Kirill thought about the varieties of human passions that propel history. That there was a special sort among them: not the dark passions of tyrants, traitors, executioners—and not the radiant passions of saints, fighters for truth, defenders of the oppressed.
The special sort of passions were the ones born of illusion. Balthasar, heading off to convert Russia to a new medical faith, expected to find the unenlightened and savage, that is, non-existence, no identity. He would be received at court, he would pronounce the true word (with the help of or through the mouth of the monarch)—and everything would be transformed in an instant.
But the supposed non-existence gave a counterresponse to Balthasar. He thought the Russians would change, become his flock—but the soil reflected his intentions in a crooked mirror, and it was he who changed, who became its hostage.
Kirill saw, as if himself witnessing scenes from Greek myths, how false dreams and deceitful illusions fell on fertile ground and created new creatures—vicious chimeras that gave rise to fate as dragon teeth planted in the furrows of a field spawn sinister warriors.
Fate. Kirill sensed a new meaning of the word. He felt that Balthasar’s essentially cruel apostolic dream, which arose not from God’s will but from the power of temptation, the seductive images of prophets of the past, the dream of conquering and transforming a barbaric country, had elicited an equally powerful response from the place, which did not reject Balthasar’s dream but conquered him, made him part of its destiny.
The family fate, like a monstrous child of the marriages of heroes or gods with mysterious powers that gave rise to the Cyclops, Argus, Typhon, and others, came into the world out of those attempts to fertilize an apparent emptiness, a seemingly innocent womb.
Fate. An illusory monster to whom Balthasar unwittingly fed his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. Fate that had historically appeared in images of a multiheaded German Hydra, encircling Russia, drinking its pure national blood, stealing its capital; in images of the fascist Hydra, sending in spies to penetrate the Soviet Land, poison wells, suss out the black hearts of traitors, and weave nets of treachery and lies.
Fate.
Standing at the entrance of the old university building and looking at the bas-relief over the gates—a plump infant playing and holding a skull while an hourglass counted the minutes over his head—Kirill thought: wasn’t he like that infant, insouciantly playing with the bones of the dead while a clock counted out the time allotted him? Was his attempt to restore the past a dangerous chimera?
Just work, Kirill told himself. Write the book. You’re not trapped, the whole world is open to you. Unlike your ancestors, you can always leave, change countries, switch your life, your biography. You are not in the identity trap. There won’t be any tragedies.
He turned around and went to the train station.
***
Back in Moscow, Kirill headed for the German Cemetery and Balthasar’s grave with a new feeling he couldn’t recognize. Now he was the only one in the world who possessed the secret of the zealous apostle’s heart. Kirill thought that he had violated the peace of the grave, broken the seals; Balthasar had wanted to take certain things with him to the grave and had not told them even to his children, yet Kirill had learned his secret.
The plane took three hours to cover the distance it took Balthasar three weeks to travel. He had come to Russia with his younger brother, Andreas.
Balthasar started a correspondence while still in Germany with old Prince Uryatinsky—probably someone from the Zerbst court connected the young doctor with the high official. Kirill assumed that in Balthasar’s plan Uryatinsky was the first step leading to the throne; the young ambitious prophet hoped to be presented soon to the emperor so that he could astound the sovereign with the marvels of homeopathy and lay the foundations for the empire’s homeopathic baptism.
Old Loder had been waiting for Balthasar in Moscow. Christian Ivanovich corresponded with Tsar Nicholas I, the younger brother of his former patient Tsar Alexander. Balthasar had probably wanted to set up a homeopathic hospital on Uraytinsky’s estate, present the fruits of his work there first to the prince and to Loder, and then, with their intercession, to the tsar.
In his letters, Balthasar, like a clever salesman, hinted that a remedy was found in Germany that might bring eternal youth, and homeopathy was already healing ailments that did not respond to the bloody, butcher-like practice of allopathy. Apparently, Balthasar did not want to explain the essence of the homeopathic method, figuring that the aging aristocrat would be more easily tempted by the glitter of fake beads.
