The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Arseny hid and healed Comrade Aristarkh—perhaps this time against his will. No one knows what the two men discussed—Arseny wrote laconic notations: “went to the barn,” “went to the barn again,” “was in the barn,” where given Arseny’s ignorance of farm life, he had no reason to go. The barn was the hiding place. Then Aristarkh vanished, to return more than once, for he was indebted to the doctor in Pushcha who saved his life and health, the doctor whose relatives included the factory owner Gustav Schmidt and Andreas Schwerdt.

  In those same months, Arseny met his future wife.

  What secrets can a night moth tell a butterfly? Kirill repeated the old poem as he thought about their meeting. The night moth circled under the barn eaves, among the smells of straw, caked blood, and medicine. The daytime butterfly fluttered above sunny roads, meadows where church belfries look down at the sea of growing wheat.

  A boy from Pushcha was sent to neighboring Nikolskoe, to the bell tower to collect pigeon manure to fertilize Grandmother Clothilde’s black roses, which had to be sprayed with special tinctures of iron filings for them to keep their color; the roses were the envy of the general whose dragoons had wounded the lightkeeper.

  The black roses, Clothilde’s late sentimentality—the boy slipped, overcome by the stink at the top, fell down the ladder, broke his arm, hurt his shoulder. Arseny came for the boy in a wagon—and met the priest’s niece, visiting for the summer.

  As Arseny wrote, Iron Gustav in his late years had a ready list of suitable brides for his grandson; the old man approached marriage with the ruthlessness of a horse breeder. Not having completely forgiven Arseny for the mediocrity of his chosen field, the meaninglessness of a career in service, Gustav decided to find Arseny a wife who could straighten out his eccentric character and return his grandson into the family bosom. Iron Gustav was cynical and stubborn, sending photographs of candidates with a description of their dowries—shares, estates, and so on—there were aristocrats and daughters of wealthy merchants among them. Arseny seemed to feel that marriage with any of these women would be too big, like a suit coat the wrong size; as if he could foresee the future, he looked not for social success but human reliability, loyalty, steadfastness—good qualities in a soldier.

  He found them in the priest’s niece, the fifth or sixth daughter of a clergyman who served a church in Vladimir but had been born in the far reaches near Murom, where the occasional pagan hermit could be found, worshipping stone circles laid out on sandy shoals in the swamps.

  Arseny recognized Sophia’s nature. Some things are so simple, yet amazing in the crude rationality of their form, created not to serve craftsmen who have hundreds of special sophisticated instruments for every project but poor men or soldiers: an army knife, a sapper’s shovel. Objects for bivouacs, travel, escape, bad times.

  Had Sophia lived in times of plenty, she might have never learned the truth of her character, for she would not have needed it all, and she might have taken up some charitable nonsense, revolutionary, religious, or social. But these causes would have been only manifestations of her strength, unrelated to an idea or faith, just her pure and natural talent for order, for keeping the world from spinning out of control. In an era of chaos and catastrophic change, people like that become islands, a raft for the shipwrecked, for those who are carried away in the whirlpool and seek to create a new meaning out of the fragments of their lives.

  Iron Gustav furiously threatened to disinherit his grandson; he had negotiated the hand of the daughter of a second-rate lady-in-waiting to the empress for him. However, once again Andreas took his son’s side and gave his blessing, and Gustav arrived in Pushcha, certain that he could still stop the wedding.

  However, Sophia got to the old man. Just as he had seen a source of energy and propulsive power in Andreas, he saw a raw, reliable, steel support in her. Gustav must have viewed family as a monstrous mechanism in which people had merged with factories and formed a whole—and there was a place for Sophia’s support in it.

  “She will withstand a lot,” said Iron Gustav. His decree—“She has no money but she is priceless”—spoken at an industrial reception, became a familial bon mot. There was one more thing: he never again insisted that Arseny retire and take up the family business.

  Gustav stopped criticizing Arseny’s life and began improving it secretly. Arseny guessed that Iron Gustav had organized his transfer to the Moscow Military Hospital, aided his easy separation from the Navy—in those days correspondence between the Admiralty and the Military Ministry took years—and assured that Arseny would work in a laboratory on the prevention of epidemics in the army, a topic Arseny had selected back in college.

