The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Thus Arseny ended up in Vladivostok. A stranger, a physician at disposal from a drowned cruiser, and not having been a crewmember of that ship; temporarily assigned to the navy, to the squadron that no longer existed, for it lay on the ocean floor, although it existed still as a unit on paper; assigned to the navy but considered part of the army—a headache for any military bureaucrat who was supposed to decide what to do with this “gift.” Arseny must have requested a move to the frontlines, to the war that he had almost missed; he was assigned to the evacuation hospital.

  There were no major land battles after the defeat of the fleet, and therefore, not many heavy losses. The frontlines did not change, it became a war of attrition. However, Arseny still managed to find adventures. One night he traveled with two Cossacks right past the town they were aiming for and rode into a village taken by the Japanese. One Cossack was shot to death, the second one was wounded and fell off a cliff on his horse, while the doctor—even though Arseny thought he was pretty good with his saber—was knocked out of his saddle and taken prisoner.

  None of the ten Japanese soldiers or their leader spoke a word of Russian—it must have been a new unit recently arrived from Japan. They tied him up and left him in the shed where the soldiers slept in shifts. Arseny had studied a conversational guide to Japanese during their sea voyage, but he was too agitated to understand what they said, the words did not resemble the transliterations he had learned; he might as well have studied Chinese instead of Japanese.

  Arseny described his alienation in his diary; he could not understand even the gestures, even the emotions, he felt he had landed among opposite, contrary people, where everything was the reverse of what he knew. Arseny could not find a hint as to what was going on; the shed, the soldiers, the lamp, the rifles in the corner, the horses—everything was alien, not as it should be, and he could not understand how these things interacted, what intentions were hidden in objects and people.

  Had he been in their place, he would have assigned two soldiers to convoy the prisoner behind the lines. But the Japanese sergeant did not seem to be interested in him; he imprisoned him by accident and just left him, like an unneeded object.

  Arseny thought he was in a strange trap; he prepared himself for torture, feared it, but in the end no one laid a finger on him, they just left him alone, as if the ten Japanese soldiers were also prisoners of someone powerful and invisible.

  The doctor was freed in the morning. The wounded Cossack survived, reached the Russian sentinel group, and they quietly took the Japanese sentries with knives and killed all the sleeping soldiers; only their sergeant sensed something was wrong and grabbed his pistol, and they shot him instead of taking him prisoner as they had intended.

  The Cossacks had not hoped to find the doctor in good health and so they were very happy. The Japs hadn’t had time to have their fun. But a day later everything changed. Perhaps in revenge for the slaughtered outpost, perhaps not, the Japanese attacked the Russian positions—the hidden positions situated on the other side of the slopes, which meant that the Japanese could not have seen them with binoculars.

  And they struck successfully, they destroyed a half unit, and the battalion commander was killed, a direct hit.

  Spymania flourished in the army by then. They said that bribed generals had given up Port Arthur, that factories made useless weapons, that all Koreans, cattle drivers, peasants, and porters were infiltrators and that’s why the fleet was destroyed.

  It’s not known if anyone gave the Japanese artillery a map of the Russian positions. Perhaps the god of war was on their side that time. But the Cossacks, remembering that the doctor came out of imprisonment without a single bruise, began whispering that Arseny had revealed their location. Pretty soon a story was circulating in which the doctor’s hands were untied and he was chatting in Japanese with the officer when the soldiers burst into the shed.

  No one might have believed the Cossacks, who were known babblers and braggarts, but ... But Arseny was a stranger in the regiment who had arrived recently and had not had a chance to make any friends. And where had he come from? Some sunken cruiser, whose existence nobody even had proof of. And then the name, Schwerdt: a German, you could see he was German, he was young and not yet polished by life.

  You couldn’t say they believed the accusation, but the command came to the conclusion that Arseny should be transferred somewhere, and in a such a manner that no new rumors would arise in the upper echelons that would possibly implicate the commanders in protecting a spy.

