The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  He remained alone, beyond the network of the Big Family, the clan.

  Alone.

  ***

  Balthasar had seven daughters: Anna-Sophia, Charlotte, Fredericka, Agnes, Gertrude, Ulrika, and Paulina—and one son, Andreas. The last child, a late child, the long-awaited boy.

  Kirill regarded the family portrait. The eldest, Anna-Sophia, was already married, Andreas—still an infant. He slept in a cradle at the knee of father and mother in the center of the photograph; he was there, though not really present, not there for history and its Cyclopean eye, selecting victims. Kirill shuddered at the photo’s predetermination: the child in the cradle was the only who would live to see the revolution of 1917. Kirill could explain it with rational reasons, the average lifespan and so on, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the shutter had functioned like a guillotine blade.

  Kirill looked at the genealogical tree branching with dozens of lives. Eight children. Nothing unusual for those days. But it seemed to him that the apostle Balthasar had spent himself on children, had become a graphomaniac of fate, had poured out his gift, intended for miracles and exploits, as semen into the womb of his uncomplaining wife, striving to expand, to capture dark expanses; but he could only reproduce himself, hoping that there would be one among the copies of destiny that would have a spark and revive the apostolic dream.

  But there were only daughters, women who would join their husbands’ families, transmuted into a new line of existence. Nor could Balthasar, a man of his age, believe that a woman could realize his apostolic fervor; the faces, figures, and images of the daughters revealed his growing disillusionment in his ability to engender a true heir.

  From stately Anna-Sophia, a maiden with a cold face and regal demeanor, a blond princess, to the mousy Paulina, who looked like a servant girl the master and mistress invited into the parlor out of the goodness of their hearts. Anna-Sophia’s dress does not follow her figure but an internal outline of aloof dignity, as if the fabric could feel the emanations of aristocracy; Paulina’s dress, made by the same dressmaker, merely covers her body. Andreas sleeps in the cradle, a delicate child, fortune’s darling, a random spark that flickered over the fire.

  Anna-Sophia became a governess in a wealthy landowning family and married the older son and heir; she converted to Orthodoxy and became Anna Preobrazhenskaya, mistress of a mansion with a winter garden, and died in 1914, learning that her grandson, son of her only daughter, had died in his first battle near Gumbinen.

  Charlotte, who married a physician sent in 1875 to the Khanate of Kokand, to the ruler Khudoyar Khan, an ally of the Empire, died with him on the journey at the hands of rebels.

  Fredericka, his favorite daughter, was most like a boy in character—and perhaps Balthasar had expected things from her. She must have felt the weight of her father’s expectations, chose the most unremarkable life for herself, marrying a music teacher, a Pole, and moving to Warsaw with him; contact with her ended in 1915 when German troops entered the city.

  Agnes, who became Agniya in the Orthodox Church, chose an ambitious husband, an official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and died with him when Socialist Revolutionary assassins threw a bomb at the wrong carriage—the official had bought one just like the one owned by a colonel of the gendarmes reviled for his cruelty in suppressing the revolution in 1905; they were neighbors and the envious counselor wanted the same luxury.

  Gertrude was a loss. Judging by Balthasar’s descriptions, she had early cancer, he did not diagnose it in time, he tried every method he knew and then returned to homeopathy—dusting off the old altar, burning incense for a rejected god—but in vain; neither the mixtures made by allopathic doctors nor the remedies of homeopathy could return life to the dying girl. Balthasar demeaned himself—perhaps he had recalled the Uryatinsky estate and the mix of healers gathered there—and called in a famous old woman who knew how to pray before icons and heal the soul of the sick, but even she was powerless; either she mocked the haughty German doctor who had disdained her before or she told him the truth—the candle was flickering and there was no saving that soul.

