The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Kirill recalled their trip here years ago, the flowers she put on a stranger’s coffin so that they would be incinerated and spread as smoke. Grandmother first lied to her son, telling him the story of the soldier missing in action so he would not ask unnecessary questions and could live without a shadow at his back; then he inherited the lie. The revealed lie separated them, tore the threads of confidence established in his childhood. But he sensed that she had nothing more to hide and suffered enough from living in silence.

  Kirill embraced her and whispered, “Grandmother, Grandmother”—wanting her to understand that he loved her and did not judge her. He felt the old fear in her, like a poisonous piece of shrapnel, of being accused, exposed, losing everything in a moment, a fear stealing a day from the week, taking away taste from drink, and luminescence from light.

  Now he understood why they didn’t bring flowers to Donskoy—any flowers would be too much here at the empty flowerbed hiding the remains of thousands of people. In that unimaginable mix of atoms there was what was left of Great-Grandfather Arseny, the man in the photo at home in a military cap with a red star on the cockade. He was inseparable now from the others who were burned and concealed.

  Still, Kirill felt that destiny could exist separately from the one who had lived it, destiny could continue after death.

  Being secretly executed, secretly cremated, and tossed into a common pit meant not dying but landing in the Metro of the Dead, the underground world of ghosts, wandering souls deprived of funerals, deprived of the death that takes place in the hearts of the living, in an open farewell ceremony. In that sense Arseny’s destiny was not completed: Kirill had to fulfill it.

  “Schwerdt,” Grandmother said suddenly. “I was Karolina Schwerdt until I married Konstantin.”

  So she was not Lina Vesnyanskaya, as he knew her, whose surname—Vesnyansky—he bore, but Karolina Schwerdt, who took her husband’s name the way people put on other people’s clothes that make them unrecognizable, in order to be saved, in order to escape. Karolina became Lina, to make the name sound Russian.

  “Schwerdt,” she repeated. “Schwerdt. I used to avoid saying the name, even to myself. They all died because of it. Papa. Mama. My sisters and brothers. Gustav and Andreas. Everyone. When I became Vesnyanskaya in 1945 and changed my documents,” she rubbed her hands along her face, as if throwing back a veil, “I swore that I would never again say Schwerdt. I would remember them by their given names.

  “I didn’t come to the cemetery for many years, afraid that someone would see me by the grave and realize that I was Schwerdt and not Vesnyanskaya. Many years. ... The grave was overgrown. After the war no one took care of the cemetery. At night bandits hung out in the vaults. In the daytime there were hoodlums. People were afraid to go there. I wanted it to be like that forever. So that the monument would sink into the earth. So that the word Schwerdt would disappear.

  “Then I started coming. Like a thief. Early in the morning. Or in the evening, when everyone was gone. In the worst weather, snow and rain. So no one would see me. I walked down the main allée as if I were taking a shortcut to the Hospital Rampart.

  “Other women came, too. Also in bad weather. I met one at the well, we had come to get water. I watched where she went: to the old grave of a colonel in the imperial army, a German. And she watched me secretly.”

  Grandmother stopped.

  “They all died in different ways,” she said simply. “Maybe they would have been killed in any case. I don’t know. There’s no point in trying to figure it out. But the fact is, the fact is ... The fact is that they died because their name was Schwerdt. It was a stone that sank them to the bottom. Proof that did not need to be invented. An excuse not to save them. A justification for betrayal: why feel sorry for Germans?”

  She stopped again. Kirill looked at the flowerbed, at the sparse, untended grass. He hid from Grandmother—Karolina, not Lina, all of a sudden—as if still listening to her previous incarnation; he pretended to himself that Grandmother was talking about someone else’s terrible past, not her own—upsetting, but not inevitable—about a past that could be opened and shut like a book, coupled and uncoupled like a train wagon.

  Probably sensing Kirill’s state, Grandmother said, without looking at him, “They all died, and I remained alive. How can I die if they die with me? I promised Papa, in my mind, even though he was already dead, that I would not forget.”

  Kirill was aware that he was hearing a testament. He wanted to make a joke of it, to say it was too soon for Grandmother to think about death, but he realized how unbearable was the sight of that dusty, dreary, pathetic grass growing on human remains, as if the grass, too, was doomed, as if the grass knew grief and anger; he quietly took her hand in his, brought it to his lips, and kissed it the way you would kiss the cross.

  ***

  Grandmother Lina died at the dacha. She went out in the fall to spray potassium permanganate on the peony beds and replant the phloxes; the flowers were her connection to her late husband, Konstantin, who died when Kirill was still in grade school. His grandfather was an antiquarian capable of talking for hours about the pattern of a Meissen porcelain plate. Yet he loved the flashy, shaggy flowers, disheveled by wind, sparkling with rain drops—as if his peasant background found relief in them—and Grandmother continued planting them along the path after his death.

  She left in the morning, one of those rare October days that actually belong in August; the last unexpended forces of summer ferment in them, like the juice in overripe apples. The clear morning was followed by a hot day, but rain, persistent and cold, came in the evening.

