The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  “Red trousers,” Kirill laughed, “red trousers.”

  Leaving the merry and dangerous red trousers to head to colder climes, to Nicholas’s Russia, where the emperor prescribed food according to status and rank; had power over the dress of his subjects, where no one could wear freethinking red trousers; to the frigid, eternal authority, to the north with its lifeless lights. He thought of Tutchev’s poem addressed to the Decembrists:

  There won’t be enough of your blood

  To warm the eternal pole!

  No sooner did it flash, steaming,

  On the age-old hulk of ice,

  Than iron winter breathed—

  And not a trace was left.

  Tutchev wrote the poem in Munich in 1827, two years after the rebellion. It was unlikely that young Balthasar read it, but he could look at the northern kingdom from a similar German perspective: as a frozen regime protected by the aristocracy from the lower element splashing out onto the public squares, from the ferocity of the mob that did not want to know higher truths, a regime that could use homeopathy as an instrument of enlightenment.

  The rebel’s red trousers, the ghost of the red rooster singing with fiery craving under dry roofs. Red trousers would be awarded to revolutionary commanders of the Red Army in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s red trousers would appear as a red rash on the canvases of Soviet painters of battle scenes, along with scarlet banners and red ribbons on hats. Red Trousers, tucked into soldiers’ boots, would come for Balthasar’s descendants, throw them out of estates and apartments, grabbing the wealth of the krauts, the damned Germans, the foreign bloodsuckers; and Balthasar had fled from red trousers to the Russian imperial throne, which had seemed to him, and to Tutchev, to be immutable.

  Kirill recalled the impact of a simple episode in the notes of the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue, who was himself recalling someone else’s words: that Nicholas II, who had abdicated, was being held under guard at Tsarskoe Selo and amused himself as the winter was coming to an end by shattering a pool of ice with a pickax. The guards mocked him and shouted at the former autocrat: what will you do when the ice melts?

  What will you do when the ice melts? Kirill never forgot that question, as a postscript to Tutchev’s certainty that the age-old hulk of ice, the foundation of the northern throne, would never melt. Now he thought those lines were a retrospective epigraph to Balthasar’s departure for Russia.

  Grimma, Wittenberg, Zerbst.

  Grimma, Zerbst, Wittenberg.

  Wittenberg, Grimma, Zerbst.

  Zerbst, Grimma, Wittenberg.

  Kirill shuffled the names of the cities, thinking about the order in which to visit them. He decided on the simplest way—following the biographies of Balthasar and his father, Thomas, and the changes in their lives.

  “Grimma, Zerbst, Wittenberg,” he said falling asleep, as if repeating a childhood spell, a magic counting game that would bring out the old domovoi, the spirit who lives in the cellar and knows everything about the previous residents of a house, its builders, and what used to be on this land, on this field, before the cornerstone was laid.

  ***

  He was the only one to leave the train at Grimma—or was that his imagination? The station was boarded up and covered with graffiti. There was a Soviet monument in the nearby park—pathetic, abandoned, the kind you see and can’t recall a minute later if it was a stele or a star.

  A monument to a Hussar regiment. A man with a swampy green face—you can sense the proximity of a river, the stone is mossy—has his hand on the withers of a horse, his greatcoat open, revealing his richly embroidered uniform festooned with braids; pigeon droppings on his temple resemble a scar; the characteristic outline of the Iron Cross on his chest.

  Why did Kirill care about this sculpture, that the Iron Cross hung on the chest of a hussar from World War I—and yet it hit him with a wave of alienation.

  He turned and went in the opposite direction. A school on a hill. Balthasar had studied in another one, this was newer, more bourgeois, more pompous.

  Towers, bay windows, Gothic trefoils, a marble Minerva Owl over the door. And suddenly, like recognizing an old friend in a crowd: a concrete bust of Rosa Luxembourg, familiar in the dreary manner of depiction, the abstraction of the face, which was supposed to express unlimited humanism and love for progressive humanity, but expressed nothing.

