giving up the past and the present—and now Kirill was that future. The one where everything came together, where all lines led.
Grandmother stopped. The narrow path, the thick damp shade. A tombstone of gray granite looked like a throne: the tall stele was the back, and the armrests on either side were granite blocks topped with bronze vases. Four steps led to the platform before the stele, scattered with dry leaves and twigs. At the top was a niche with a bronze face, a king of the Dark Ages, descended from barbarian rulers who worshipped fire and mistletoe. Thick bronze curls brushed back; a heavy mustache that could hide a couple of margraves; a well-fed chin; Neanderthal ears, ready to catch the sound of hunting and animal roars; narrow squinting eyes gazing into the unfurnished space with thoughts of bridges, roads, troo
ps, ambassadors from foreign lands; a monumental nose, pitted with metal, smelling battles and gold; a hilly plain of a forehead; lips eager to suck out bone marrow; and a strange and incongruous detail—a bronze dickey with a tie encircling the tree-trunk-thick neck. Teuton, forest ruler in a dickey, conqueror of Rome, a sovereign whose statues were easy to imagine all over the country, equestrian, on foot, with a sword or scepter, taming a lion or pointing the way beyond the ocean, to the country of Eldorado (Kirill even thought he could see him in Lenin’s place), a cast-down god, whose shrine was forgotten, whose adepts were scattered, but here, in this holy place, an echo still remained of the ancient faith.
The person was completely alien to Kirill. It was no accident he’d never noticed this monument during his walks with Grandmother Lina—the way you wouldn’t notice a luxury car if that wasn’t part of your world.
GUSTAV SCHMIDT
1839–1916
Schmidt ... Kirill sighed in relief, for he had been on the lookout for Schwerdts. Here was Schmidt, some stranger Schmidt, judging by the headstone a millionaire, a Rabelaisian character with an appetite for quail by the dozens, villain of heartrending popular novels of early last century, owner of factories where poor souls toiled tied to furnaces and lathes. Grandmother must know a story about him, thought Kirill. He couldn’t imagine being related to anyone in possession of more than an apartment, a simple country house, a car, ten thousand rubles in the bank.
“I never understood why they made the face in bronze,” Grandmother said. “He was Iron Gustav. A steel magnate. I missed his funeral, I was with Papa at the front. But I remember Gustav. He’s your great-great-great-grandfather. He’s my mother’s father—she was married to Andreas. Her maiden name was Elizaveta Schmidt, and then she became Elizaveta Schwerdt. I would have made the bas-relief in steel.”
Kirill regarded the bronze face, seeking at least some similarity or family features. He looked at his grandmother. Back at the monument. Not a thing. Then he realized that no matter how dominant essential identity can be and how powerfully it manifests itself, it can be hidden by performing a kind of natural selection on oneself. In the Soviet period his closest ancestors lived by chasing away Schmidt’s legacy from themselves, afraid of being his grandchildren, and apparently they succeeded in this self-neutering; they renounced the primal power, the talent to own and control, for there was no outlet for that talent except making a career as a Soviet manager, general director or ruler of a gigantic construction project, plant, canal, or an entire region. But thank God they did not aim for that role, otherwise Kirill would have inherited very different ancestral sins.
“I’ve shown you everything,” Grandmother Lina said. “There are also graves here of people I knew, but we can do that later.” Kirill did not know what to say. He had an urge for time to roll back, for the car to have broken down, for them never to have made it to the cemetery today.
He used to be protected by the innocence of not knowing, and now his fate was controlled by the same forces that had controlled the destiny of his ancestors. Kirill could not know for sure what those forces were, their nature, but he sensed that they were like a storm raging outside, piercing the sky with lightning, chasing travelers on nighttime roads, burning old oaks to their roots; they formerly had no entry into the house of his life—and now suddenly, ball lightning might fly in through the window opened by accident and turn everything to ashes.
Storm. A storm. The noise of water gushing heavily from the roof into the rain barrel. The moist, cold, dripping windows. The drooping grass. The heavenly sugar of hail, landing in cups and glasses left outside, resounding, melting, vanishing. The wildness of agitated tree crowns, violet slashes of blinding lightning.
That recollection reverberated like the tempest that had traveled across the cemetery, strewing broken branches and fallen railings. The echo was weak in his memory: the smell of burned wood, fallen apple trees, green apples hitting the grass like large shrapnel; Grandmother, her terror, the spherical reflection of the candle in the trembling window ...
“Let’s go,” she said. “It’s time. The sun is going down.”
Kirill looked at the sky. The sun of course had moved past noon, but it was still high in the sky. He and his grandmother lived at different speeds, her time flowed much faster, her inner sun was setting, had been for a long time, was nearly in twilight, and that was what she saw now, illuminated by the declining sun, touched but not warmed by its weak rays.
The ones who were not in the cemetery, who had no tombstone anywhere, who were tied to these named monuments by the spectral thread of her memory—she was with them now, she saw them, conversed with them.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the Donskoy,” she said.