  Grandmother had not returned the following evening. The phone in the dacha guard booth went unanswered; in this weather the guard went to his house in the village to warm his rheumatism by the stove. Kirill drove out in his grandfather’s old Volga with the unreliable carburetor, the “barge,” as he called it; the motor died on him twice, and twice restarted—the Volga liked shamanism, knocking, pauses on the trip—and finally turned onto the familiar country road, and light from the family windows glowed through the rowan trees by the gate. He was happy until he thought what light in the windows meant at 3:00 a.m., probably burning since the night before.

  Grandmother left sooner than her time, Kirill later understood. The remains of her days, the precious remainder of life, she had invested in the dacha house, in the trees on their property, in the forest around them; she used up the time to create ties that could not be put into words: not guilt, not duty, but the strange tugging feeling that she was present in the rustles of the house, the busyness of the wasps under the beam, in the appearance of mushrooms in the old spots that she had shown Kirill when he was a child, in the alpine strawberry swoon of forest meadows—reminding him politely, asking for something, appearing in a beam of light cleaving the forest, breaking against its fir limbs, or in the fall of an aged leaf, or the quick fading of phlox, dropping petals onto the apples that had rolled into the drainage ditch.

  When they buried her, the weather had changed. At the German Cemetery, snow fell in tiny grains that did not melt on the shoveled clumps of reddish clay. When Grandfather Konstantin had died, Kirill was in summer camp and did not get home in time; this was the first time he saw the cemetery earth open, and Kirill imagined that the gravediggers were knocking on the coffin lids of Balthasar and Clothilde.

  Grandmother’s coffin was a cheap one—the family was not doing well by then—and she was not buried deep—the gravediggers didn’t want to keep banging at the soil,—but Kirill imagined that the dead were pushing up from below, piled one on top of the other; once again he saw the signs, the Masonic Eye of God, the clover leafs, crossed swords, and knew that no one noticed them, no one cared about the stone book on the limestone altar; this was an inheritance intended for him alone.

  The death of Grandmother Lina somehow released the family, the way an unfinished knitting project held by a needle falls apart. Neither his father or mother nor Ki
rill had understood how much Grandmother held them together; it seemed she lived unnoticed and quietly, rereading books, taking care of ancient things left by his grandfather, and herself was an ancient thing. But it turned out that it was Grandmother—not by word or advice but by being there—who balanced the differences in various personalities, multiplied by the vicissitudes of life.

  Misfortunes visited the family after her death. There were cuts at Father’s institute and he lost his job, then Mother slipped on the ice and spent a long time in the hospital, where it was now necessary to buy medicine and the attention of the staff. Then—and subsequently Kirill would see a direct parallel with the family history during the 1917 revolution—bandits showed up to take away the five-room apartment in the Stalinist building near the Oktyabrskaya Metro station, inherited from Grandfather Konstantin; they came the way the revolutionary sailors entered the houses of parasites to enjoy the spoils. The bandits had been given a tip, they knew an antiquarian, a collector, had lived there and that was why they wanted that apartment and not the one next door. The family was rescued by a KGB general who had been a patron of the late Grandfather Konstantin, but he rescued them according to the “rules” of the new times: they had to move to a three-room apartment in a worse neighborhood, but they got to keep Grandfather’s collection and their lives.

  Father started selling off some of the antiques, getting into affairs he didn’t much understand, tricked more than once. And the money received for trophies of a long-ago war—Grandfather’s collection was mostly that—did not stay in their hands, did not bring joy or sufficiency.

  Kirill did not notice the poverty, he even felt resigned about the bandits who came to throw them out into the street—a sense of gaining a second, belated, and real youth made up for the criminals.

  Fifteen years later, when he thought about his generation, which had come into adulthood in the 1990s, he felt that the ancient alchemy of history was still alive. Fire, water, air, earth—they were the children of fire and air, never knowing water and earth. The children of the great mirages that rose over Russia—the generation of the pause, when the monster of Russian statehood had almost died, was weak and wraithlike. When the atmosphere changed and one could barely breathe, it turned out that they had nothing to lean on, that their existence was founded upon the play of air currents.

  The Union fell apart without great bloodshed, as if on its own, and they were corrupted by the ease of the collapse and therefore unprepared for resistance. They thought that all evil had been contained in the USSR and now that there was no Union, things would take the right path; they did not understand that evil was a part of history and that democracy was a system for minimizing evil and not for the triumph of good. Now they were twice orphaned because the country of their birth was gone and the country in which they grew up was also gone.

  Kirill liked the nineties; dust had been blown off things and events, a veil had been removed, and they were free. He worked, wrote, taught, received grants, spoke at conferences, and unable to develop a smart strategy and pick one topic, he worked on the history of collaborationism during World War II, then dekulakization in the national republics, then the Comintern.

  In Soviet times, his father was close to dissident circles, read The Gulag Archipelago, and even once contributed money to some cause. Kirill zealously, to his own surprise, wished that everything they had whispered in kitchens would be said aloud at full voice, that there would be books, films, monuments; but in fact he was simply trying to avoid his personal mission. Defending the abstract truth of history and talking about others was more comfortable than digging—to the bottom—in his own family’s past.