  Oddly, this made Kirill feel better. He could not imagine being born in this city, studying in this school, living in one of these houses that resembled sandcastles. Grimma not only had a unity of style, it had a solidity of style; he could not enter it, just as he would not have been able to plunge into the saltheavy water of the Dead Sea. Everything here was too real—the window frames of pink sandstone, the bronze weathervanes and guild signs, ornaments with white dancing griffins and idyllic maidens.

  Born under a red star, hammer and sickle, and made—in the way a resident picks up the building’s defects—of crumbling concrete, faulty, cracking bricks, damp spackling that has lost its adhesive nature, Kirill sensed that his lack of pedigree bestowed freedom. He felt that he understood one of the sources of Balthasar Schwerdt’s destiny: the desire to break into the easy world, where your life is not determined by your ancestors, their bulky houses full of wealth, their emblems and coats of arms, the very materiality of their lives—oak, gold, silk—as high quality as heavy.

  “Goodbye,” Kirill said, kissing Rosa Luxembourg’s concrete cheek.

  He walked past the city archive. He wanted to look in but changed his mind, saying, Next time, knowing there would be no next time.

  He imagined the archive as the quintessence of urban existence; the city lived to produce orderly posthumous documents on shelves, where the papers of good neighbors continued to reside side by side; where a son follows his father, the grandson his grandfather, and the yellowed wills of former lovers touch the way their balconies once touched, too closely.

  The archive seemed defenseless in the face of his intrusion, like furniture in a house with new owners. Besides, he had more faith in his own ability to understand someone else’s fate, its spirit, than in archival information.

  Down the street, toward the expansive town hall with a gold clock and the date of 1515. How many minutes had passed in five centuries, yet the town hall still had a tavern in the cellar, and a golden lion recumbent beneath the blue vault of the arch across the street still looked at the clock.

  Down, down, toward the old granite bridge. A factory would be to the right, and beyond it, the secondary school where Thomas, Balthasar’s father, had taught, and where the boy had studied.

  Kirill crossed the river for a view of the school from afar—so large was the building.

  The school looked into the emptiness of the opposite bank. Cut off by the river, it opened up to the eye entirely: three stories with thirty windows on each floor. How long could the corridors be, thought Kirill; the school was bigger than the city, bigger than the narrow river valley, taller than the granite cliffs.

  The façade, lined by white cornices, was a lesson in drafting geometry. The bank opposite bristled with steep stones; rough cliffs were festooned with moss. The school looked out like an ancient battleship with a threatening cannon at the chaotic forms of nature, saying every substance would be counted, all matter would be told its place. The gymnasium school, like the enormous Ark, had everything—except the secret of the universe; its universe was limited, comprehensible.

  Kirill imagined how young Balthasar had chafed at the school, how he wanted those windows and those corridors to hold no power over him.

  Kirill walked several kilometers along the river, upstream, past the weir and the hanging bridge. He thought about the gymnasium, its grim majesty, the severe brick building stretching along the bank like the local paper factories. He thought about how a man truly could flee to the end of the world to get away from this factory of biographies, that then settled as fragile papers in the archives. The archives, with its flaki
ng tower and weathervane, the only moving thing in the city—that and the river.

  But why Russia? The school must have had an enormous globe on a bronze stand: pick any continent, any country. Kirill knew the answer. It was waiting for him in the next town, in Zerbst. He walked back across the rose sandstone bridge, past blue, green, and violet Easter eggs in the shop windows, the gray concrete wall behind which the city hid from floods, through the heavy steel gates, past watermarks from different years on the corner of a ruined building, a graph of catastrophes that had become habit—to the red train that would take him back to Leipzig.

  ***

  He knew Zerbst better than the other cities on his list—naturally, thanks to Catherine the Great, Sophia Frederika Augusta Anhalt-Zerbst.

  Even though she had lived in Stettin, where her father served the Prussian king, and not in Zerbst, her marriage to the heir to the Russian throne in 1744 and her coronation in 1762 connected the courts of the Zerbst principality and the Russian Empire with dozens, hundreds of various threads.

