The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Grandmother’s marble stone was split in two. The fissure separated first name from surname and birth date from death date.

  At first Kirill thought the crack was due to a cavity in the stone that had filled with water, then froze, then thawed, then froze, throughout the winter.

  He felt remorse about the broken object. He considered going to the cemetery office and finding the mason, to see whether the stone could be repaired or if it needed to be replaced.

  The harsh scraping sound of a handyman’s sleigh against stone somewhere changed Kirill’s perception as if in a kaleidoscope: he saw the peeling paint on the railings, the dirt on the snow, feathers of a dead bird, branches broken by the snow, and most importantly, the line of the crack in the stone, random but well-defined, like the zigzag of lightning—the blackness inside the crack, the very essence of blackness that did not seem to belong to this world.

  The trolley rang its bell in the distance; the sound was of farewell, as if the trolley was traveling toward death, as if it knew that today it would kill someone with its heavy wheels. With that sound—he used to come back with Grandmother on a trolley, a red trolley with a beige stripe and round yellow headlights—Kirill understood the meaning of the sign given to him. He did not believe in the materiality of spirits, that his late grandmother literally existed somewhere and could interfere in events in this world. His fear was that this simply had been water gathering in the cavity and breaking the marble headstone in half, but the rationality of the explanation underlined the subtle coincidence, with the lifespan of a flash, between his departure and the appearance of the crack.

  Kirill realized that he wasn’t going anywhere, that he would turn in his tickets, give some excuse to the directors of the Harvard program, because otherwise that damned crack would not let him alone to the end of his days, would leave a mark on everything otherwise solid and whole, things would break apart, feelings, relations, attachments, that crack would run though the lines of his life like a black snake of meaninglessness.

  He felt relieved. Kirill ran his hand over the stone folds of the cloth on the limestone altar, over the empty stone pages of the open book. Kirill regarded its surface as if it were a country, a continent; he peered closely at the dark stone, its potholes, craters, ribbed edges of moss, the valley of pages broken on the spine, and began to see mountains, forests, roads, cities, vague shadows of the past and future, moving like the shadows of clouds on a plain. He saw the book of destiny and he could conceive all eras at once, saw himself standing at the cemetery, which alone was unchanging and unmoving; the rest flickered, hid in shadows, appeared and vanished; the foggy seas splashed the continent of the book, and ships sailed for it; cities were built and disappeared, troops marched along the roads. Only the stone altar with its stone cover, with the stone book on top, stood immutable in the flickering, smoke, sparks, and changes of night and day—like the axis of the world.

  Kirill turned. Grandmother was looking at him from the photograph on the split tombstone. Her gaze was joyous.

  Kirill wandered the cemetery for a long time. He felt as if he were at the Great Hall of the Conservatory, the orchestra members in place and the marvelous instruments ready to produce sound. He sensed that the music was nearby, as if the singing of the organ pipes, hidden by a curtain of metal sunbeams, could break through the noise of the day.

  His parents received the news that he was not going to Harvard with relief. His mother was simply happy he was not leaving her. His father urged him to consider his decision and not be hasty. But Kirill saw that his father was also happy, but for a different reason, and Kirill could not understand the reason.

  ***

  Later that evening Kirill thought about his father.

  He thought about him as a man profoundly alien to him, so much so that this alienation contained a paradoxical closeness: it was his father, through rejection and dislike, who made him who he was. He went over dates, circumstances, historical contexts, unhurriedly trying to distill the alchemy of fate from them.

  His father grew up seeing the nomenklatura friends of Kirill’s grandfather. The army bureaucrats, suppliers, and specialists in reparations impressed the boy with their tailored uniforms, array of medals, ceremonial weapons, and trophy furnishings.

  The beneficiaries of the World War II victory, who had received Pobeda cars, they wanted to appear like real soldiers—at least in the eyes of a child—and their talk was full of boasting and exaggerated or false exploits. Grandfather Konstantin knew their worth, but he had to put up with them; Grandmother despised them, but did not dare disagree with her husband. So they came to carouse, brought the boy to Red Square to watch parades, took him to the shooting range, gave him extravagant presents inappropriate for his age.