  Perhaps Arseny achieved all that himself, with the shadow of Iron Gustav behind him. The old man had made it into the circles of military industrialists, established a complete cycle of artillery production near Kiev—gunpowder, shell casings, gun barrels and carriages, scopes—and began campaigning on behalf of General Sukhomlinov, the governor general of Kiev, Volyn, and Podolsk. Sukhomlinov had his own party, he was expected to become a military minister. Gustav tried to establish his plants closer to the western border, since he also traded with Europe, and Sukhomlinov helped him a lot during the revolution of 1905, when factories and railroads were on strike.

  It was enough to be Gustav Schmidt’s grandson for doors to open for you. Arseny was not a classic protégé, spending much more time looking into his microscope at Koch’s bacteria and spirochetes than into the eyes of his bosses—typhus and tuberculosis, tuberculosis and typhus were his main enemies, for he remembered how they had killed as many soldiers in the Russian camp hospitals in Manchuria as Japanese bullets did in the battlefields.

  Naturally, Arseny perceived the Two Ts, as Kirill called the two diseases, within the context of the socialist idea: as the consequence of the oppressed state of workers, the scum of the old, rotted world, the symbol of the moral filth. Looking into the bronze oculars, what he saw on the slide were not bacteria but class enemies—as Arseny later wrote bitterly, when he himself was considered a class enemy, the carrier of filth, the poisoner of society’s health.

  ***

  Kirill liked coming here, to the quiet side street near the Garden Ring. The grim hulk of the Stalinist skyscraper housing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs loomed over it, but the lane itself breathed a different air, specifically Moscow air, gray like sparrows and pussy willows, myopic, better at transmitting the shuffle of an old man’s shoes than the ring of coin. The house built in 1910 by a famous architect for Andreas and Iron Gustav, a two-story mansion in the Moscow Moderne style, still stood at the old address, even though the lane’s name had changed three times.

  The mansion now belonged to one of the shadow structures of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kirill kept trying to guess what was there—intelligence? A semi-official business? He had not been allowed inside even with a letter of recommendation from the city cultural department. He looked at the tile roof, the wrought-iron bars on the balconies, the mosaic panels, and the old round windows like portholes; there was no connection between him and the house, he had grown up in an essentially different country and couldn’t imagine himself living inside it.

  The biggest panel, over the main entrance, depicted a fish: a burbot swimming among water weeds on a river or lake bottom. The weeds floated in long ribbons, stems with orange flowers resembling gerberas; the burbot was winding its way, pink mouth open, eyes raised as if in prayer to the God of fish, pastor of schools and shoals, Father of cod, Lord of sperm whales and sharks. Next to it and a bit lower, strode a lobster sheathed in armor, antennae raised militantly.

  When Grandmother Karolina taught Kirill how to draw, she often depicted the underwater world, accompanying her drawing with a poem that Kirill thought was for children:

  Leeches and crayfish crawl through the silt,

  The water hides many terrors ...

  The pike—the crocodile’s younger sister—

  Stands dead b
y the shore.

  Crayfish, burbots, pikes, sea grasses with unknown orange flowers appeared in her drawings. Kirill was delighted by land beauty transferred underwater, and he quickly picked up the game and added roses and dandelions. He never wondered why Grandmother was so devoted to this subject, why she never drew the mushroom forest at the dacha, or a city park, but only the strange underwater realm inaccessible to the living.

  The first time he saw the mansion, Kirill understood why. The mosaic over the door remained a secret sign for his grandmother, marking the blocked entrance to the past.

  The fish, an ancient Christian symbol, what did it mean? A tribute to Andreas the seaman eaten by savages? A dedication to Arseny, who suffered at Tsushima and watched his comrades drown? Or was it just a vague sign, foretelling the coming flood that would be survived only by Noah in a house with porthole windows? Whatever it was, his grandmother never took Kirill to the house but continued to draw the picture with him that he would easily recognize if he ever found himself in that lane.

  After his first visit there, Kirill naturally remembered the poem. Driving home he wondered who wrote it. He guessed it was Kornei Chukovsky; the intonation was magical, specially created for a grandmother to read aloud while knitting or playing a game.

