The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Gustav had a very vague understanding of the connection between Arseny’s education and the potential order for surgical instruments, which his factories did not manufacture, but he saw that the father supported his son. Grudgingly, he retreated, even though he long harbored the hope of returning his grandson to engineering, calculating that the anatomical theater (he himself was not a coward but had a panicky reaction to corpses) would deter Arseny from taking up medicine.

  Arseny had no interest in surgery. “A surgeon heals dozens, an epidemiologist saves tens of thousands,” he wrote in a letter to his third cousin, the grandson of his great-aunt Anna Sophia. The letter was intended to convince the cousin to study alongside him, and it worked. As a consequence, the young man was killed in one of the first battles of the war, in Eastern Prussia.

  War epidemiology as a discipline didn’t really exist then, so Arseny studied military surgery but at the same time studied privately with civilian professors, with doctors who had practiced in Central Asia during army campaigns, and defended his dissertation on malaria, a disease that tormented the Caucasus Corps of the Russian Army in the nineteenth century.

  He was one of the top graduates in 1903. His dissertation was published by the Academy; by then border clashes with the Japanese were growing in frequency in Manchuria. The day the Academy hailed its graduates, the Trans-Siberian Railway opened in both directions, and additional Russian forces journeyed, albeit slowly, to the Far East. Arseny asked to join the active army but was held on at the Academy for scientific work.

  Iron Gustav—even though Arseny did not write about this—with his new connections in the military must have known about the coming war, for Russian intelligence reported clearly on the Japanese preparations. The old magnate had profited on the construction of the Trans-Siberian and was greedy for new orders, sensing what the war would bring.

  The rift between Gustav and Arseny deepened: The Trans-Siberian Railway was built by convicts or recruited workers, whose lives were little better than those of convicts. Russia wasn’t buying the needed construction machinery fast enough, so the branches were built by hand, with pick, axe, and wheelbarrow. Iron Gustav approved of this policy, deeming convicts human rubbish, good for dying while hammering ties into the permafrost.

  Arseny studied the art of surgery on soldiers, the peasants of yesterday. He knew that his patients would be transported in railroad cars along tracks spattered in sweat and blood, paid for by death, sent by railroad to their slaughter. The industrial mechanism consuming human lives disgusted him, and even more disgusting was Gustav’s enthusiasm for it and the treasure he reaped from it. Slowly Arseny came to the conclusion that the worst illnesses, the worst epidemics are not rooted in nature but in the social structure. It’s not clear if he’d already read socialist literature, but he was ready to accept socialist ideas.

  ***

  Arseny worked only a few months at the Academy. In the winter of 1904, Japan attacked Port Arthur and the Russo-Japanese War began. By April a squadron was being formed in St. Petersburg to bring support for the ironclads blockaded in Port Arthur. Arseny had already asked several times to join the troops, but he was rebuffed each time—Arseny assumed that Gustav had a hand in it; he had his own ideas of honor—rooted in business—and wanted to protect his grandson from battle.

  The squadron was put together in great haste, and construction of some ships had to be completed en route. They had a shortage of weapons, iron cladding, workers, experienced sailors and officers, and physicians. Especially physicians familiar with the tropics and tropical diseases.

  Some wheels turned in the military and naval mechanisms—perhaps someone saw the brochure on malaria—and Arseny was sent to the navy, to the command of the Second Pacific Squadron.

  Arseny Schwerdt was assigned to the Prince Suvorov, the flagship of Vice-Admiral Rozhdestvensky; Kirill did not, and could not, know whether the battleship’s captain, a German, Commander Ignatius, had a hand in this. The battleship, even though it had been put to water two years prior, was still under construction by the wharf wall; Arseny lived in the city for now.