Perhaps Loder, who had lived in Russia for a long time, would have warned Balthasar about Uryatinsky, perhaps he had done so in his letters; but Balthasar was unable to meet his father’s old mentor—there was a cholera epidemic in Moscow, and he was detained at the cordon sanitaire, not allowed into the city.
Loder died two years later.
Kirill visited Loder’s grave, also at the German Cemetery—where else could he have been buried? The old monument must have fallen apart, and it was replaced in the Soviet era, an ugly granite slab with LODER C. I.—as if part of some bureaucratic list of pensions or awards.
The graves of Loder and Balthasar were not far apart—the cemetery was much smaller in those days. Kirill thought about how many disasters could have been averted if only they had met, instead of being separated by the epidemic.
The paths of Balthasar and Andreas diverged at the cordon, and little was known about Andreas: whether he remained in Russia or went back to Germany. Kirill, enthralled with Balthasar, did not think about the younger brother, remembering only that according to the family tree, he died young leaving little trace.
Balthasar was forced to go to Uryatinsky’s estate; the cholera left him no choice.
In his diaries, Great-Grandfather Arseny, the military doctor, sometimes quoted Balthasar’s notes, left for posterity and lost or destroyed, probably, during the Civil War. He repeated Balthasar’s handwritten line, “For seven years I worked, living on the estate of my benefactor, Prince Uryatinsky.”
Arseny had paid attention to the obvious emptiness of those lines that encapsulated seven years in fourteen words. Or rather, great-grandfather simply did not know who in fact Prince Uryatinsky was: the grandee’s descendants expended a lot of effort to hush up the rumors about him, to clean up the heritage and family name, and to get back their career positions.
Kirill would have missed the name, too, would have considered the first seven years of Balthasar’s sojourn lost time, if not for the strange speed of the metamorphosis that followed: from apostle to ordinary man.
Within those seven years from 1830 to 1837 lay a mystery. Kirill went after it, for the history of the family came out of it; the mystery seemed to grow a twisted joint into the outline of each subsequent generation.
Kirill thought about the first time he visited Uryatinsky’s former estate. It had been nationalized after the revolution, some of the outbuildings were torn down. Then the estate suffered in the war: in 1941, the Soviets defended themselves behind the thick brick walls, and in 1943, it was the German infantry, and the attackers tried to knock down the walls with artillery. The estate was rebuilt as a sanatorium. In the nineties, the short-lived Soviet additions began falling apart. The abandoned park was so overgrown with invasive alders that it seemed trees grew not from seeds but raindrops. In the midst of that forest, anxious and gray, the remains of the estate buildings rose like boulders of alien matter tossed there by a titan.
Descended from Tatar emirs who switched to serving Russia after Kazan was taken—the family went back to Siberia, to the nomads who had served Genghis Khan—Prince Uryatinsky, a guards officer and brief favorite of Catherine the Great in her late years—the princess from Anhalt-Zerbst—was a zealous Germanophile in his youth. He built his estate—the land a gift from his royal mistress—in the style of a medieval German castle; he even had the ston
es transported a thousand versts from German lands so he could have granite, and not limestone.
And now, over two centuries later, in the midst of desolation and squalor, in the midst of thick undergrowth, huddled the remains of his handmade Germany. The guard tower at the gate was square, with rectangular crenellations. Another building, with a grotto in its foundation and an encircling staircase, was the Tower of Solitude, as Uryatinsky named it. Embrasures on the facades, simple capitals, oriel windows as graceful as a lady’s snuffbox placed on rough granite walls, ornamental gypsum vases and horns of plenty, sculptures of maidens and gods, of which only the lower half remained—a crazy mix of styles, everything that Uryatinsky seemed to have stolen from Germany, torn out of context like a marauder, combined according to his intuition and whimsy, and placed on swampy land fed by spring floods.
Even if Kirill had not known Uryatinsky’s fate, it would have been uncomfortable, creepy to be in the midst of the ruins of someone’s mad dream, among the remains of eccentricity of such scale that it ceased being eccentricity and took on the majesty of utopia. But Kirill did know Uryatinsky’s fate, of course, and so he had goose bumps. He imagined traps in the mounds of brick overgrown with grass, in the darkness of the cellar windows, in the holes of the collapsed roofs, in the grass. He imagined being trapped here forever, as Balthasar almost was.