  He experienced the event with a cheerful soberness, as if everything that had come before—crossing three oceans, the battle, the anxious night, the refusal to surrender, the breakthrough—was a game in which he did not quite understand what could happen to a person. But get lost in the dark—and now prove that the Japanese didn’t know Russian or ask him about anything; you’re on the brink of such destruction, such despair, that simple death seems like a desired reprieve.

  Arseny must have told one of the military medical bosses what he had been forced to do during the voyage. They sent him to the mobile hospitals at the front.

  These hospitals had too many soldiers who had lost their minds. The military doctors knew and were prepared for the fact that a given number of people who had been in battle, under gunfire, would lose their minds. But there were ten times, a hundred times more madmen than predicted by medical science and the experience of old physicians who had seen the Russo-Turkish war of the 1880s. Something had to be done with the madmen—gather them, treat them—they were no longer a statistical error, they had become a phenomenon. Does it need to be said how relieved they were when Arseny Schwerdt mentioned that he had taken care of the madmen of the Second Pacific Ocean Squadron?

  This was a new war, Kirill thought; that was the point. It was the first war of the twentieth century, a new industry of death. The old tactics—advancing on foot, in columns, en masse—and the new technology: long-range artillery, fast artillery, large-caliber artillery, mines, machine guns, multicharged rifles, barbed wire. But the people were still from the old era, belonging to that past that seemed unhurried, even charitable somehow: peasants who understood death in hand-to-hand combat, a sword fight, a shootout in a field, not in the form of an eleven-inch howitzer shell that could send a unit into oblivion or a machine gun volley that could knock down a row of men—that kind of harvesting was beyond their understanding.

  Arseny was given orders to collect all the mentally ill into one train and take them to Central Russia. Peace was concluded with Japan, troops were heading home, but he was stuck in the Far East. The top brass wanted the crazy soldiers in one train, not traveling in parts; perhaps the officers were confusing madmen with revolutionaries, dangerous freethinkers, and wanted the extra precaution. Revolutionary outbursts continued throughout the country, soldiers and sailors were rebelling in Vladivostok, railroads were on strike, while Arseny and his assistants organized the train in Harbin, gradually learning to recognize the rare fakers, distinguish illnesses, and improvise diagnoses.

  The train set off only in January, after the government forces suppressed all rebellions; they moved in the direction of the Baikal region, where the punitive units of General Meller-Zakomelsky and General Rennenkampf had just passed.

  Kirill imagined what they had traveled through. Arseny did not mention it at all. First the rebels had pillaged and burned, then the punitive troops hanged and shot the rebels, as well as “suspicious” types, anyone who got in their way. And this was normal, healthy, state-approved behavior. And the train carried men considered to be crazy because they heard voices or thought themselves to be someone else.

  The coming madness of wars and revolutions was revealed to Arseny, thought Kirill. And unlike the sign of Angra Pequena, this message Doctor Schwerdt understood.

  It took the train two months to reach its destination, Ryazan. In Harbin the doctor had lived apart from the patients, in a rented apartment. But the train had so little
space—they had to wrest each car from the stingy quartermasters—that all he could have was a narrow compartment, which he shared with a colleague.

  Day and night he made the rounds of the train cars—many of the patients were also wounded, some heavily. And he was permeated, permeated, permeated with delirium screamed during fitful sleep, whispered to a comrade, spoken into space. People seemed to be torn open by shrapnel, turned inside out by explosions, and they were trying to comprehend the world with tools of intellect. Gradually, in order to distance himself and keep from going crazy, Arseny began describing the most acute or unusual cases, seeking a rational seed in the madness, elements of common visions that infect, so to speak, a healthy mind as well, but which flare up in the madman’s brain as blinding, all-explaining hypotheses and become obsessive faith.

  Arseny’s notes did not survive, he turned them over to the doctors who would be treating the mentally ill in Ryazan, but some things could be restored from his diaries.

