The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Perhaps if Arseny had not had six children, Gustav would have behaved differently in commercial enterprises and the family’s future would have been different. But apparently he wanted to prove something to fate; his business sense did not fail him, but his sense of proportion did. He lost the ability to differentiate between family and family business, he planned to give each grandchild an enormous fortune—even though he was rich as it was; he openly took on the top men in the war ministry, creating dangerous enemies who started spreading rumors: a German is supplying the army, that’s potential sabotage! Of course, such charges surprised no one, industrialists often created such intrigues, sending letters to the police, Senate, and Ministry of Justice that “revealed” their rivals’ ties with Germany or Austro-Hungary. But in the summer of 1914 the risk of such charges grew exponentially in a flash: war broke out.

  Kirill vowed not to try to imagine how the family members responded to the news of war. He had an answer: Arseny never again wrote in German in his journal. The old book, only half full, was put on a shelf. The new one, started in August, had only Russian and Latin; soon the Latin vanished—he must have subconsciously prepared himself for being searched someday, and an illiterate military investigator or policeman would suspect the incomprehensible Latin words to contain treason, spy secrets.

  Arseny, who had dealt with counterintelligence after his brief imprisonment by the Japanese, saw further than Iron Gustav and Andreas, who realized that their position was shakier yet still felt protected by their status, money, and most importantly, connections, highly useful connections.

  Iron Gustav swallowed his pride and applied to the Highest Name with a request for citizenship for himself, Andreas, and other family members who needed it. The request was granted, but not as easily as Gustav had expected.

  The newly minted Russian citizen welcomed the war—but was he sincere? Iron Gustav was counting on the war strengthening his positions, for he would demonstrate the superiority of his shells and cannons and of course would enrich the family—so thought Arseny, who did not like his grandfather’s enthusiasm and the patriotic meetings he organized at his factories and the large amount of money he contributed to the court’s charities, a bow to royal patronage.

  But Kirill thought otherwise. Looking at the past from the future, he felt that both Gustav and Andreas sensed the danger in being German. All of Schmidt’s companies changed their signboards, choosing indefinite and neutral names like Sunrise or Dawn. It was ironic that those names survived the revolution and remained in the USSR, in harmony with the new mood. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd on August 18, and couldn’t Iron Gustav take the obvious hint, Kirill asked himself, and immediately answered: no. Gustav and Andreas felt that they had already gone too far, been too aggressive in the marketplace, had stepped on too many toes, had stressed the Germanness of their machines, mechanisms, and weapons intending to signify their unsurpassed quality, and were now afraid that their competitors would take advantage of the situation.

  Arseny, who was still working at the Moscow Imperial Military Hospital, was not bothered in the first months of the war—the general opinion of all sides of the conflict was that the war would end by Christmas; the commanders thought the present staff could handle the flow of wounded.

  Therefore Arseny spent the fall in Moscow. His father and grandfather had separated themselves from the rest of the family, taking on the cares and fears of wartime. Previously, the household had been held together by their participation, in the daily breakfasts, lunches, dinners, evening conversations by the fireplace, the numerous small ceremonies, and mostly by the very presence of elders who found time to be interested even in the affairs of the children, to teach them German—elders who did not seem like old men. Even though Gustav was in his eighties and Andreas approaching sixty, they both seemed impervious to old age: like pagan gods, they held the capitalist horn of plenty that spewed out machines that produced machines.

  For the two titans, the war was a purely commercial issue for now. The others knew war only from the newspapers, from rumors, from the whispers behind their back: Germans. Only Arseny had encountered real war: in the hospital where they received individuals, then dozens, then hundreds of wounded men. Interestingly, Doctor Schwerdt was never rebuked for his German nationality. There were several other German doctors at the hospital and they were looked at askance, but in Arseny they saw first and foremost a physician. The other German doctors spoke Russian without an accent and had lived their entire lives in Russia; many had been at the hospital longer than Arseny and had received deserved glory—yet they were instinctively and instantly perceived as being alien while Arseny was one of our own. Why? After all, Arseny was much more likely to be a scapegoat out of envy alone, for everyone knew that his grandfather and father were German industrialists, wealthy men.

  They probably felt something at the hospital that Arseny may not have felt: his definitive separation from the family and his switch to Russian citizenship not in terms of civil status but in the sense of readily desiring to share the fate of his new homeland; or they sensed that Arseny was far from the reality of life, he was a fool and a saint fixated on bacteria and infectious diseases, a man seriously fighting death—a very recognizable Russian type.

  The wounded began appearing. It turned out that Arseny with his modest military experience had things to teach his academic colleagues. They—despite having worked in a military hospital—did not understand that wounded soldiers were not ordinary patients; the war was still living inside them, and they needed special care.

