The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  ***

  Kirill has long known whom the book would be about.

  About faces and masks, fractured fluid personalities, the Januses of history. Those for whom doors are wide open. The shoots of the family tree that bear strange fruit. The bizarre scions in whom the line ends and simultaneously unfolds in full possibility, unrelated by conditions and traditions. About people leaving old ties behind and moving into the unknown. Secret heroes of history, invisibly harnessed to its reins. The ones whose destiny is a letter in a bottle. About the unusual links in the chain of events—a different color, a different material. About those whose actions determine the destiny of subsequent generations.

  Kirill sees the blueprint of the family tree. He remembers all the branches, all the names, relatives remote and close, hundreds of people. The tree’s roots reach back into the fifteenth century, but Kirill doesn’t need to go so deep. For his family history that is a prehistoric era, like the reverse calculation of time before the birth of Christ, before our common era.

  In 1774 the new era had not yet begun, but the one who made it possible was born in Anhalt-Zerbst: Thomas Benjamin Schwerdt, son of a pastor and the niece of August Gottlieb Richter, a prominent professor of medicine.

  Thomas had studied medicine in Jena, where he lived with his uncle, professor of anatomy and surgery Justus Christian Loder; his other medical mentor was Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland.

  Richter, Loder, Hufeland were the leading medical minds of the era, confidants and physicians of august persons, and friends of Goethe and Schiller. Members of secret societies, masters of Masonic lodges, researchers in nontraditional practices like Tibetan medicine, and authors of learned works; teachers of generations of doctors in Europe; participants in great events related to Russia: Hufeland treated the mortally ill Field Marshall of the Russian Empire Kutuzov, Loder set up the Russian Army hospital in the war with the French and became the personal physician of Emperor Alexander I, and Richter trained them both; and all three greats, like muses or midwives, influenced Thomas Schwerdt’s medical career.

  Naturally, with that kind of patronage, his future was guaranteed. However, he would have flourished on his own, thanks to his abilities, the greatest of which was obstetrics: many noble and wealthy families were indebted to him for their descendants.

  But he did not acquire the outstanding talent of his mentors. He was received in their homes, took part in discussions, but he never equaled them in science or society. Fate set him back a few times: his first wife died young, and he had not been able to save her; in 1812 he was almost executed by the French for sabotage—just before the execution, while he was receiving communion in prison, the city was liberated by the Prussians.

  Thomas changed cities, universities, medical specialties, as if hoping to come across a place where his gift would flourish and yield fruit worthy of his teachers. Everywhere he was under their patronage, everywhere he was called in to oversee childbirth in the most noble families—but with every year he sensed more clearly that he would not enter the pantheon of medicine’s greats.

  In 1805 his first son, Balthasar, was born. That was the start of “our era” in Kirill’s family, because Balthasar was the first to step onto Russian soil. Thomas and Balthasar were part of the Big Family, whose boundaries were wide and flexible—part of the changing union of several families united in the interests of the clan as well as by various degrees of kinship. Patronage, politics, and money intertwined; various branches of the Big Family belonged to different hierarchies, social circles, professional corporations, worked for kings, built careers for generations in the army, navy, and in foreign colonies. Anyone born into the Big Family was like one of its organs, belonged to it like an infantry solider to his unit, and was subject to the decision of the elders—to marry, to be assigned a regiment at birth, to be designated a priest, physician, admiral, scientist. The Big Family was always playing the career game, promoting its own, reinforcing its positions, capturing new resources and posts, planning two, three, four generations ahead, competing with other Big Families. Balthasar, like his younger brothers, like his father, Thomas, was a piece in this game.

  Kirill had learned to see the family tree from this angle, too: not only as a network of relations but a network of mutual support, a scheme for multiplying influence, capital, social capital, a map of geographic, social, and professional expansion; the tree’s crown sometimes appeared to him as a hive, a hive of gold-bearing bees, gathering earthly and heavenly treasures.

  Balthasar, naturally, was to have his place in the game, become a pawn, a knight, a rook. But he broke off relations with his father, while maintaining some support from the Big Family, the clan, and headed to Russia. That was the total knowledge that Great-Grandfather Arseny and Grandmother Karolina had; it’s possible that Balthasar, when telling his children about the past, downplayed his starting position for certain reasons, and so his descendants took him to be a simple doctor rather than the emissary of mighty forces.

  Kirill could see further.

  Balthasar graduated from the medical school at Leipzig University. His father was a surgeon, and more importantly, an obstetrician who practiced at the court of Zerbst and had friends in high places. Behind him, in the shadow of eternity, were the figures of three titans—Richter, Loder, Hufeland, great physicians who cared for the health of the men who ran Europe. There were probably other patrons who remained in the wings of the family history. A marvelous beginning, a grand future: follow the plan, trust in the Lord, and perhaps you will be a titan in your old age, having enriched medical science and brought glory to the family name.

  Balthasar became his father’s assistant, joined his practice—his father was growing old, his hands were not as firm holding a scalpel or forceps—and he needed an heir. There was more: his father, the junior comrade of great men, with a clear understanding of his own abilities and knowing he would never equal them, must have hoped that Balthasar would surpass him, would be not only worthy of patronage but would heal the father’s injured pride, proving that a Schwerdt could do more, that the court of Zerbst was not the limit.