Kirill had seen one of Uryatinsky’s letters to Balthasar in the medical archives, in which he discussed the conditions for the doctor’s service. He was amazed by the handwriting—Kirill would have called it the handwriting of a fencer—light, healthy-looking, expressing something wholesome and open in the author. The handwriting must have attracted Balthasar; he imagined an enlightened grandee, close to Catherine the Great; a great and wise old man—Uryatinsky was seventy when Balthasar arrived in Russia—a patron of sciences, the one who would be the first to bow to the radiance of Homeopathy.
Kirill would have believed the handwriting himself, if he had not known who Uryatkinsky was, child of the Golden Age of Catherine in the reign of Alexander and Nicholas I—a shard of a former era, sent into eternal disgrace for the affair that took place in the Mikhailovsky Castle in spring 1801, a wealthy man locked up in his estate, vanished from the eyes of the world, ruler of his swampy, faraway land.
Uryatinsky made his fortune off Germans.
He hired recruiters for settlers, people who encouraged families in Germany to move to the Russian Empire.
Experienced farmers and craftsmen were needed—saddlers, smiths, coopers, millers, winemakers, stonemasons, and others. Uryatinsky’s recruiters brought in the poor, the feeble and aged, and the hopelessly ill. And they robbed them, paying them a tiny fraction of what had been promised. Uryatinsky had his people in the guardianship offices in charge of foreign settlers, in the government chancellery, and the millions budgeted every year for travel expenses, food, and housing for the new settlers went to him—the aid meant for colonies of immigrants.
Catherine’s senior favorites grew rich on military orders, on the navy, factories, timber, and grain. The junior Uryatinsky, inconspicuous, with no decisive influence, dipped his hand in the treasury from the other side: probably every German settler in the Russian Empire brought him income. Over the decades, he accumulated a fortune.
Uryatinsky had his agents in the German royal courts. He sent expensive gifts.
He also brought in various things to amuse the court and the empress, who was jaded by so much entertainment, demanding new diversions every day. Uryatinsky’s people were not above manipulating children, maiming them, so they’d grow up to be dwarves or hunchbacks; he imported Arabs and wild savages from foreign lands, magicians, sword swallowers, fire eaters, fortunetellers, musicians, prognosticators, astrologists, actors, chess masters, healers, architects, tutors, chefs, priestesses of love, jesters, dwarves and giants, freaks of all sorts, six-fingered men, bearded women, children with rudimentary tails, hermaphrodites. But most of sly Uryatinsky’s money was made on ordinary Germans—kopeck by kopeck, ruble by ruble; he robbed them when they arrived, trapped them in debt, and placed cunning bribe-takers in the colonial offices.
Alexander, when he declared Uryatinsky in disgrace, did not deprive him of his wealth. That was when a German castle arose in the forest, for Uryatinsky had become obsessed with Germans and felt—and apparently Alexander took this as a sign of impending madness—that the whole population of Russia ought to be replaced by Germans. As a teenager, Uryatinsky had lived through the Pugachev siege of Kazan, he saw the wild army of rebels—a mix of Cossacks, peasants, and Bashkirs. That is probably why he retained a lifelong fear of popular movements, and strengthened the banks of the Volga with Germans, like introducing plants with roots that could hold the soil filled with rebellion—without forgetting about his pocket.
Uryatinsky never dealt with his recruiters directly, his name was never mentioned in colonial affairs. There were times when he executed Catherine’s diplomatic assignments, and so in Europe he was known as a grandee from an enlightened monarch, one who controlled an enormous empire.
After his fall from grace in 1801, Uryatinsky did not travel anymore to Germany, in fact did not leave his estate. For three decades he sat in his retreat, like the fat stub of a heavy candle. Even the French in 1812 did not reach the estate, not a single cavalry patrol. Having outlived his enemies and friends, and remaining spiritually and mentally in the eighteenth century—not having the seen the nineteenth, hidden away in his forest—Uryatinsky turned the estate into a simulacrum of the empress’s court, as he remembered it. This was where trade in living goods came in handy.