  Gustav and Andreas were worried about maintaining and increasing the production of cannons. At the hospital, Arseny saw soldiers with their legs blown off, doomed cripples, an eternal burden to peasant families. And even though Gustav’s factories manufactured Russian cannons and the soldiers had been wounded by German ones, a switch took place in Arseny’s mind: he felt that weapons made by Schmidt and Schwerdt were the ones that had disfigured his patients.

  Interestingly, Arseny did not talk about treating the wounded. He had gone underground, apparently realizing that he would not find a common language with his grandfather and father. They considered the death of soldiers inevitable, while he rebelled against that inevitability; also, Arseny discovered something new in the soldiers that he had not seen in the Japanese war and which he barely understood.

  Arseny had expected that there would be many men who had lost their minds, as there had been in 1905, but it was different this time.

  He’s mad but he is healthy, wrote Arseny about a soldier who talked about the treason of the empress—a German. Mad because he reduced all catastrophes to the evil will of Alexandra Fedorovna, and insisted on it until he became delirious. And healthy, because the decay of the Russian state had a reached a point where it was easy to see evil intentions, a conspiracy—certainly the authorities would not allow such chaos and disarray without secret reasons.

  The slag, the fallout of the mind that had once gone into the exhaust pipe of pure madness and self-destruction, Arseny thought, was now differently transformed: into deferred aggression directed outward. The soldiers in the trainload of madmen that Arseny led from Vladivostok in 1906 were essentially harmless in their crazy fantasies. Now, when delirium and darkness of the mind became the norm, madness had become dangerously realistic and bitter; the soldiers felt that traitors had dug in behind their backs, their own people turned alien. Of course, this had existed during the Japanese campaign, but in a weaker, diluted form—and now it had thickened, strengthened, and was contagious like an infection. The soldier who went on about the empress replied to the nurse who told him not to blacken the monarch’s name: “I have no goodness in me for any living thing.” And Arseny wrote that in those words he heard a note of madness and at the same time a frank admission of a sober and wise man.

  Arseny may have befriended that soldier, his name was Petr Nezabudkin (from the word forget-me-not), a good, Dostoevskian name for one ob
sessed. They had wanted to turn him in, but Arseny protected him, explaining that a soldier after being wounded is not himself and repeats stupid rumors, but when he is healed he will be ashamed. The hospital gendarme believed Arseny: he knew that Schwerdt had treated crazy people back in the Japanese war.

  Nezabudkin thanked him in his own way: he introduced him to several soldiers who formed a “circle.” One of the guards at the hospital, from Moscow, was a Bolshevik agitator and brought leaflets for the trusted patients to read, knowing that the soldiers would be sent back to the troops after they had convalesced.

  They hunted the hospital Bolshevik. The gendarmes set ambushes at fence holes and searched carts carrying firewood. The agitator was eventually arrested with a pile of leaflets; Nezabudkin may have felt out the doctor, an officer: would he agree to be the new courier? Kirill did not know whether Arseny agreed or not. One thing was clear: the wounded soldiers considered Arseny a defender, and that reputation was passed along the “soldiers’ telegraph” to the front, when in December Arseny was called to head the evacuation hospital.

  Naturally, Gustav and Andreas expected Sophia and the children to stay with them in the Moscow house, with nannies and a governess. But Arseny decided otherwise. He sent the children to stay with distant relatives in various cities, and took his wife and his eldest daughter, Karolina, with him. Why did he do that? If he cared about the children, it would have been better to leave them in a home that had every luxury, with a loving grandfather and great-grandfather; it was a ticklish moment, fraught with old men’s injuries and jealousy.

  The only thing Kirill understood was that Arseny wanted his sons and daughters to grow up primarily as his children and not as the grandchildren of Andreas and the great-grandchildren of Gustav; he was afraid to entrust their fate to the willful old men, sensed that they could spoil the children with unbridled adoration, indulgence of their whims, and expensive gifts.

  Or perhaps Arseny foresaw the future and guessed that the mansion once full of light and voices would be plunged into grim silence that the children could not dispel, and they would have to live in it, anxious and echoing; the once hospitable house would become a lonely citadel where Gustav and Andreas, like gods of a lost time, would have long conversations about the new times, their shameful impotence, and how to save themselves and everything they had built up over a long prosperous era.

  ***

  Kirill imagined that conversation easily. It probably took place in the study on the second floor, where the wide window faced south. Kirill saw the heavy old bog-oak furniture, with carvings—perhaps Gustav had brought it from Germany—furniture that remained in a state of bewilderment: if the owner wanted to open a door or pull out a drawer, the hinges would creak or the key would stick. No, furniture did not have reason or will, but the entire life of the house, formerly fed by the energy of Iron Gustav, now seemed out of sorts, frozen in frightened anticipation.