  Surely, thought Kirill, some of the grandees of the small principality had visited St. Petersburg, been blinded by the splendor of the empire (as had the empress herself at one time, before she became empress), enjoyed the ruler’s favor, and brought back stories about the mighty northern state, the enlightened monarch who listened to the counsel of wise men and corresponded with the most outstanding minds of Europe.

  Kirill arrived in Zerbst around noon. The streets were deserted, and the houses seemed to have shutters tightly closed, curtains drawn, shades lowered.

  Right, then left, along Pushkin Promenade, to the old castle. Kirill was always uncomfortable in Germany with all those street names—Gagarin Allée, Pushkin Promenade, and Lermontov Strasse—that had replaced the original German names. But here, on the way to Catherine’s family home, Pushkin Promenade was appropriate. “Foreign writers showered Catherine with praise,” Pushkin had written. “Quite naturally: they knew her only through her correspondence with Voltaire and the stories of those she allowed to travel.”

  Stories, stories, stories. Kirill passed the tower on the marketplace, turned into the palace park to the small and restored palace and the large one left in ruins, and the new statue of Catherine.

  The deceitful bronze vestal in a dress embroidered with innocent flowers, inadvertently extending her hand toward the imperial scepter and crown on the pedestal. “The nice old lady lived pleasantly and slightly sinfully,” Kirill muttered, pleased to have Pushkin’s ironic line.

  Catherine had died two hundred fifty years ago. Apparently, the oath breaker and husband killer still elicited illusions among enlightened Europeans—or, her figure lent significance to the place, turning it from a backwater to the birthplace of a great empress.

  Kirill imagined the Germans and Russians fawning and flattering, how the burgomaster and officials delivered insipid speeches—nonsense about “cultural bridges” and “ages of unity”—how infirm nobles, representatives of societies of friendship and memory, drank champagne while watching reflections of fireworks in the palace pond. He googled and found that even the organizers of the memorial society for Peter III in Kiel came for the festivities; a fine story, he thought, when the murdered man’s executors come to honor the killer; Catherine would have laughed heartily!

  But, despite his sorrowful disdain, Kirill sensed that he was on the right track. All this posthumous bustle, the division of the dividends of glory two and a half centuries later, showed how great the cult of the empress had been in the days of Balthasar and his father.

  Kirill looked at the ruined Grand Palace, light gaping through the missing windows of the top floor, at the blackened statues on the gable, and tried to imagine how Balthasar had seen those windows. His father delivered babies in this palace, had entrée to the court where there were conversations about German careers in Russia, governors and generals, scientists accepted into the Academy of Sciences; about Pallas, who had studied nearby in Halle and was now on an expedition in the East, to uninhabited places promising discoveries in all areas of knowledge; about Euler, who was given a house in the capital by the empress; about others, celebrated and unknown, who rushed to Russia to benefit from its wildness, vastness, to encounter wonders that if in fact still existed would be found only in that still unexplored country.

  In the fourteenth year of the new, nineteenth, century, Nicholas, grandson of Catherine and brother of Alexander, who vanquished Napoleon, came to Germany. Soon after, Nicholas and Charlotte, Frederick’s daughter, were married; she converted to Orthodoxy and became Alexandra Fedorovna. Russia married Prussia; this was examined and re-examined in Zerbst, where a different family ruled, not related by blood to the late empress but remembering the golden, pearl, and emerald mirages from the East.

  Kirill reached the gymnasium where Balthasar had studied. The tall and narrow Gothic windows made it look like a church, and the lower rows of stones, rough cobbles, seemed to grow out of the ground, taking on honed, polished forms the higher they went. To the right a tower peeked over the city wall. The façade turned to the city retained traces of how the building had grown, tripling in size. Another façade had windows: narrow, monastic ones below and a very large one with stained glass and a Gothic quatrefoil over it. Kirill recognized the quatrefoil, he had seen it on headstones at the German Cemetery—so this is where those signs were born that ornamented gravestones in the faraway northern country.