  The new battleship could not travel through the shallow Suez Canal—nor would the British have allowed it—so they had to go around Africa. No one in the Russian fleet had ever taken a squadron this large on such a distance—23,000 kilometers. None of the ship’s doctors knew precisely and exhaustively what medicines would be needed on the voyage, what kind of illnesses could affect the combat capability of the already weakened squadron, for the sailors were all on their second term of service. The doctors prepared for the unknown, collecting reference books, refreshing their memories of foreign fevers and varieties of plague, and questioning the few who had taken long voyages in the tropics; in effect, the coming battle with the Japanese Navy, the slaughterhouse promising many deaths, took second place for the medics to the numerous unknown threats along the way. Admiral Rozhdestvensky, known for his harsh temper, would take it out on the doctors if the sailors succumbed to mass illness.

  Finally, in late September, the squadron left port. Kirill knew that Arseny wrote home, but his letters from the rare ports where the ships stopped—the British tried to keep the squadron from being supplied with coal—were not saved. So Kirill reconstructed what his great-grandfather had experienced from books, memoirs and letters of seamen who had served on the Prince Suvorov and other ships.

  The Dogger Bank Incident: the Russian ships fired on British fishing trawlers, taking them for Japanese torpedo boats in the dark. It didn’t make sense for Japanese vessels to be in British waters, but nerves were frayed, intelligence had reported on the possibility of gunners and diversions. Kirill read a report of the event: hundreds of shells were fired, they hit their own ships, a Russian priest was killed on a warship. The English press called Rozhdestvensky’s squadron a “fleet of lunatics”—the first omen. Kirill tried to understand what the men were feeling, why they were so easily deceived, taking fishing boats for warships—and he sensed the fatal premonition of seamen who wanted their fate to come as soon as possible.

  The first madness appeared still in the Atlantic. Collapse of discipline. Breakdowns on the ships.

  Then came the second evil omen, whose meaning was clear to Kirill, seeing it a century later.

  The squadron anchored in Angra Pequena, off the coast of modern-day Namibia. They restocked supplies, made repairs. A few kilometers away was Shark Island. A few months later the German expeditionary corps was to create a camp for imprisoned rebels of the Herero tribe—the first concentration camp of the twentieth century. Several thousand people would die on the bare rocks of the island, guarded by sharks, better than any barbed wire. The Germans were fighting with the Herero, forcing the tribe into the barren desert; they already had prisoners in barracks in Angra Pequena doing forced labor.

  “They saw evil but did not recognize it,” Kirill said to himself. “They saw evil in its infancy, just testing itself, not in full strength, but they did not destroy it.”

  Kirill re-read the letters of a lieutenant who had served on the Prince Suvorov.

  “I am writing from Angra Pequena. [...] A ship arrived today with German troops. It turns out the English had armed a militant border tribe of blacks and sent them against the Germans. What can you say, what fine neighbors! The poor Germans just barely dealt with the Herero, and now there’s another unpleasantness.

  “We stayed in Gabon until 18 November. [...] Our officers bought a lot of parrots, gray with red tails, onshore; some are completely tame.

  “On the 19th we celebrated crossing the equator, an old naval tradition. Neptune appeared onboard with his wife and a huge entourage of all sorts of devils to question the commander for the reason of our appearance on the equator, and he collected a huge tribute in the form of drinks from the gentlemen officers. After which, everyone who had not crossed the equator before was sprayed by the fire hoses and bathed in a huge tub fashioned out of a tarpaulin. Then Neptune gave us a free
pass, promised beneficial winds and untaxed fishing rights. The celebration was very nice.”

  Kirill read it over and over.

  “Tribe of blacks” ... “The poor Germans just barely dealt with the Herero” ... the parrots, the Neptune ceremony.

  They were blind.

  Kirill thought that if any of the sailors and officers had understood what was happening, had felt sympathy for the poor tribe doomed to death, then perhaps the fate of the squadron, also sent to its death, would have been different. But no hearts trembled, and the squadron was doomed.

  Kirill thought about Arseny: what had he felt? He, whose sons and daughters would die at the hands of German soldiers, or at least because of them? Who would be starved to death in Leningrad? What had he thought looking at the hills of Namibia? Did he pay attention to the intermittent news from shore?

  Kirill felt that the answer was no. Arseny was busy doctoring.