  Ulrika was the wife of two husbands, a fugitive, a subject of two sovereigns. Had she been born a few decades later, she would have been an emancipated lady, but in those days she exhausted herself fighting conventions, battled for a divorce, exciting men’s strife, which became woven into the tapestry of world conflagrations right up to the slaughterhouse known as the Battle of Jutland, where the battle cruiser Seydlitz of the Imperial German Navy, on which her son from her first marriage was an artilleryman, sank the Queen Mary of the British Navy, on which her son from her second marriage died.

  Paulina—Pavla in Orthodoxy—was the quiet daughter, a tiny woman who never knew adulthood and never separated from her parents, her family. She was the sister of all the sisters, the connecting link, for icy Anna-Sophia and mannered Agnes and Ulrika, who avoided them all; she was the spirit of sisterhood, the pin holding the hair of her older sisters, the thin silver clasp on a necklace of heavy agate beads. Silver lock, silver ring, wife of a priest from Ryazan—Anna-Sophia arranged the marriage, happily condescending to her sister—and she put up with her brutal husband, the beatings, but when he joined the far-right nationalist Union of the Russian People, she performed a delicate suicide, going on a boat ride on the Oka River, where her boat was flipped over by a wave from a passing steamer. Pavla did not know how to swim, and drowned, leaving no children. She was barren, which is why her husband beat her, and she died in the watery element that would take Ulrika’s sons as well as Ulrika, who had purchased a ticket on the Lusitania for her voyage back from New York.

  The only boy, Andreas: named in honor of Balthasar’s brother, eaten by cannibals; brought as an exculpatory gift for Andreas the Marinated Midshipman; given to pay back fate. But fate did not accept the sacrifice; Balthasar’s intention was too obvious and simple: substitute one life for another, dedicate his son to his brother’s memory.

  Balthasar feared that the boy would die in infancy. He imagined danger everywhere—in the shallows of the river, in low railings, in narrow alleys from which a carriage could come barreling out. But Andreas grew clear and straight, without the desire common to so many children to test the borders of life, to understand what is death.

  He studied easily and surpassed his peers. He could count very well, his penmanship was diligent, and he had a talent for drawing—a lady living at the Widows’ Home, who had studied painting with an Italian teacher in her youth, taught Andreas oil and watercolor; but he was even better at draftsmanship, for abstract figures animated his mind more than concrete objects. In fact, he was animated and excited by objects born of engineering genius: fortresses, dams, sluices, bastions, aqueducts, and especially railroad and bridges.

  As if he sensed his “in-between” position, being German by blood and Russian by birth, Andreas loved railroads, the state they produced of being in transit, of not belonging to a specific place.

  Not far from the Widows’ Home lay the Moskva River. He spent entire days on its banks as an adolescent, watching the construction of the Borodino Bridge. Before there was only a wooden crossing subject to high tides, a crossing used by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1812. Now a bridge was being erected, named for the great battle that marked the bloody confrontation between East and West. It was being built by Russian Germans, the railroad engineer Ivan Rerberg and the colonel-engineer Amand Struve, the future master of bridges who conquered the Oka, Dnepr, and Neva rivers, the creator of the Liteiny and Palace bridges in the capital, in St. Petersburg, the future owner of the Kolomna Locomotive Works that made the best Russian steam engines.

  It was not known whether Balthasar Schwerdt had known Rerberg and Struve, and whether he could have introduced his son to them. On the one hand, the doctor of the Widows’ Home was too insignificant to have connections to such great men. On the other hand, Anna-Sophia had married, entered high society, and even though she was not on equal footing
with her new family, which did not care much for poor relations, she could have introduced her father or brother to the famous builders.

  In any case, Andreas walked from the Widows’ Home—this was in his notes—along the grassy banks, past vegetable gardens, grazing goats and cows, suburban cottages and houses, to the Dorogomilovsky Ford, where stone buttresses covered in scaffolding rose from the river floor and riveted metal trusses reached out toward each other in musical curvatures from the banks, opening a new road from the West, unlocking the river defense of Moscow; he walked and watched how quickly—in the course of a year—the bridge was built, embodying, materializing someone else’s engineering thought.