  The family—because of the determinism of kin, the causality of births that form irrevocable ties—began to personify what he feared most of all: the inability to manage and control—in this case, the past. Kirill feared that dark waters of the elemental past would rush into his life, that which could not be changed and could not be accepted.

  As a child suffering from morbid attacks of dreaminess, he imagined that he was no one’s son, no one’s grandson, no one had borne him into the world, he was superfluous, a stranger to all, related to no one, not even his beloved Grandmother Lina.

  As a youth he began hating words denoting kinship. Mother-in-law, second cousin twice removed—they seemed antiquated, hoary, from the tribal intimacy of language. Kirill could not imagine he could be the subject of those terms; it would mean being covered in animal fur, forest moss, turning into half-human half-animal, bound by pagan ties not only with others like him but also groves, springs, meadows, trees, and animals.

  Kirill was afraid that if he went down the family tree even into the 1930s, to the torture cellars reeking of blood, he would learn something that would take away his right to determine his own life, make him one of the men—he had met a few—who were killed alive by the terrible truths of the past, appearing to others as ghosts of conscience, forced to sacrifice themselves to expiate the sins of their fathers.

  Sometimes Kirill opened his grandmother’s tabletop desk with wooden cubbyholes, where she kept papers that had survived a century. He opened it but did not touch the papers, looked at the soiled, worn corners of envelopes, and thought that poison might seep out of those holes, as if sent by an assassin. He would shut the desk and return to his books, articles, and lectures, promising himself that one day he would definitely read her archives and write a text.

  Kirill thought he had to take care of his own destiny first and acquire independence. He worked steadily, defended his doctoral degree on the Russian Liberation Army, made a name for himself. He was invited to America for a project on the deportation of Jews from the Russian Empire during World War I.

  It wasn’t his topic. Kirill drafted the proposal on the margins of his other studies, so to speak, and sent it in, telling himself that he had no chance but he was fully aware that it would arouse some interest.

  The answer came: Harvard, two years, an enormous stipend, the prospect of extended work and residency; a prestigious offer at the highest level. Kirill accepted instantly, telling himself that those years would allow him to fully establish himself as a scholar. But secretly he know that he would not return to Russia, he would separate himself by an ocean from the destiny of Europe, where the destiny of his family lay, he would reject the idea of the book willed to him by Grandmother Lina, would work on a topic that he did not need but that meant something to others, he would write a completely different book, and move to another continent—forever.

  Her legacy kept reminding him of her testament and his promise. Without noticing, he thought of her more rarely. Her things suddenly became unwanted witnesses; her lamp, desk, bookshelves, even the sugar bowl in the kitchen, which she filled by using tongs shaped like a bird’s beak, started to seem like obsolete relics, unneeded, cluttering up the house, kept only because they had become ridiculous and fetishistic embodiments of memory. Under various excuses, he began ridding himself of witnesses, hiding the sugar bowl in the cupboard and moving other things into the storeroom or her old room, which stood empty. He did not see this as a hidden war, regarding it instead as a concern for the spatial functionality; he thought—and it’s so easy to think in the name of the dead—that Grandmother Lina would be happier than anyone else at his success and his coming trip to America.

  In the preparations for the trip, Kirill felt he was forgetting something, but wrote it off as inevitable travel jitters. One evening about two weeks before his departure, his father said casually, “Maybe you should visit the cemetery? To bid farewell?”

  Kirill was ashamed. The simple thought that he should visit the graves, to say goodbye, had not occurred to him. Previously he would have thought of it himself, it would have been natural; and now, what was happening to him? Kirill looked at his father, who seemed to have fallen behind the times, and realized that his father loved him.

  He embraced his father. Now he had to go to the German Cemetery, stand
at the gravesites, and the anxiety would vanish, because it arose from his nonobservance of ritual, his stepping away from the duty of memory and respect.

  His father peered into the dark of the corridor that led to Grandmother Lina’s old room, and said nothing, merely shut his eyes and shook his head.

  Kirill went to the cemetery in early spring, when the days are warm but the nights still frosty. He went, as it seemed to him, in a good mood, to bid farewell for a long time or forever to his family on this sunny, cheerful day, and to remember the graves, paths, and gates looking like this. But the closer he came, the less confident he felt. He wanted to turn back, or buy flowers, or not buy flowers—the flowers would be a misguided attempt at asking for forgiveness; the engine light started blinking, he knew there was nothing wrong with the engine, it was the light that was broken, but he grew angry as he did whenever something was wrong. At the entrance a family in black stood next to a coffin cart waiting for the hearse to arrive and a handyman was sprinkling the road with salt; the cart was rusty, the salt fell in large clumps, and an old woman in a black coat gave Kirill a dirty look as if his green jacket offended her.

  Kirill walked along the allée and then took the path. The snow banks accumulated over the winter were melting, and the whitened, squashed plastic flowers showed through the snow.

  The stone monument of Balthasar and Clothilde was visible in the distance. There was the altar with the book, there was the bench, and there was ...