The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Schmidt was an engineer. He saw Russia not only as a potential market but also as a huge unorganized space, with great natural resources that had to be exploited. However, his personal technical talent (unlike his entrepreneurial perspicacity) was embarrassingly small: he had tried various engineering fields, but the only things he could design were pumps.

  His enemies joked that Schmidt pumped money. He expanded production and took on steel making, railroads, and obtained commissions from the government for sapper equipment for the army. He dreamed of attaining the big prize—total participation in military production: building artillery plants, gunpowder and shell factories, defense manufacturing. Not many people were allowed in; Schmidt still had to make his way into that market, shouldering aside other manufacturers and suppliers.

  Schmidt, according to family legend, watched Andreas, the improvised station commandant, avert disaster. Later, when the tracks were cleared, he invited Andreas to continue the journey to Moscow in his car.

  Engineer met engineer, Schmidt met Schwerdt. And Schwerdt met Gustav’s daughter, the nineteen-year-old Lieschen (her mother died in childbirth and Gustav did not remarry).

  Here the family narrative grew incredibly saccharine. Kirill made a face, he couldn’t abide the sentimental meeting on the snowy way station, two trains, a sudden meeting, turning into love at first sight. He grimaced but asked himself: what if people lived like that, loved like that, tied their lives together like that—as if in a cloyingly sweet picture on a candy box?

  But he sensed that this was the official biography, the edifying story. Perhaps Andreas fell in love. Perhaps Lieschen did. Perhaps it was mutual. But would Gustav Schmidt, a wealthy man whose daughter would have had her pick of husbands, have given his only heir to an impoverished engineer?

  The story appeared to be one in which the wise father did not interfere in the young people’s happiness. But it didn’t make sense to Kirill: why would Gustav have chosen this unknown, unproven young man, of unimpressive background? Andreas never achieved anything significant after his marriage; had Gustav’s confidence in him been misplaced?

  Then Kirill understood. Andreas never built anything because Gustav demanded a price for his daughter’s hand—a terrible price. Gustav saw what others did not—Andreas’s talent was not only great but universal, plastic, and the young man did not comprehend his own powers. He did not realize that he could have founded a scientific school or become a genius of construction, an inventor of engineering methods, could have built something comparable in scope to the Suez Canal.

  Andreas needed a lonely personal path to realize his talent and abilities. Schmidt deprived him of that path, sensing future greatness. A refusal of his daughter’s hand would have forced Andreas to taste fortifying bitterness, to mature and concentrate on his calling. Instead, he achieved happiness, a career, and a loving wife. Schmidt installed him, like a battery, in his company’s mechanism, and Andreas, a captive, like his father at Uryatinsky’s estate but unaware of captivity, began fueling Schmidt’s growing industrial empire with his talent, serving his father-in-law’s ambition: to obtain the profitable military contracts, to become part of the military-industrial elite.

  With great foresight, Schmidt insisted in 1882 that Andreas become a citizen of the Russian Empire: he, his sisters, and his father, Balthasar, had formally remained citizens of Saxony. Gustav had Prussian citizenship and did not wish to give it up. There were interests that kept him in Prussia, that required him to be a citizen there and a foreigner in Russia, Kirill posited—probably inheritance, shares of bank capital, or the hope for Prussian nobility; Kirill could not determine what it had been.

  But he wanted his daughter and her husband, whom he considered as a son, to set roots in their new homeland. When their son was born, Arseny Schwerdt, Kirill’s great-grandfather, Gustav made Andreas a full partner and increased his share of the company. In exchange, so to speak, Andreas and Lieschen became Andrei Yulievich and Elizaveta Gustavovna and applied for Russian citizenship. There was talk of conversion to Orthodoxy, but Andreas, gentle and pliant, refused, as if the Protestant faith had been part of his practical and rational engineering understanding of the world.

  Schmidt gave the newlyweds an estate near Serpukhov. He seemed to have chosen the place with long-range plans, not only for the beauty of the floodplain meadows and the views of the Oka River: the neighbors were wealthy gentry and Schmidt had been thinking of future spouses for his grandchildren. Importantly, all the neighbors were Russian: one count, one artillery general, one widowed princess in whom Kirill suspected Gustav had an interest; sedate and quality society that the young couple should join.