  But it was Boris Kornilov. A poet arrested in 1937 for being a Trotskyite and shot dead in 1938. Kirill recalled the thin book of his poems on Grandmother’s shelf. He picked it up: “Serafima,” a bitter poem about love in which the childlike quatrain was embedded.

  ... Both he and she smelled of mint,

  he says goodbye at the far window,

  and his crumpled jacket of prewar thin fabric

  is soaked by dew.

  Kirill closed the book. Kornilov, a Leningrader accused of kulak leanings, was an acquaintance of Grandmother’s sister Antonina, Tonya. The book’s pages radiated unrequited love, a lonely emotion. Had Grandmother been in love with Kornilov? But her unknown love was called Arkady. Maybe Tonya, a resident of Leningrad, was in love with him. And Grandmother, by repeating the lines that corresponded with the river mosaic, was memorializing Tonya, who had no grave or marker.

  Could they have foreseen it all, being inside the light-filled house—Kekushev the architect had designed enormous arched windows—on Christmas or Easter? Kirill knew it was a meaningless question, but still he kept returning to it. He went there, to that quiet lane, to imagine the few happy years that preceded World War I. Nothing came to mind except candles, white curtains, a set table, food, gowns and frockcoats, wrapped presents. Happiness does not remain in history, it does not form its substance, thought Kirill. It’s not just the same, to follow Tolstoy’s formulation, it means nothing on the big scale of fate, it can’t be used to atone, justify, or save anyone, it is like counterfeit money. It draws a blank in memory.

  Kirill had hoped to find the key to those days in the family album that his grandmother had saved. Of course, Kirill wasn’t sure that she had saved all the cards; this must be a reduced, censored selection, while the compromising correspondence was burned in the twenties or thirties.

  The postcards had adorable poodles mischievously looking at the camera; gentle kittens with bows; a sleeping chubby-cheeked girl hugging a toy soldier; pastoral children dancing around a lamb; another card showed a pair of kissing children, a pair of kissing lambs, bunnies cuddling, and two floating butterflies in a beautiful outdoor setting. Happy Name Day ... Happy Birthday ... Christ Is Risen ... Kisses ... Love ... Love ... Dear ... And it was all so lovely, so touching, that it was impossible to believe that a few years later, a few months later these same people would pick up weapons and go off to annihilate people just like them, with the same puppies and kitties, buds and flowers—using the slash of a saber to cut down to the saddle and tear through all the layers of flesh.

  Kirill wondered if his great-grandfather Arseny really was given to this sort of sentimentality. Had he been sincere when he sent all these family messages with curlyhaired girls and adorable angels? Kirill could not feel these emotions, they were as outdated and obsolete as crinolines and dyed mustaches and gramophones, so he could not imagine himself in Arseny’s place. But Kirill sensed that his great-grandfather fulfilled the family and social rituals out of duty; his feelings sought other symbols, only nascent then.

  ***

  Spring 1912. April. A brief entry in Arseny’s diary. He had stopped keeping a diary and used it as a notebook for medical notations. Before Arseny had written either in Russian or German. His German was grammatically ideal; he made occasional mistakes in Russian, but they were the kind a person who is fluent in the language would make, sensing the contradictions between grammar and natural speech.

  If he needed distance to regard something critically, he wrote in German; if it was with approval and acceptance, he wrote in Russian. When he used borrowed words, like landshaft or mikstura, he wrote them in German as Landschaft and Mixtur, creating the impression than he meant German landscapes and mixtures; in language he appeared as a dual, divided man who could change masks, becoming Russian or German, valuing that vagueness, the ability to roll from one identity into another.

  Now both languages were replaced by illegible Latin (even his handwriting had changed). Arseny seemed to have moved away from reality, hiding in an ancient language, in medical scribbles that only a colleague could decipher.

  Latin, the secret writing of Latin, in which Kirill recognized only the most common words, even though he had studied it at the university.

  And then—an entry in German: Father visited. He asked about the symptoms and consequences of being poisoned by spoiled meat. And four—four!—exclamation points in the margins, underlined twice.

  There weren’t four exclamation points in total in all the rest of his diary pages. Arseny wrote not without feeling but without intonation; he wrote as he lived: smoothly, without splashes. When an earthquake destroyed Messina in 1908 and a Russian squadron anchored in the harbor saved thousands of Italians, Arseny, a naval doctor in the past, noted the event in his diary and added a single exclamation point.