  Having spent eight years after the war under Stalin, afraid of him even dead, they drank vodka and ate fatty steaks to suppress their fear of Him and continued to celebrate the leader’s birthday—for they were afraid he would return, reach them from the other world, grind them into labor camp dust.

  During the war they took out their fear of Stalin on subordinates, humiliating, beating, shooting them. Afterward, when the leader was dead, they joyfully sang along with stage music, movies, and memoirs of senior officers that portrayed them as fearless heroes.

  They tried to exorcise their fear, bury it under corpses, drown it out with Katyusha gunfire in movie soundtracks, conquer it once and for all. But no matter how many bravura marches played on the screen and how many black-and-white tanks rolled past the signpost “To Berlin,” the fear was always with them, wearing a military jacket, smoking a pipe, and speaking in the voice of Mikhail Gelovani, the actor who always played Stalin.

  The boy didn’t know. And so he took the former slaves of the leader for worthy men; he played with their children, studied with them in an elite school and then at university.

  But there was something in him—probably from his mother—that made him a loner, so he avoided sitting in the front row, among the activists and heroes—not courage but the ability to become, if necessary, inconvenient prey, like a turtle or a sea urchin.

  He never got in anyone’s way, never competed with anyone, he belonged to the Komsomol, joined the Party. Supported by his father’s connections, he was not a careerist; he neither knew nor desired to know how to devour people, he was cool toward big ideas, but persistent in science. He studied his archeology as if he wanted to hide deep in time, in history, take cover in ruined palaces and temples of Central Asian rulers, in the houses of merchants who died during the Mongol invasion, to shrink, to disappear in the coals of ancient fires, in clay, in sand.

  His mother never told him about his German ancestors. But he wisely never delved into the family history, as if blind to recent historical eras, and had an innate historical longsightedness, discerning only things centuries away. In his archeological expeditions in Asia he encountered the archeology of recent times, fresh ruins of camps, the settlements of exiled nations, quarries and mines built by the slaves of the Gulag, but he did not pay them any mind.

  It was there in Asia that he met his wife, Kirill’s future mother. After graduation, she was sent to oversee the planting of windbreaks and fight the dry winds that destroyed the virgin chernozem soil plowed on Khrushchev’s orders. Her father had died of wounds soon after the war, and her mother, exhausted by wartime evacuations, died shortly before the wedding.

  The windbreaks were inadequate; the trees did not take well, ailed, dried at the root as young transplants; but Kirill’s mother had the strips replanted, fought with the regional authorities, demanded tireless work from the laborers, as if the struggle with the desert’s lungs were a tribute to her parents’ memory. And there, at the edge of the world, Kirill’s father met her.

  In truth, he stole her, arranging the transfer of the young specialist to Moscow without her knowledge—one of Grandfather Konstantin’s military pals was a big shot in the Ministry of Forest Industry; he stole her, loving
her simplicity and firmness, sensing that he, a refugee from the present, needed a wife who could take on daily life, leaving him the safe and distant past.

  Initially, she was unsettled by their Moscow home, Grandfather’s big apartment. The first time she was left there alone, she wept—not from fear but from the foreignness of the ancient objects. Soon Kirill was born, and through him, who had no idea of the age or value of things, crawling, walking, climbing—his grandfather worried about damage to the antiques but forbade nothing—she began mastering the world of the Moscow apartment. When Grandfather Konstantin died, she took his place as guardian of the house.

  But Kirill guessed that this house and this life were never truly hers. With the same stubbornness with which she planted windbreaks, she expended a lot of effort to fit into the world of her husband, his parents, and son. But Kirill feared she had exhausted herself, and in her old age, when that time came, she would not find real support in the house and these things.

  Kirill hoped that his book would be a lifeboat, an ark, for his father and mother.