  Andreas moved his elderly father and mother to the estate. Balthasar had not wanted to leave Moscow—life far from the city would have reminded him of his imprisonment in Uryatinsky’s swampy fortress—but his son and daughter-in-law insisted. He moved, lived through the first winter, and died in the spring, a cold spring, having caught cold in his greenhouse, tending to his medicinal herbs.

  In the March cold, over the icy roads, they brought the body to Moscow. Andreas bought land in the Heterodox Cemetery and paid a mason to create the limestone monument Kirill had known as a child. And so Balthasar Schwerdt moved to Russia forever, became part of its soil. But he lay surrounded by other newcomers: Napoleon’s soldiers who died of wounds, English merchants who perished on their travels, European nobles who had come to work at the invitation of Peter the Great. A Moscow medical journal published an obituary, but in German, because all the physicians who read it were German or understood German.

  One would think that Balthasar’s death cast a shadow on the estate, on their new home. But in fact, the death aided Schmidt’s plans. Over the year Balthasar lived in Pushcha—which was the estate’s name—he became a kind friend of all the neighbors; he treated the progeny of the count and general, he treated the widowed princess—and he treated the peasants. Another would not be forgiven such mixing of social strata, but in his late years Balthasar seemed to have regained his apostolic fervor. He was meek but firm and unbending in his treatments, as if giving bits of his life to others; he fought death with no distinction between the son of a landowner and the child of a poor woman; another would not be forgiven, but he was, because he was the Doctor who knew everyone’s ills and woes and brought the light of hope into the long night of suffering.

  Thanks to the brief but glorious memory that Balthasar left behind, his son with his wife were welcomed into the local circle; the death of Balthasar, the kind doctor, opened doors for them. And most importantly, it preordained the fate of Arseny Schwerdt, the amiable grandson who barely remembered his grandfather.

  ***

  According to Arseny, his parents brought him to Pushcha every summer. The attic was where Balthasar’s medical things were kept: instruments, books, and crates of vials, retorts, test tubes, homeopathic items that Balthasar took with him everywhere, unable to give them up.

  Science, including medicine, was developing rapidly in those years. Arseny, who was allowed to play in the attic, decided at a young age that his grandfather was a magician—otherwise, why did he have those bizarre and mysterious vials, substances, and books in Latin? As Arseny wrote, he did not share his theory with anyone because he believed the grown-ups were deceiving him when they said his grandfather had been a doctor. He heard the local peasants talking about the good doctor and exaggerating the results of his treatments, but he did not know that the exaggeration was a naive desire to repay kindness with kindness, to say a good word to intercede in the next world, and took the stories as the plain truth. He stayed in the attic, making up his own explanations for the narrow-necked bottles and colorless powders, the disintegrating pills, evaporating tinctures, and desiccated manuscripts with puzzling drawings and symbols; he imagined himself his grandfather’s heir, not suspecting that the adults considered his treasure trove mere rubbish and viewed his pastime with amusement.

  His parents
thought that Arseny loved the freedom of rural life and proximity of nature, while he simply missed the dusty attic; he learned to hide his desire because he sensed that it would not please his parents and certainly not his grandfather, Iron Gustav. That’s what he called him in his notes, repeating the family and social nickname, the master of steel who took the boy to his plants, revealing his passion, pouring molten metal from cauldrons that cooled into pig iron, iron beams, copper bars, bronze pipes, the mechanical hammers falling from on high in heavy blows.

  Only Clothilde, Grandmother Clothilde, Balthasar’s widow, was Arseny’s confidant—she was lost without her husband among the new wealthy and highborn relatives, removed from her married daughters.

  Forced into marriage with Balthasar, she seemed to understand him better than he had himself. She bore children uncomplainingly, and she lived uncomplainingly in semi-impoverishment on the small income of the doctor of the Widows’ Home—and shared Balthasar with everyone, accepting his coolness toward her; she learned to bind wounds, compound mixtures, listen to the febrile breathing of patients, apply compresses, and compassionately see patients off to the other side.