  And here there were four. And spoiled meat.

  Kirill imagined spring 1912. The broken ice on the Moskva River, the drip-drops, sunshine; the smells bursting in after the winter freeze of tar, manure, smoke, warming soil; the freshness of space, the renewed emptiness, the space available for the clouds and storms of the coming summer. Where did the stink of spoiled meat fit in, which Kirill imagined clearly after reading the words?

  He understood why he imagined the smell so easily, so powerfully.

  Russian history of the start of the century, from the revolution of 1905 to the revolution of 1917, stank of spoiled meat, as if the rotting corpse of the empire exuded the rankness; social life decayed, turning into something disgusting, indigestible, inedible, and contemporaries could sense it in the air of the times.

  Spoiled, maggot-infested meat was one of the key images of the two revolutions captured in Soviet culture: the image of tsarism that could no longer be tolerated, swallowed, it was the end of patience.

  Kirill recalled Eisenstein’s film The Battleship Potemkin. Part one, “Men and Maggots.” In the first scene the old-regime boatswain rouses sleeping sailors, awakening them for revolutionary consciousness. In the third or fourth scene the sailors meet at the hanging beef carcasses intended for their pot. The carcasses stink, even the black-and-white film transmits the stifling, viscous odor of decay. The ship’s doctor examines the meat with his pince-nez—the magnifying glass shows white maggots. But the doctor and officers do not see the maggots, do not smell the rot, because they belong to the old times, they themselves are rotten to the bone, crawling with maggots.

  The crew refuses to eat and starts a rebellion. A red flag is raised over the battleship—Kirill remembered the film from his childhood.

  A second image, a second plot—an echo of Potemkin—is the execution at the Lena mines. A rebellion at the gold mines in Siberia. On the command
of the gendarme captain, soldiers opened fire on striking workers, killing several hundred people.

  The event stunned the country, opening the doors for a second revolution. The investigation gave a start to the political career of the lawyer Kerensky, future chairman of the Provisional Government. The rebellion had started over rotten meat in the canteen cauldron. People worked in horrible conditions, lived in barracks on permafrost, laboring twelve hours a day, bearing what is impossible to bear—but they rebelled over maggoty meat.

  Kirill could not recall when exactly the Lena executions took place. Before World War I for sure, before the war. He turned not to the Internet but the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, just to show off. And read: April 1912.

  Kirill, with a foreboding of what he would find, looked for information on the owners. Lena Gold Fields, Lenzoloto, Russian capital, British capital, shares sold on the stock market, a struggle for control over the mines. There were two or three half-familiar names on the board of directors—Kirill had encountered them in descriptions of parties at the Schmidt-Schwerdt house. Nothing more, but now Kirill was certain that Iron Gustav had been among the Russian shareholders, acting through intermediaries.

  So, Andreas and Gustav were trying to find out if food poisoning from rotten meat was so serious that people were prepared to take on the gendarmes. They didn’t understand, they didn’t feel the wave of outrage rising in the people, thought Kirill. Arseny did. The four exclamation points were not about the execution per se but the stupidity and blindness of his grandfather and father.

  Gustav and Andreas were on the government side. On the side of the minister of the interior who announced from the Duma that the gendarmes’ use of weapons was correct. “That’s how it was, that’s how it is, and that’s how it will be!” If only they had known how it would be. Arseny had already betrayed his family, he was already red, while remaining a Russian German.

  In the meantime, Iron Gustav had obtained large military commissions. Arseny and Sophia had babies, and the widower Gustav pictured the growing family’s future. The old man had a second wind, although he was unlikely to care deeply for children; they were primarily heirs, expressions of family, little adults, three-year-old brides, five-year-old managers of shareholders. The children appeared one after another, increasing the number of birthdays, name days, presents under the Christmas tree, rocking horses with manes of real horse hair, the changing faces of dolls, toy train sets, magic lamps, the saccharine postcards that Kirill would later find in the album. Gustav was seeking to tie the family together with threads of amity, laying the foundation of future amicable relations, but because he was Gustav, it was all heavy-handed and oppressive.