  Balthasar had been a pupil at this school, which had not changed since the Middle Ages. A pupil who took not only the lessons seriously but also the school’s spirit, grim, stubbornly monastic, striving for higher mysteries hidden in matter and the mystical revelations of the heavens—the vanishing spirit of an age when people believed in the existence of the Holy Grail, krakens, and witches, when alchemists sought the philosopher’s stone, and magicians tried to catch a salamander or find the mandragora that bestowed immortality.

  Of course, when Balthasar was at the gymnasium, the lectures were completely different; the clear light of new science chased away the shadows of the old mystical knowledge. But it lived on in the very ribs of the walls, the candle-sooted vaults, the foundation stones and the shape of the wizard’s tower, the shelter for wise men above the earth. Arriving here after Grimma, a school of the new times, Balthasar took the first step toward his future transformation into a homeopath, a step toward the ability to combine knowledge and ecstatic faith.

  But what was the source of Balthasar’s strength for transformation? What inculcated the apostolic power and turned homeopathy into messianic passion? Zerbst did not have the answers. Tomorrow Kirill would follow them to Wittenberg, where the Schwerdts had moved from Zerbst.

  ***

  “Lutherstadt Wittenberg,” announced the sign at the station.

  Kirill had the impression that in every German city he had visited, Luther had lived, preached, or studied, a fact that was mentioned in guidebooks and on memorial plaques; in the USSR every building where Lenin had stopped was similarly marked, and the familiar pathos repulsed him.

  He had read Luther’s theses, by coincidence right after reading three volumes of Lenin’s collected works, the articles written in 1916–1917. He was taken by the similarity of two powerful but narrow minds and the style of their rhetorical constructions; Luther’s rebellion against spiritual capitalism, the use of indulgences, and Lenin’s rebellion against material capitalism. He had thought about writing an article on Lutheranism in Russian socialism, but as often happened, he was too lazy to go beyond the hypothesis.

  As if driven by a persistent pop melody, he wandered around the city. Luther peered out from beer bottles and café windows. Luther was a refrigerator magnet. A florist sold “Luther” gladiolus bulbs. Farmers offered Luther-tomaten in the main square, and the fiery reformer looked down sadly from his picture on the price list at the tiny tomatoes selling for eight euros a kilo. Luther is more alive than all the living, Kirill said to himself. He was ja
mmed into the narrow little streets, where everyone knew you were another tourist visiting the city because it was Lutherstadt Wittenberg.

  Hemmed in by the immense cathedral—no longer a place of God but the place of Luther—Kirill left the old city, walking along the river into the emptiness of the fields. It was noon, the sun shone almost straight down, and the trees seemed to grow out of the edge of their own shadows. After a kilometer or two, watching only the river flowing between huge slopes, the swaying of red and green buoys, he forgot about Luther and Wittenberg.

  The image he had noted excited him: the tree growing out of the edge of its shadow, as if the shadow were its root. He saw that the tree was Balthasar and the shadow, Luther; one was not possible without the other.

  Kirill saw the young man so clearly, living in Luther’s city, a city where Giordano Bruno had studied. In the small town by a river, where the transformation into a prophet occurred and a new epoch began; where word and faith turned the world upside down.

  What had turned into the dross of culture in Kirill’s day, into refrigerator magnets and tacky souvenirs, had still been alive as a triumph of the spirit in Balthasar’s. Then the memory, transmitted from generation to generation, still lingered of wars over faith, the victory over Tilly and Wallenstein; missionaries were still traveling to primitive places, and the New World was arising across the ocean, the continent of Protestant faith, crowned by an evangelical city on a mountaintop.

  Balthasar—it’s not clear how deep his faith in God was or the nature of his faith—could read that very fact that he was in Wittenberg as a providential sign. He was seduced by spiritual temptation. He was chosen, like Luther, chosen to become a homeopath, an apostle of the new medical truth.

  Standing on the bank of the silent river, listening to the wind in the fields, the rustle of dry, obedient grass, Kirill sensed for the first time—tangentially, an echo—the scale and strength of the temptation that made Balthasar go to Russia. He sensed it as something unimaginable, impossible for a modern man, who would call it foolhardiness, self-deception, naiveté, while for Balthasar it was passion.