  Balthasar left, but she continued treating the peasants, intuitively, like a healer—and she perpetuated his fame, and they began calling her the Good Lady; she was best with children’s ailments. She wasn’t very good with adults, sometimes her treatments helped, sometimes not, but she diagnosed children flawlessly, as if she had gotten a small bit of Balthasar’s medical gift.

  But she, too, died. She went to help the forest ranger’s wife, who lived on the other side of the Oka. The ranger’s wife was having a baby and her oldest son came on skis to get her. They made it across the river, she delivered the baby, but on the return trip the horse fell through the ice. Clothilde saved herself and pulled out the driver, but she froze in the icy river wind, covered with a crust of ice before the rescuers reached her. They wrapped her in furs and woven mats and drove her to the estate as fast as the horses could carry them, but when they unwrapped the fur cocoon, the Good Lady was dead, the driver was alive, but she was dead, her heart could not take the wild, whipping Oka winds.

  Grandmother Clo, Arseny had called her: Grandmother Clo. That is how she entered his life—part of a name, a fragment of life: Grandmother Clo. He wrote that he remembered the train from Moscow, the gallop through fields, the empty hall, the table piled with juniper branches, the grand piano as hefty as an elephant, in a white cover, the light of dozens of candles, and the small, childlike face on the small satin pillow of the coffin. She seemed to be his age, a young girl who aged in an instant but had never known old age. Everyone she had treated was allowed into the hall, and women wept, pronouncing her name in their way, Kolotildushka; he kissed her cold forehead and knew that he would always remember the juniper and the resiny wrinkled berries, the futile weeping.

  Iron Gustav did not come, he was traveling far away, and Arseny was grateful for the unintended delay. Things would have gone differently with him there; Gustav would have brought splendor and violated the severity of death. Quite probably he would have interfered in the fine fabric of predestination, his strength would have interrupted the gentle guidance that Clothilde had left, would have won the remote battle for their grandson’s future; but Gustav was not there, and so the boy Arseny’s story and future began.

  Andreas was an inspired but hopeless hunter. He acquired hunting dogs at Pushcha, hired a kennel master, even though he couldn’t even hit a heavy autumn duck.

  Iron Gustav methodically built upon his artillery production, elaborating new methods for tempering cannon barrels, while Andreas shot into the sky the excesses of his talent not needed by his father-in-law’s industrial empire. Gustav probably required only a tenth or fifteenth of his gift, and the remaining forces tormented Andreas; the talents sought escape through whims and eccentric habits.

  With the birth of his son—Oh! the baton of the unfulfilled, passed on to children—Andreas with Gustav’s sympathetic agreement decided to teach him to be an engineer. He invented and had built a toy that was unprecedented—a precursor of constructors, a toy railroad, in which the engines and cars could be taken apart and most importantly, with trusses and spans to make bridges. Arseny remained indifferent to his father’s idea, but Andreas was caught up in it, he started production, opened a store. He masked his seriousness at the endeavor but he perfected the game, devising a kit in a wooden box that contained a miniature model landscape made of wood and stone so that you could play railway engineer laying a road. Losing all sense of scale, he covered the table with toy steam engines, commensurate with his inner life.

  Arseny tried to stay near the dog kennels. His first teacher in doctoring was the old hunter in charge of the dogs. Arseny recalled that as a child he imagined he could resurrect Grandmother Clothilde, who had not died completely, even though he had seen her lifeless body. He did not seek an answer to resurrection in church but in the pagan, spiritual attention to nature. He felt everything was connected—berry and cloud, river and sand, star and dew. He imagined the thin, flickering connections hidden by the fog of imagery; he studied animals—wild birds, fish, his father’s dogs—not like a scientist but as a young pagan sensing kinship with all living things. He attended church without conviction, marking time; his temple was the attic with Balthasar’s flasks—as if they were the sandals and sword left under the rock for Theseus.