  Kirill thought about the difficulty of recognizing a new evil. It does not have a name yet. It is judged in terms of the previous cruel age: to them, it had been the decimation of a tribe of blacks, with no intimation of the future.

  Yet inside the familiar evil, which was considered inevitable or justified, the seeds of a new evil were growing. The seeds were there, but growing conditions were not yet ideal; the evils were not highly visible, would be considered excesses at best, abuse of authority, arbitrary command. The seeds would not grow everywhere at once; the old world could not accept a new evil because it had its own, commensurate to the era. But the new evil would travel, restlessly, relentlessly, seeking a place for itself.

  Angra Pequena. A password that allowed entry to the back door of history, an unnoticeable door leading straight to a slaughterhouse that would occupy the entire world; Angra Pequena—had his great-grandfather remembered it?

  Kirill thought that the answer would also be no.

  By the time they reached the Cape of Good Hope, there were dozens of men on the ships who had lost their minds. The tropical diseases the doctors had so feared had bypassed the squadron, but madness took its toll. At first they locked officers in their cabins, and they kept the lower ranks and sailors in the infirmaries. Arseny, who was an outsider assigned to them, was sent to keep an eye on the madmen—they didn’t have any specialists in psychiatric illnesses in the fleet; at each stop they loaded the patients on the hospital ship.

  No one could treat the madmen; they had no knowledge and no medicines. Arseny followed his patients down the roads of their madness. The madness was of one kind: they were waiting for the Japanese fleet, which allegedly was traveling a parallel course. The crazed signal man constantly saw smoke on the horizon; the crazed admiralty messenger kept waking the chief with imaginary reports from the bridge; the crazed stoker did not want to shovel coal into the boiler, since that would only accelerate the fatal meeting with the Japanese; the crazed gunner could not shoot during training exercises, he was certain that the shell would explode in the barrel; the crazed telegraph operator received radiograms from the Japanese asking them to surrender.

  Arseny later told his wife, and she wrote in her diary, that he had not been sure of his own mind. He imagined low Japanese torpedo boats flying on the crests of waves, and he wanted the waves to cease and the propellers to rest so that the ships would not hurry to battle. When St. Elmo’s fire flashed on the masts of the flagship right near Madagascar, ghostly jelly torches, Arseny, who did not know what they were, thought that the Japanese were attacking with a new weapon. St. Elmo’s fire was considered a good omen, but so deep-seated were the bad premonitions that this time the phenomenon was taken as a foretelling of death. Only the crazed artillery officer showed his good side, insisting that it was only electricity, and laughed and laughed, as if he had come up with a great joke.

  At last, the squadron dropped anchor at Madagascar. They intended to send all the madmen home to Russia in an auxiliary battleship through the Suez Canal. Arseny—who later admitted this to his wife—secretly hoped he would be sent to accompany them and that his expedition would be over. However, the gears in staff bureaucracy turned again, and other doctors were sent to Russia. Arseny fell sick in Madagascar. Nowadays it would be called a psychosomatic fever, a psychogenic rash, but then they suspected an unknown infection and the ailing doctor was removed from the flagship to protect the commander from contagion.

  Commander Ignatius wanted to keep Arseny on the Prince Suvorov, knowing what the battle would entail and how important every doctor on board would be. But the order was clear, and Arseny was given the choice of two ships: Borodino, the sister ship of Prince Suvorov, and the armor-piercing cruiser Emerald, which came from Kronstadt and had caught up with the squadron.

  Russian roulette, life and death. Ironclad battleships had strength and power, twelve-gauge guns, but they led the charge. Cruisers were unarmored tins, but they had maneuverability and speed.

  Arseny chose Borodino. First, he had already grown accustomed to being on a battleship. Second, he had a superstitious belief in the protective power of the name. But Emerald’s captain, Baron Ferzen, another German like Ignatius, had noticed Kirill and used behind-the-scenes diplomacy to get the physician for himself, thinking like the commander of Prince Suvorov: an additional doctor was a good thing in the squadron battle with the Japanese.

  Emerald, Emerald.