  Balthasar met his father’s expectations. He was still very young, but he was knowledgeable and even daring as a physician. He worked for three years with his father, diligently preparing his dissertation—something on treating goiters was all Kirill could remember—and wrote articles; he defended his dissertation and his father was ready to retire, turn over his practice, and introduce him into the circle of old friends not as a son but as a doctor. Balthasar seemed to be eager to follow his father’s plans and counsel; the middle brother, Bertold, was at the same medical school in Leipzig, and the youngest, Andreas, was still little, and Balthasar would soon be Doctor Schwerdt—in the future, the famous Doctor Schwerdt.

  Suddenly, when everything was decided, Balthasar broke with his father and with traditional medicine, allopathy, and became a homeopath. Inexplicable. Great-Grandfather Arseny wrote that Balthasar had experienced a personal crisis, but he did not know why: it was a mystery to him.

  Arseny did not know what Kirill had learned from his research in the archives: before the crisis Balthasar, probably influenced by his father, had been a critic, even a persecutor of homeopathy: he took part in debates, wrote sarcastic articles about “charlatans,” sharpening his scientific arguments on his enemies, creating his medical credo. In that period homeopathy for Balthasar was like a dangerous heresy perverting the Holy Writ, and Balthasar acted with an inquisitor’s fire, probably—although there is no direct evidence for this, but Kirill thought so—stooping to intrigues at work or socially; his father, long schooled in court life, must have given him his first lessons.

  But why were homeopathic doctors the chosen victim of Balthasar’s wrath? The archives were silent on this. Why not alchemists or healers of all sorts? Kirill imagined that it was the father’s influence: perhaps a homeopath had taken away a valuable client. But still, Kirill felt that this passion was inexplicable. Balt
hasar must have believed in medicine as a deity, believed in the physician’s prophetic role as intermediary between God and the suffering. He persecuted homeopaths, claiming the truth of medicine, worshipping the scalpel that cut off mortal flesh.

  Then, like Saul on the road to Damascus: “Suddenly a light shone around him from heaven. Then he fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’”

  The false became the truth, the former truth—false.

  Kirill searched for even a hint of what caused the transformation. At first he thought that Balthasar had lost a contest between doctors: he couldn’t heal someone who was then healed by a homeopath. But there was something missing in that hypothesis, a final precision that was commensurate with the scale of self-rejection and change.

  Balthasar then wrote several articles on homeopathy, about how he had been in the darkness of ignorance, deprived of true light, until God’s providence gave him the true measure of things. But he never explained how God gave him the revelation. Was he embarrassed? Couldn’t explain a vague sign? Or, did he not want to reveal the depth of his shock and upheaval and considered it between himself and God and no one else?

  Balthasar was trying to spare his father’s feelings, his professional ego. That guess, based on nothing, allowed Kirill to delve into the ancient plans of fate. Balthasar was mortally ill with a disease that could send him to the grave or at best leave him crippled—blind or deaf, legless or maimed. Thomas could not cure him, his son, his hope. The father could not, his friends could not, but a homeopath, called in secretly by family, perhaps, did. A homeopath. A damned heretic.

  His obstinate father would have preferred his son to die—as if with that cure he had sold his soul to the devil. Young Balthasar, who fearlessly challenged death when he was dealing with other people’s lives, for the first time felt its heavy imprint on himself; he changed, for before he had believed in his great future and thought himself invulnerable. Saved, he simply admitted the truth of homeopathy—he saw his work, his path in it.

  “So he, trembling and astonished, said, ‘Lord, what do You want me to do?’

  “Then the Lord said to him, ‘Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’

  “And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no one. Then Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were opened he saw no one. But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.”

  Kirill had reread those lines many times until he realized—belatedly because he had grown up as an atheist in an atheist country, that Balthasar, grandson of a pastor and son of a pious father, had certainly known the Bible well and must have viewed his experience through the prism of the Acts of the Apostles, the incident on the road to Damascus. And he was probably a passionate and ecstatic man who in the fever of his illness and the joy of being healed could have imagined a Voice—or heard the homeopath’s speech as such.

  But why did the new Balthasar, Balthasar the homeopath, go to Russia? Was it because the northern country was wild, medicine not very developed, and it would be easier to win converts there than among Europeans, who were ossified in old medical superstitions?

  What was the role of the three titans, Richter, Loder, and Hufeland, and the Big Family? How could they benefit from the unexpected impulse of the young doctor, how could they direct and control the paladin?

  The result of Balthasar’s travels Kirill knew, but not the true, inner source. Kirill set out to visit the five cities where Balthasar had lived with his father, before he became a homeopath and headed to the North. Leipzig, Grimma, Zerbst, Wittenburg, Halle—somewhere there his character was formed, the knot of his fate tied, and Kirill hoped to undo that knot, not in the state archives but on the streets where Balthasar walked, in his buildings and churches, amid his rivers and hills, by the things of life that create the forces of destiny, its attraction and repulsion, its secret calls, whispers, night phantoms, and starry blueprints.