  ***

  Kirill opened the little portable desk that held the papers of Grandmother Karolina—he couldn’t call her Lina anymore—the next day. It didn’t look as small as he had remembered it. He set it on his desk. The wooden box seemed much heavier than the papers in it, as if the contents of the letters had weight—the events, fates, and deaths imprinted on the papers.

  There were worn leather albums filled with postcards, collections of letters in envelopes and without. Neatly written books, old school notebooks, photograph albums with cracked leather bindings. Newspaper clippings, school reports, imperial certificates, money: imperial banknotes, the million ruble notes of the revolutionary period, Soviet rubles. A small stamp album with stamps cut from envelopes; handwritten pages with typed copy on the reverse—someone was using old paper from an office. Some completely illegible bits, crumpled and then ironed, notes with ink blurred by tears, trolley tickets perforated by a fivetoothed punch, math division problems, and more notepads, old telephone books with short numbers that were no longer in use in his lifetime, Soviet greeting cards with the flag and state seal, his father’s third-grade exercise book, children’s scrawls—drawings, kindergarten colored-paper appliques for Women’s Day, evaluations from the workplace typed on a machine with a sticky E, IDs, passes, bank books, and badges featuring the astronaut Gagarin. Patterns for a wedding dress with a piece of fine lace pinned to them; soup and dumpling recipes written on loose pages; carbon paper worn through in places, reused so that lines covered other lines, forming strange patterns of ghostly words; two tickets to the planetarium, used, with the stubs torn off; two unused tickets to Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Theater; blueprints for the dacha house on waxed paper; the wrapper of a Polyot chocolate candy (who ate it and why had they saved the wrapper?); prescriptions; and a newspaper cutting of Grandfather Konstantin’s obituary. And more of Grandmother’s letters, photos of her brothers and sisters, several notebooks with perforated pages; a heavy notebook filled with unfamiliar handwriting with old-style orthography, state bonds, an old map of Moscow trolley lines; another notebook in Grandmother’s handwriting, clean, neat lines, she wrote without errors, she must have made the clean copy from a crossed-out draft; more documents, more letters, an envelope with negatives, a library card, a receipt for watch repair ...

  Grandmother, who could not tolerate disorder, should have organized the papers by topic and year, placed them in envelopes, and labeled them in a neat hand, almost like a penmanship lesson. For some reason, she did not do that. Was she putting if off for later? Did she mix everything up on purpose?

  Kirill thought that she probably did not want to neaten the past, that is, in some sense bury it, dressing it in a corpse’s fancy clothing. In this mixture of everything together, important and unimportant, random and serious, the past was still alive, breathing melodically, and Grandmother Karolina kept it that way.

  Kirill spent several months going through the contents, sorting, reading papers, making piles, inventing classifications: by people, by era, by genre. Every classification fell apart: she wrote about the years before the revolution and the Civil War to her love in the 1930s—a tragedy, her letters were returned, without envelopes, in a pile, and all that remained was the name Arkady—had he stopped loving her, had he been arrested, had he died in the war? The nineteenth century was described in Great-Grandfather Arseny’s diary, written in the winter of 1917, while the events of that winter were in Grandmother Karolina’s most recent handwritten reminiscences in a separate notebook, with a few photographs. The few surviving letters among the brothers and sisters either reported on the sender’s daily cares or referred in a paragraph to the childhood or adolescence of the recipient, events known to the correspondents but not to Kirill.

  Postcards, signatures under photographs in albums, everything echoed, complemented, leaped across time, called like lost mushroom hunters in the woods, gaped with omissions and torn lines, peered myopically with faded postmarks, hid cut-out and torn-out pages, bristled with dark crossed-out lines, and ran off in all directions, vanishing, vanishing, vanishing ...

  Kirill ruined his eyesight sorting out handwriting, old type fonts, following the changes in spelling, the loss of some words and the birth of others. He noticed that some of the letter writers kept their language pure while others littered theirs with words from newspaper headlines; intonations in relationships changed, events were reflected differently in the mirrors of opinion, and the old family legend of Balthasar Schwerdt and his descendants was forgotten, covered in weeds, and gone from letters and recollections.