Kirill was no longer surprised. He nodded. They stepped onto the main allée, walked through the cemetery gates beneath the sorrowful face of Mary, Mother of God—and the noise of the street, the sparrows’ chirps, the distant thump of a ball, the trolley bell, children playing jump rope, dogs barking, snatches of conversations, engines running, the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer, the click of high heels rolled all around them, like change from a torn pocket, deafening them, slicing through the veils of silence as if they had truly come from the kingdom of the dead.
Kirill started the car and pictured his grandmother as a little girl in a horse-drawn carriage, the strong horses setting off in rhythm, powering uphill, and the cobblestones sounding beneath their hooves instead of asphalt. The little girl, wrapped in fur—for some reason Kirill pictured a fox coat—beloved by those now dead, still a daughter, still a sister, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and niece, goddaughter—not yet knowing that a steely wind would soon carry away the adults, and she would be left alone, one-on-one with the century.
At home Grandmother Lina did not let on to his parents in any way what she had told Kirill at the cemetery. He realized she wanted to give him time to process the new information without general conversation and discussion; to his surprise, he recognized that he did not want to share what he had learned, as if while the facts belonged to them all, they had a deeper meaning for him alone.
In the morning, the two of them went to the Donskoy Cemetery. It was drizzling, the trolley bells rang on the boulevards, old men on folding chairs in front of the Fisherman store sold worms. It was all—the rain, the worms—so insignificant, petty, important but to very few people in the city, that Kirill began to feel that this trip, after yesterday’s stunning revelation, was a minor and unnecessary tautology: he would encounter the same red brick cemetery wall, the same faded plastic flowers ...
Kirill knew that the Donskoy would not have the wealth of symbols that had amazed him at the German Cemetery, no lions or griffins roamed there, stone ivy did not grow there, and the stone Eye of God did not peer out of a Masonic triangle.
They entered the cemetery. Here the names were Russian, the old graves of nobles, officials, actors—but there was no sense of secrets, his eyes slid steadily over the stones, recognizing his native language, the familiar images.
The rain came down harder; there was so much polished stone around that the sound of the rain was strangely dry, as if thousands of cricket drummers were striking mica timpani; the sound came in waves of a funeral march, increasing, diminishing, carried by wind gusts. Kirill sensed an acute internal shiver in time with the music; the sound seemed to be coming from below, from underground.
He remembered the Metro of the Dead he had invented as a child; when his grandmother had brought him to Donskoy, he “identified” the crematorium as the entrance to the Metro. Now he thought he heard the corpses banging rhythmically on the coffin lids, demanding truth and revenge. This was not the noise of the rain falling from the sky, but the dull thud of bones coming from under the earth. It softens the soil for landslides, chases away rats, penetrates foundations, warps cobblestones. It is carried by the water of underground rivers trapped in pipes, it flows over rails and wires, it gushes out of the ground, soaring to t
he Ural Mountains, to the Siberian swamps, to the edge of the continent, breaking off into the Sea of Okhotsk and the Arctic Ocean near Magadan and Pevek.
Kirill felt sick, as if he were losing his mind—but he sensed that hammering with extraordinary clarity; the world had revealed its other side; he thought that his grandmother could also hear the sound, knew about it.
He wanted to open the umbrella, but she stopped him. She had always been markedly neat and tidy, could not bear damp and dirt, as if in response to the years of poverty when there was no place to find shelter, dry off, get a new dress or shoes to replace the soiled ones. But now Grandmother Lina did not want protection or anything to separate her from the voices of the dead pretending to be rain.
They passed the crematorium and turned left—Kirill vaguely remembered this path—then left again, where the crumbling towers of the old monastery stood beyond the trees, and stopped at the crossroads of the allées, by a granite flowerbed filled with self-seeded blooms. The bed was an unfinished project: they were planning a fountain or a pavilion where one might rest, but the result was a flowerbed to fill the empty space.
“Papa is here somewhere,” Grandmother Lina said softly, sadly, looking at the flowerbed.
Kirill did not understand which father she meant. Her own? Great-Grandfather Arseny? He’d been killed in the war and buried in the battlefield. Somewhere in an imaginary landscape with woods and river, wheat and village, where a hawk circles and soars on currents of hot air, and in the winter a vixen catches the mice that feed on the leftover grain from harvest.
“He’s here,” Grandmother said. “In the grave of unknown remains. I learned many years later. We had a KGB supervisor at work. High up. He had been in the service back in the 1930s. And he survived. So he,” she stumbled over her words, “he knew that I was half-German, even though I had taken Kostya’s surname. It was all in the records. And he,” here she stumbled again, “he found pleasure in playing with me. Once he said that he knew where my father was. It was twenty years since his arrest. I still had faith. I believed that maybe he was someplace where they wouldn’t let him send us word. That colonel said that Papa was at the Donskoy. They shot people in prisons. The bodies were brought here. Burned in the crematorium. And buried here. Somewhere here.” Grandmother sighed deeply. “Under this flowerbed.”
The Goose Fritz Page 5