  “They’d fought the Japanese and searched for Japanese spies in every corner. The soldiers whispered openly that ‘their excellencies had sold themselves to the macaques.’ But there are no Japanese in the soldiers’ delirium. None. They are too far, too alien. There are cannons. There are attacks. There are wounds. There are enemies. But no Japanese. What’s interesting is that the enemies are not foreign, they are Russians. Rebels. Students. Rich men. Officers. Revolutionaries. Generals. Courtiers. The Empress. Stessel. Kuropatkin. The Emperor. Usurer kikes. Ordinary kikes. And Germans. The soldiers are diseased with the enemy. Everyone has his own, but they all have one.”

  Arseny began paying attention to the phantasmagorical Germans that existed in the soldiers’ delirium. He was tempted to look into the crooked mirror and see himself, Arseny Schwerdt, to plunge into the murky soothsaying of a crazed Pythia and hear vague prophesies of destiny and fate.

  One soldier, upon learning that the doctor was German, kept insisting that he grow back his lost leg. He was certain that the Germans knew the secret of such treatments but hid it from Orthodox people. Another thought that the German doctor was there to kill the wounded, a third that the whole war was started by Germans to make money and to have as many Russian men killed as possible. A fourth, who had been orderly to a German lieutenant, who was wounded and died in his arms, believed that he himself had become German; he recounted waking up one morning and he seemed to be himself, yet everything Russian was alien, and his boots smelled of a foreign pitch he didn’t like, and the cavalry horses made foreign noises with their horseshoes; he said that he couldn’t bear to live this way, everything nauseated him, and he asked if there was a way to become Russian again, otherwise he would kill himself.

  The war had been in the Far East, but the soldiers who had lost their minds saw the enemies they had brought with them in the trunks of their mind from Central Russia. Kirill was most interested in Arseny’s aperçu: there were no Japanese in their delirium. But there were Germans.

  Kirill began wondering why. “The Japanese are too alien, too distant,” Arseny had written. Kirill added: the Germans were no longer alien or distant. There was a reason why the cemetery in Moscow for the non-Russian Orthodox, where people of all faiths were buried, was simply called the German Cemetery by locals. That is, a German was both a German and also the Russian image of a foreigner in general.

  For a German is not just an enemy, thought Kirill. For all the talk by Russophiles of the dominance of Germans in Russia, the German was somebody close, almost one of us, and at the same time a foreigner. This contradiction between familiarity and the presumed abyss of differentness inside the German is horrifying: you are open to your alien, he reads you like a book, he knows all your secrets and weak spots, all the levers of the national character; you are absolutely defenseless before an enemy like that.

  Alien as one of us, our alien. And, thought Kirill, first there must be a consensus of acceptance and assimilation, before the pendulum of troubled national feelings swings to the other side, to rejection and refusal.

  There are alien aliens, too, Kirill continued his thoughts. They appear in movies, slimy creatures that spill out of the human body, out of the healthy body of the nation, he added ironically. Nazi movies, in fact, except the action has been transplanted into space. A marvelous projection of social anxiety.

  Our alien. Name: Arseny. Patronymic: Andreyevich, but surname Schwerdt. And a soldier asks you, magician-German, to grow back his amputated leg, and swears and curses at you, you-German, for keeping your medical secrets.

  That was the mirror into which Arseny looked; that’s what he saw there.

  Two months of travel brought the train to Ryazan. There, far from the two capital cities, in the provinces, the patients were examined by a commission that included police officials. They were assigned to various hospitals or simply decommissioned and sent home if they weren’t violent, because they didn’t know what to do with them. Arseny was proposed for the order of Saint Anna Fourth Class, the most minor in the long hierarchy of military awards. But the proposal was recalled: that was the effect of his one-day Japanese imprisonment and the negative review of the regimental commander, who believed the rumors and suspected that the doctor caused the death of his men; he did not write that openly, but a hint was more than enough. Arseny didn’t care: the war was over, and orders can be handed out to others.