In a secret drawer of his desk, the prince kept the gifts of Catherine’s brief benevolence—an emerald ring and a diamond-encrusted snuffbox. Uryatinsky gradually forgot that the benevolence had been fleeting, came to remember himself as being favored longer than others, and eventually, as being favored alone.
He filled his gloomy castle with dwarves and freaks and installed a serf troupe of acrobats. In his seclusion, in the forest, his Tatar blood spoke. He procured mares so as to have mare’s milk—part of some cure—called in shamans and sorcerers—pretenders, in fact, who claimed to be from the depths of Siberia. The old man was ailing, his potency was gone, and messengers of the old voluptuary galloped down distant roads and European tracts seeking out rare roots and mixtures that could return the desire of the flesh. At his “court,” treatments were offered by old women, herbalists, defrocked monks, and self-styled healers—and he would not let anyone leave. He blocked the roads.
Uryatinsky forgot his Germanness, it came off like polish. The prince lived like a khan, rubbing himself with stinking badger fur, drinking a magical decoction of cemetery herbs, and listening to the mutterings of the stargazer who flattered him and foretold the removal of the disgrace upon him. Then he had the stargazer punished, for flattery, ordering him to be left naked in the swamp as dinner for midges and mosquitoes.
The idea of eternal life, power over body and decrepitude, settled in Uryatinsky’s mind, gnawed at him on stormy nights, in the heat of stoked stoves, in the belly of greasy furs. Uryatinsky rejected the diligence of youth, the acquired German respect for gold; others sought alchemists to turn lead into precious metal, but he, on the contrary, wanted to turn gold into a new substance, something more precious than earthly materiality, into a medicine that returned youth. He gave an outbuilding to some crooks, tramps who had allegedly been kicked out of universities by rigid professors, and paid them generously, eagerly listening to their fairy tales about original elements, fiery salamanders, and spirits of the earth.
Imagine the effect of Balthasar’s unexpected letter. He wrote of “eternal life” and “overcoming matter” in the idealistic sense, wishing to delineate the boundaries, the horizons of homeopathy. But Uryatinsky read the letter literally. He latched on to Balthasar—hence the generous invitation, the readiness to expend whatever necessary, to give the doctor a hospital. Uryatinsky seemed to be getting
words from the past, a direct indication from the Almighty on the path to take—and he believed in the German homeopath, not at all the way Balthasar had expected, but with a mad, dark faith. If Balthasar had demanded live sacrifices, Uryatinsky would have put his serfs under the knife without a second thought.
An apostle had appeared, a true apostle among a thousand false ones that he himself had brought from the German kingdoms and principalities. To him, who had appropriated the German spirit, who had spent so many years sifting sand in search of diamonds! Of course, Uryatinsky did not chase away his witches and sorcerers, for they—impotent and fake—nevertheless constituted his entourage, a platoon of lower creatures, like kobolds, who should tremble and fall to the ground encountering the arrival of the new Faust.
Balthasar, naive Balthasar, read Uryatinsky’s letter, written in the clear hand of a man of the sword, as a confirmation of his own thoughts, a sign of the realness of his dreams. He went to the marvelous prince.
Kirill, standing amid the ruins, pictured Balthasar’s arrival. And what he suffered over seven years of incarceration here.
Gray alders, swamp trees, loved the rust of water. Unyielding bricks that still remembered the flame of the firing kiln: “For seven years I worked, living on the estate of my benefactor, Prince Uryatinsky.”
His benefactor.
Kirill did not understand at first why Balthasar had compressed seven years of life into two lines and never wrote or told anything more; he maintained the secret as if it were the secret of the confessional.
Kirill had found what was possible about Balthasar’s life at Uryatinsky’s estate: the prince’s sponger, archivist and librarian, left extremely curious notes. His heirs bought them for a major sum and the memoirs were brought to Europe, where they lay in émigré archives; a young researcher prepared them for publication and thus led Kirill to them.
The Goose Fritz Page 10