  Kirill pulled out the narrow drawer at the top left of the old desk. Inside, if you squeezed your hand into it—it was intended for a narrow woman’s hand, but Kirill’s hands were narrow, his family thought he might be a pianist—in the far corner there was a tab, apparently sticking out by accident. If you pulled on it, a small door, camouflaged as a carved wooden wreath, would open on invisible hinges. If you put your hand in there, you would feel a cold weight, like a coiled stone snake, sleeping in the dark of the hidden recess.

  When you took it out, you must not forget to open the drapes to let the sunlight pour into the room, a lot of light was needed because jewels kept locked up for decades absorb the dark and it had to be washed away, chased from the faceted crystals.

  Yes, this July light was good, albeit too thick; the sunshine of May or even April would be better, thin, colorless, still dispassionate, sinless as a child’s kiss, not filled with the power of sun rising in summer’s zenith. But July sunshine would do, viscous, self-intoxicated, as overripe as two-year-old honey. It would chase away shadows, feed the crystals with its willful radiance, and the heavy, unyielding emeralds, the hidden stones of the Urals, captured in the silver manacles of a necklace, would glow in his hand.

  The cruiser Emerald survived the hell of Tsushima, where almost the entire squadron perished, broke through to Vladivostok, foundered on the rocks near the harbor, and was blown up on the orders of its commander, Baron Ferzen. Prince Suvorov perished, Borodino turned over, taking the entire crew except one sailor, while the minuscule cruiser, defenseless in the battle of line forces, survived.

  When his mother learned Andreas was saved, she ordered an emerald necklace, of the best stones that could be found, for her future daughter-in-law, whoever that might be. Perhaps the jewelers, knowing why the necklace was commissioned, went through all their old trunks to find stones from Peter the Great’s time, and a great marvel was born.

  A special stone is in the center, an emerald of tender grass green and incredible size, like grass mowed at dawn, before sunrise; like its juice, innocent and sweet. To the left and right, in both directions, are large stones of various shades of green: from bright, changeable foliage resembling the glossiness of apple leaves to the thick green, falling into blue, of juniper, to crystals seemingly created from the waters of the ocean depths, where lies the Prince Suvorov, on its side, with gaping holes, the battle flagship.

  The stones are held together by a fine chain, a silver chain; prongs hold each crystal as with the fine hands of ants—not spiders—and each link of the silver chain seems to be born of the previous one.

  Kirill knew that G
randmother Karolina considered the necklace more than a family heirloom; it was a talisman and charm. In 1941 the necklace remained in her house in Moscow while the family gathered in Leningrad; she survived, the rest died.

  Was the necklace a charm? wondered Kirill. Perhaps its power was exhausted, and now it was nothing but a beautiful piece of jewelry. He hoped that was the case; it was as if the joy over the salvation of a son where many others died—where the sea bottom was sown with dead ships—and elation, pride, and fervent prayers of gratitude had all imbued the necklace with an egotistical and spiteful nature that would protect only the chosen one and perhaps repel the rest.

  Kirill lifted the necklace to the light; the faceted crystals glowed peacefully, tenderly. He put it back in the secret compartment.

  Arseny was spared. Perhaps it was the protection of the Marinated Midshipman who had been eaten by cannibals when he was younger than Arseny. Arseny’s patronymic was Andreyevich, and the Russian squadron sailed under St. Andrew’s flag—the blue saltire on white background, the Ensign of the Russian Navy, protected by the apostle who had been crucified on a diagonal cross. Arseny was also protected by the martyr Andreas, who did not become an admiral, the family sacrificial lamb who had suffered at the hands of pagans.

  The Emerald proved itself to be more than steadfast. After the battle it broke through to Vladivostok, its speed saving it from enemy torpedoes; it had few wounded and even fewer dead—a lucky ship, led by a lucky star. The fact that the cruiser foundered on rocks after having avoided the Japanese and was blown up on May 19—the commander was later tried and acquitted—was the required portion of failure for an astonishing success: being surrounded by battleships, being asked to surrender, seeing the remains of the Russian squadron surrendering—and then breaking through the line of Japanese ships and not lowering the flag.