  Kirill, thinking about Andreas, walked along the same places, by the new Borodino Bridge. The family’s fate converged there. In the nineteenth century, Andreas walked along the rolling hills. Just under a hundred years later, Kirill’s grandmother and mother, back from evacuation near Engels, had moved into a house on the opposite bank.

  His mother had told him about the evacuation: the train traveled for a month and the food they had brought with them had run out. You couldn’t even get boiling water at the stations. They arrived and were taken to a kolkhoz. Later the only thing she remembered was a brick cellar where the smell of smoked meat was so strong you could cut it with a knife and eat it; there were cramped rows of hanging hams and sausages—the spirit of gluttony seemed to run through them, forcing the sausages to bend into rings and the hams to ooze aromatic juices. His mother had never seen so much meat. She fainted.

  She had not been told where they were or why there were supplies here. She decided that the children and their mothers had been brought to Communism, the long-awaited Land of Abundance, which she had seen depicted in paintings and frescoes in the Moscow Metro.

  Communism did exist, she decided. It was hidden for now, it wasn’t for everyone yet, only the little ones. The Germans were attacking, and the children were hidden in Communism, revealed before its time, half-ready, not strong enough to fit in everyone.

  She did not wonder who had prepared the marvelous food. Who had lived in the empty houses where they were brought. She thought that was how it should be: servants, builders created the oasis of Communism and went off to build the next one.

  Many years later, she was sent to Engels on business. She decided to find the place they had lived when evacuated there. She learned that in August 1941 the Volga Germans had been exiled to Kazakhstan, given twenty-four hours, allowed only one bag each. So the Russian evacuees were moved into houses where the stoves were still warm.

  The German hams saved Grandmother and Mother from starvation. When they returned to Moscow, other people had been registered to live in their room in the communal flat. So they huddled in the barracks near the train station. Nearby, at the Borodino Bridge, German prisoners of war were building a new structure. The prisoners worked so quickly and neatly that no one could believe they were real Germans. The propaganda taught that Germans were only capable of death, destruction, and devastation. These men were building as if they were going to live there, as if there were no war and death but only masonry, mortar, trowel, plumb line, and bricks.

  They were given a room in that building. Kirill’s mother wept, not wanting to leave the barracks: she couldn’t understand how people could live in a house built by the fascists. She became accustomed to it, eventually was proud of their new place: as if the house were special, better, even slightly magical.

  ***

  The new Borodino Bridge extended to the Stalinist skyscraper that housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a stone cliff like a gigantic palm raised to fend off people coming from the West. The enormous building glowed with square windows, radiating a faceless, hive-like will, repulsing all arrivals.

  Kirill wondered whether Andreas would have understood the fears of the girl who would become the wife of his great-grandson. Did anything of Andreas remain, in today’s Russia? Of his dream of roads and bridges?

  Andreas entered the Railroad Engineering Corps Institute in St. Petersburg—and it may have involved the patronage of one of his father’s widowed patients. He graduated first in his class and was given a job at the Ministry of Railways, with a small civilian rank, but he hoped to avoid a clerical career.

  Kirill’s great-grandfather Arseny wrote that in the fall of 1917, as he went through the attic of the estate, he found some of Balthasar’s homeopathic tubes with residue still on them, and a packet of his father’s blueprints made as a youth—a bridge over the Volga, a bridge over the Ob, over the Yenisei, over the Amur. The Trans-Siberian Railway was slowly moving east, and ambitious Andreas dreamed that soon he would be laying the road through swamps and crevasses, drafting huge expanses of bridges. For now, he repaired other people’s bridges, proposing only corrections in the construction. But he seemed to believe that the railroad itself was a path, and it would reward his loyalty.

  And it was thanks to the railroad that Andreas met his wife and settled his destiny—although perhaps not as he had wanted.