  ***

  Given a long leave, Arseny went home, to the estate, to Pushcha; even though he later rented apartments in Moscow, in his diaries Pushcha was the only place he called home.

  They were making trouble in the region. The eruptions of the first revolution were not as intense around Moscow as in the distant provinces, but still, the neighboring estates had suffered. Supplies were ransacked in some, horses stolen in others, and the neighboring general demanded a half squadron of dragoons to protect his property. But the marauders did not touch Pushcha—the fame of the Good Doctor and Good Lady protected the old place. Arseny followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and began treating the peasants, increasing the family’s good reputation.

  One night a wounded man was brought in a sleigh: a sword had sliced through his arm to the bone. Arseny knew the muzhik from the fishing village at the Oka River; it was said he used to be a brigand, then supplied Nizhny Novgorod merchants with barge haulers, a business that died out when steamboats came in. He worked as a lightkeeper, sailing at night to light the beacons, and on long summer days rowed vacationers along the Oka’s indolent channels, and he fished a bit, bringing enormous catfish, the black denizens of river depths, packed under thick burdock leaves to protect them from the sun, to sell at Pushcha. And now he lay delirious before Arseny, the wound was infected, and Arseny understood that the dragoons must have caught him thieving and chased him through the woods, wounded him but did not catch him, he got away, knowing the ravines and cuts in the forest, or perhaps by water, for fishermen had small boats hidden away, whether for some illegal trade or simply because their brigand blood enjoyed it.

  Arseny knew that if the dragoons found the wounded man in his house, if he didn’t report him to the police, they probably wouldn’t arrest him, his relatives Gustav and Andreas would intervene, but he would be fired from his military service. Arseny might have reported him if he had not led the train of madmen, if he had not seen the Cossacks from the punitive units fighting and running men through with their sabers, if he had not been imbued with profound sympathy for the rebels.

  He did not give him up. He hid the fugitive, cleaned and sewed up his wound. He knew that the beacon keeper could not go home, that the dragoons were waiting in his village. He gave him money for the road, and the beacon keeper floated away on the Oka, helped by his river brothers to Nizhny Novgorod, where thousands of people lived and where you could vanish without a trace.

  Arseny must have thought this would be a unique event. But nocturnal guests trampled the path to his house in the twilight. Arseny did not write how many times they came t
o him, how many times frothing horses flew into his yard, but Kirill sensed that it more than a time or two—there were ambushes all around, searching for real and imaginary rebels, the general whose greenhouses of roses had been shattered was furious.

  Did they threaten to give Arseny to the authorities? Did they try to buy him off? Or did he willingly receive the nighttime visitors from the unknown revolutionary force that burst out occasionally in crimson smoky explosions beyond the forest?

  Kirill thought that Arseny had been firm: he opened the doors himself, no one forced him. That was the form Balthasar’s apostolic fervor had taken in him: in the socialist idea he saw the medicine for everyone that Balthasar had sought in homeopathy.

  Arseny Schwerdt underwent a deep transformation that summer. To complete it, fate gave Arseny two more meetings.

  In late spring, the Oka thieves’ transport brought a new guest to Pushcha. They must have learned about the strange doctor and checked him out, or perhaps there was no other choice. They brought the man Arseny called Comrade Aristarkh, no other name. He was a Socialist Revolutionary, one of the underground leaders of the December uprising in Moscow. He had been wounded and could not flee with the others; he stayed in safe houses until it became too dangerous: the police were combing the city, the gendarmes were finding all the revolutionary hideouts.

  This was a big shot coming to Arseny. Apparently he was accompanied by two or three bodyguards.

  The Bolsheviks later took credit for the Moscow uprising. In fact it was headed by the Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs. Who Comrade Aristarkh actually was, how many names he used as indicated in the gendarme search warrant, Kirill did not learn right away; to begin he simply imagined a man without any special features, a professional at disguise, capable of appearing to be an agronomist, a merchant, even a private detective.