  ***

  Kirill spent several days walking around Leipzig. But the city did not want to tell him anything. Jaws open wide, three-toed paws extended, blind eyes bulging, the patina-green chimeras looked at him from the church cornices on the corner near his hotel; they were the embodiment of the monstrous power of oblivion, for their jaws seemed to emit the meaningless, convulsive roar of a creature that did not know why and for what it was born.

  Limestone griffins with ram horns, dog tails, and wings folded on their backs supported balconies and were squashed by the weight of the stone; round-eyed demons with bird claws and lion manes immured in medallions over the arches of doorways strained to escape and were ossified by their fury—the city looked at him with dozens of hellish eyes, as if demonic forces had been mixed by stone masons into the cement and were now creeping out of all the crevices, blending into a mocking devil’s mask with a long tongue, sophisticated in the art of lying.

  Kirill was ready to leave. There was only one place left that he had not visited—the monument to the Battle of the Nations. Not looking forward to the crowds of tourists, but reminding himself that the Lake of Tears on the Mamayev Mound in Volgograd had been copied by the sculptor Evgeny Vuchetich from the Leipzig monument, he traveled to the memorial site in the morning. It was pouring rain, the wind turned his umbrella inside out; there was no line at the ticket counter.

  He went up to the observation deck. The rain stopped while he was ascending and the sky cleared over the tower. Leaning on the parapet, he looked at the low houses with tile roofs, the brick water tower, the television tower in the distance, in the grim fog. Gradually, looking deeper, he understood that he had chosen the right place; whatever the city had to tell him could only be seen from here, from above and at a remove.

  The Battle of the Nations ... 1813 ... Balthasar’s father, Thomas Benjamin, was almost shot by the French ... Suddenly Kirill’s vision changed, and he saw how the plain beneath looked after a decade of Napoleonic wars—burned houses, rivers poisoned by corpses, fertile fields trampled by troops. This plain was defenseless, open to the winds of war, all passing armies; the city was crucified on the crossroads of trade routes, doomed to be ravaged—over and over.

  This is what Balthasar grew up in, this is what he left, this was his childhood memory. Kirill had unconsciously placed his ancestor in today’s Germany, but in fact, Schwerdt had departed from the small kingdom of Saxony, a place devastated by war: from a smaller, fractured world into a larger one, stable and secure.

  “Seemingly stable and secure,” Kirill automatically corrected himself.

  The vision vanished. He was standing on the square top of a granite tower. The rain had returned, and the view was enveloped by drizzle.

  He was back in the center of town by noon. The day seemed replete with what he had found. He sloped aimlessly around town, thought about calling his father but did not want to share his discovery for fear the line of revelations would break. Leipzig still had not told him everything; there was a detail, small but important.

  Where to find it? Would it be found? Kirill decided to go where he had had no intention of going: the museum of city history. Just that morning he thought that the museum would tell him nothing because the museum holds only what the city wants to show, but now he thought he was being tested—would he be able to overcome his prejudice?

  A teddy bear with a Nazi armband. Mannequins dressed up as East German police in helmets with plastic face shields. A Soviet poster: “We Won.” An antique desk of lacquered oak—on the polished lid the drawing of the tree’s growth was executed with same unconscious power as the movement of God’s hand in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. An oversize fly swatter made of rough stitched tarpaulin, to put out fires spreading from firebombs.

  Kirill wandered the halls of the museum, not focusing on any particular era. He waited for a secret inhabitant of some object, a wooden casket
or a cuckoo clock, to peek out and check that the guards were gone, and jump down and head over to visit a neighbor in a nearby exhibit, say, a coal boy wearing an old fire helmet with brass wings. Of course, Kirill was only using the image to sharpen his focus, even though he enjoyed imagining how official portraits of old people exchanged winks or how a porcelain service that survived the bombing cried piteously over its cracks. He expected objects, seemingly condemned to physical roles and to the muteness of the obvious—here is an oil lamp, here is a printing press—to yield a glimmer that overcame the inertia of matter, and allowed them to bear witness beyond themselves.

  Red trousers. A man in a picture had red trousers. In the background, a crowd, behind it the Old Town Hall, the very one that now housed the museum in which Kirill was standing and looking at the painting.

  Red trousers—there was something so incongruous about them that Kirill stopped.

  “Influenced by the July Revolution in Paris, demonstrations also took place in Leipzig in September 1830. Furious citizens wrecked the apartment of a high-ranking police official.”

  September 1830.

  A bloody echo of the French Revolution. Citizens with swords, soldiers with rifles. A matron hurries her children away. A dog runs underfoot. Burghers have crossed swords holding them aloft—a vow? A child with a toy saber does not want to leave. A woman with blue ribbons gives him a reproachful look.

  A month later Balthasar Schwerdt would leave Leipzig for Russia.

  The boy with the toy saber does not want to leave.

  Schwerdt would leave.

  “What was it?” Kirill wondered. “The last straw? The last argument for leaving? No. The decision was made long before. The agitation on the town square was merely a sign that he had made the right decision. A sign that made Balthasar feel better. He set off on his journey unburdened by doubts.