  Two oncoming trains were stuck at a way station near Kaluga, waiting for the tracks to be cleared of snow. A blizzard was followed by hard frost, and the wet snow turned to ice, and the mounds across the rails froze the switches.

  Usually, only mail or freight trains stopped there.

  Ten hours later the passengers had eaten everything they had brought with them and everything the stationmaster could offer. Someone was ill and needed a doctor, the children were chilled by the drafts, the stoves in the compartments were running out of fuel, the toilets stank, and the telegraph brought news that the cleaning brigades were overwhelmed and it would take at least another day to reach them.

  No one working at the way station took on responsibility for that island in the midst of the frozen forest. The stationmaster and telegraph operator had never seen so many people in their lives, and realizing they’d be subject to the thunder and lightning of the angry passengers, they endeavored not to leave their office. The steam engine team was busy with their own problems—they decided to stop stoking the fire, the pump house was frozen ...

  It was Christmas Eve. People were traveling from Moscow to the provinces to visit relatives on their estates and from the provinces to Moscow. Mothers with children, old ladies with companions, retired military men, pensioned officials—people who could not host their own receptions and parties and form the bulk of guests at those given by others, the flowing collection of semi-familiar faces that move from one living room to the next.

  Bundles with candies and presents, suitcases with gowns and ironed uniforms, a freshly killed bird, jams and pickles in baskets, delicacies from the capital, bottles of wine and champagne wrapped in straw—there was everything on these trains except a person who could deal with the coming catastrophe.

  The smoothly functioning machine broke down, and rank and title meant nothing in the face of mounds of snow. The high-placed old men complained of gout, the former officers recalled the Turkish war, the retired officials grumbled about the new governor. Everyone waited for someone to propose something. Hysterical notes began to sound in conversation, ladies got into arguments over the filth in the toilet, a former gendarme official threatened to shoot the chief of the cleaning brigade as soon as he got there. An elderly senator demanded a telegram be sent immediately to Moscow, certain that the drifts had not been cleared simply because they did not know he was here.

  Night drew closer. The temperature dropped. A teenager, garrulous and inventive, brought the news that he had seen a wolf pack at the edge of the neighboring woods.

  Here Andreas’s talent showed itself in full. Normally, he lived like a sleepy god, a favorite of fortune, whose life was a chain of small successes and friendly smiles from the universe, who did not labor, for labor is mastery, but merely performed magic as light as a joke.

  The bridges of other engineers were heavy while still on paper, for the designers were struggling with matter, fighting the laws o
f resistance. Andreas’s bridges, however, had an instantaneous aspect, like lightning, and were whole, like a beautiful rhyme joining two shores of meaning.

  However, when life turned against Andreas, setting out battalions and regiments of unpleasantness, another Schwerdt awoke in him, who took strength from adversity.

  The infants were moved to the stationmaster’s house. The guard was sent on a sled to the nearest village for food. The remaining provisions were requisitioned from the baggage cars and someone’s cook was set to making hot soup. They opened up suitcases and shared extra clothes. A physician traveling to Vyazma examined the patients with chills and handed out medicines. The toilets were cleaned out, the pump house repaired. The guard came back with bread, meat, pots, and a load of firewood. By morning an engine came from Moscow, pushing a snowplow.

  Kirill wondered: did Andreas know that he was being observed? Did he guess it only later? The family legend held that Andreas had no idea he was being watched. Kirill, on the contrary, was sure the opposite was true, and that Andreas endeavored to show what he could do.

  There was a parlor car that had been tacked on to the end of the Moscow-bound train. It belonged to Gustav Schmidt, the steel magnate, whose factories made rails, and who owned shares in several railroad companies. This particular branch they were stuck on was not his, so he could not order the staff around. He was probably interested in seeing how his competitors’ people handled (or rather, failed to handle) the situation, and he likely drew conclusions about necessary clearing technology, organizing way stations, and heating railroad cars.