  Kirill assumed he had only a small part of what was once a large whole. He saw this in the gaps in correspondence, in the mentions of other diaries he did not have. Only a small fraction, five or three percent, had survived, and there wasn’t a single paper in German. Kirill understood that the archive had survived many purges, those in turn elicited by various purges, large and small, in the country, ideological campaigns, show trials, from the early Taganstev case in 1921 to the Doctors’ Plot in 1953. Threats came from various directions, requiring the removal and destruction of a single page or an entire stratum of life. What was safe yesterday became dubious today, what is dubious today will be fatal tomorrow; the archive grew smaller, parts of it were burned, burned like fuel for the undiminishing fear that broke though in febrile flashes.

  Some lives survived only by a half, others by a third or fourth. Some, like Grandmother’s brothers, left only remnants, particles, bits of biography, the way the dead lie shattered on the battlefield after being hit by a howitzer shell.

  Kirill would have found it easier to read if he had known that there really had been a howitzer shell, a single historical cataclysm, but he saw how people spent decades excising things, aborting the past; he felt he was witnessing a crime committed out of deadly fear and cowardice. This was the crime he had to expiate.

  He hung posterboard on the wall and drew schemes and graphs. A family tree appeared before him—with a broken trunk, fallen branches, lost leaves; he had seen such trees in photographs of battle scenes. This ghost tree came to him in his dreams, grew into him like a restless spirit.

  He, who had avoided kinship, began to feel in his nightmares like the final branch of the ghost tree, the last shoot tied by its stem to the other world, growing out of it and existing in two realms. He would waken with a powerful revulsion for the tree metaphor, its vegetative literalness, associating a person with a branch or leaf; but he felt he had to live through this association, accept the identification, for it would give him strength, the way a mask does to an actor, to continue along the path and the keys to hundreds of locked doors waiting for him.

  For months and years, Kirill traveled in ever-widening circles of research. He wrote down all the names he found in the archives, looked for those names in memoirs and histories; he leafed through hundreds of books, archive files, manuscripts, finding preciou
s grains of mentions, lost fragments from his puzzle. He journeyed to the places where his ancestors had lived, looked for witnesses, and if he didn’t find any, turned the place itself into a witness, using it in his attempts to restore the contours of the past. Letters in response to his questions arrived from Siberia, Europe, Australia, both Americas, where grandchildren and great-grandchildren had also preserved the remains of papers that had come from grandparents and great-grandparents, papers carried out under a coat, in a suitcase, saved from night searches, fires, artillery, and submarine torpedoes in the Atlantic.

  Things gradually came together, and torn threads were restored; Kirill wrote drafts and sketches, but he couldn’t capture the character or genre of the future book; it remained a stone, unresponsive to his efforts. He taught at the university, wrote articles, defended his PhD, early, incredibly early in terms of the post-Soviet scholarly world, but he knew he was working at a third of his talent; his strength belonged to the book, put into it in advance, into the need to keep the variegated ghosts in his mind, his memory, alive. The book was with him always, maturing, rewriting itself, and he was its tribute payer, but he could not begin it, as if the book said: it is not time.

  Time, real time, prompted: run. Move away.

  Two newspapers where he wrote columns about history were shut down. When he refused to sign a bootlicking open letter, they cut his teaching hours. The grants ended. Invitations to Russian conferences petered out. His foes said behind his back that he denigrated the Russian people, he was a slanderer; they called his dissertation on the Russian Liberation Army “anti-patriotic.”

  Kirill felt the noose of his unwritten book tighten; he thought sometimes that there would never be a book, that it was a dream, a Grail, merely an expression of his acute and unmistakable sense that his life was beholden to fate but that the book only masked this feeling, fracturing it, reflecting it in the circumstances of the past, allotting it to the characters of his narrative—in other words, made that feeling tolerable, since in its pure, undiluted form it was as deadly as the Gorgon’s gaze.