  Once, Arseny’s father took him on a trip to a factory under construction. When they got there, they learned the cattle in the region had anthrax; the local authorities were hiding the epidemic because it was the eve of the fairs and large herds had already been sent to be sold—maybe infected, maybe not.

  Andreas worried that the peasants brought on to help dig the foundation pit would get sick; telegrams flew to the provincial capital and to St. Petersburg, and doctors and veterinarians arrived.

  Arseny stayed with his father. Andreas had probably wanted to give his son a lesson on managing people and situations. But Arseny saw something else: the horrible similarity of death in the eyes of cows and humans; death’s indiscriminate power, prepared to poison water sources and extinguish nascent life inside of seeds. He saw the funeral bonfires, the grave pits covered in lime, the endless rows of carts with firewood to keep the fire burning; he saw the clouds of ashes blocking the sky and he saw—he felt—the invisible paths that death travels, breaking out in carbuncles on the skin.

  In the face of that death even Balthasar’s imagined magic, the flasks and powders in the attic, was impotent. Arseny, without rejecting Balthasar’s legacy, no longer interpreted it literally but as a sign, a pointing finger; he grew up in two weeks. Back home, Iron Gustav thought the boy appreciated his father’s lessons, had listened to his instructions, and was ready to accept the family destiny—but this was a false impression.

  Iron Gustav, with his sense of humor, asked the boy to take any volume of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia from the shelf and open it to any page; his future would be indicated by the article his finger found. Arseny almost landed on Metallurgy but pointed to Microscope. Gustav interpreted it his way, that is, he would study metals. Arseny interpreted it differently. Gustav gave him the best microscope, with iron legs strong enough to keep the slides in place, probably better than most university medical laboratories had, and Arseny went off into the microscopic world, lost to the larger world for several years except for the summer months in Pushcha, which were devoted to communicating with the natural spirits, animals, and plants.

  Both Iron Gustav and Andreas overlooked Arseny, for they were involved in secret negotiations with the Director of State Railways Sergei Witte, or, more likely, with his negotiators, for Witte was buying up private railroads for state use. When it became clear what the only male scion of the line cared about, it was too late to argue or change him: Arseny had developed a subdued but firm personality, confident in its foundations, and unswerving in changing circumstances; his character would allo
w him to survive two wars, protect him from a curved blade, a knife in a boot, a waxed garrote, shrapnel, bullets, and fragments in order to bring him inexorably to the torture chamber of 1937.

  Kirill was fascinated by this temporal suitability of personalities, their suitability to the era: the fact that a character trait could mean salvation in one time period yet be fatal in another. He thought about his own personality—what was it? Apparently, it was that of a rescuer: Kirill had inherited his grandmother’s and his parents’ gentleness, preference for solitude, fear of getting entangled in relationships, and ability to preserve his inner dignity without making a show of things.

  Arseny, however, did not think about self-preservation. Wounded by death and turning it into his eternal enemy, he became somewhat soldierly. Balthasar had been doctor and apostle, while Arseny grew up to be doctor and warrior; the two concepts were connected in the name of the institution he chose to attend: the Imperial Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg.

  At first Kirill thought that in an effort to free himself from the protection and care of father and grandfather, Arseny chose to study at government expense and far from home, from Moscow. Then he realized that Arseny wanted to obligate himself to the Emperor by his officer’s oath, putting blood and family ties second, subordinating himself to the will of the state rather than the will of his parents.

  Arseny told his father and Gustav his plan ahead of time. He could have kept silent until the last moment, since he knew they would not approve. But Arseny seemed not to fear his father’s pressure, his grandfather’s wrath, even welcomed them as a test of the certainty of his decision. He got his trial in full measure: Gustav, deceived in his expectations, threatened to cut him out of his will and insisted he would punish the stubborn boy. But his father seemed to understand his son’s character. While medicine for Gustav was a secondary occupation, useful but not important, Andreas remembered his father, Balthasar—and unexpectedly took his son’s side and even found a good explanation for Gustav: he had calculated how many steel surgical instruments the army ordered every year and what profit they could make if they entered the market.