  A late evening that lasted for years. The drapes tightly drawn. The house quiet, residents and servants sleeping. As though a carriage or automobile would pull up at any moment and the doorbell would ring.

  August. August 1914. It must still have been hot in town, dogs barked in increasing clusters along fences in the suburbs, and boys angled in the river for fish rising to catch dragonflies and butterflies exhausted by the lean summer air. On the main thoroughfares the tramways were late more often, bearing nocturnal passengers into the dark, into the unlit outskirts. From there, from the outskirts, came the wind, carrying voices caught in the forests and fields, overheard by village windows: the keening wail, the blank verse of recitative farewell—women seeing off sons, husbands, and brothers with ancient words, nameless, powerful in chorus, and in impersonal grief; the women sobbing in unity, like an enormous belly expelling the sound; they bore children in pain and would see them off to death in pain, giving away the flesh of their flesh to the evil of killing, to die in foreign lands.

  Shadows, contorted by whispering crosswinds, dance on the walls, bitter voices pound the windows, but Andreas and Gustav do not hear. Night, black as oil, drips from their black coats. The dull light of lamps shines on the blades of ancient daggers, sabers, and swords hanging on the wall like a multibeamed star. The two masters of steel regret for the first time that they had hung the blades here, the cold night sun of weapons rises over their heads, the blades are raised over their necks.

  Kirill sees Gustav and Andreas in their house, but he cannot hear what they are saying—an invisible, incorporeal wind tears the words from their lips and crumples them, carries them through the walls. But Kirill knows what they are talking about. The announcement from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. All German citizens ages eighteen to forty-five are considered military prisoners and will be sent into exile—at their own expense. Yes, Gustav and Andreas are older. They are now citizens of the Russian Empire. The blade flashed close to their heads, they felt the swish. Danger. What next?

  Messengers gallop along the nocturnal fields, illuminated by indolent bolts of lightning, heading for the army of people, horses, and forage. The first scouting missions are now on foreign soil. Somewhere in the night of East Prussia, Gustav’s cannons are moving, his artillery carts are rolling, his pumps and boilers are working, his armor is protecting sailors on military ships, dreadnaughts and cruisers; military trains rush from every corner of the country along his rails. But all this is separate from Gustav, it cannot be credited to him, for now he is a pariah, a leper, and the barefoot newspaper boy shouts his name with cheerful hatred.

  Gustav and Andreas know that various clubs and societies are expelling Germans. The newspapers are full of stories about coming deportations and arrests, about turning confiscated property over to military hospitals. The public mood is bravura for now, reports coming in about the victory near Gumbinnen and German troops retreating deep into Eastern Prussia, and it might seem that the patriotic fervor will soon dim, by Christmas the troops will return to the winter quarters, and peace will be signed.

  However, while Gustav retained some illusions, still hoped that his good name would be protected from attacks and the quality of his products would lead to an uptick in orders, Andreas, who had a limited understanding of military things and avoided politics, had an engineer’s sense of harmony, and felt that the old construction of the world was reaching the end of its tensile strength; war was only a valve through which the demons of the future would burst into the world, and that valve could no longer be shut.

  The monsters of the coming world appeared to Andreas as new technology that the war would create: gigantic cannons, armored trains, floating fortresses with hundreds of weapons, monster zeppelins carrying firebombs. A few of Andreas’s sketches survived, hidden behind the postcards in the album. Kirill was stunned by the four horsemen in bolted armor and gas masks riding mechanical horses, but Kirill did not feel the artist’s confusion, as you do in Dürer’s Four Horsemen; he then realized that Andreas was not afraid of the future, guessing that as a man of the old era he would not live in the new one, and all his concern was for his descendants.

  The balance of rights and will between Gustav and Andreas invisibly shifted in the latter’s favor; Gustav was still head of the company, but Andreas spoke more in their evening conversations, while Gustav listened.

  September 1913. The Russians lost the battle at Tannenberg, which destroyed General Rennekampf’s First Army, whose punitive forces Arseny had seen during the first revolution, when he delivered the soldiers who had lost their minds from the Far East to Ryazan. Now once again, trains carried a horrible harvest of wounded men instead of grain, and people talked about German generals at the head of the Russian army: was there treachery?

  Once again the two stood; at sunset the sun turned red, like a bandage on a wound, and now night was black like the inside of a rifle barrel. Their factories were still working, melting steel, laying tracks; the lathes still turned, the freight was shipped, the bookkeepers counted money—but the forme
r confidence and drive was gone, evening moved through inertia, which was slowing down. Some contractors had declined work, state officials were no longer as pleasant, rivals stole their contracts, and their shares were falling; innumerable herds of lathes, machines, and mechanical leviathans were sweating the oily fear of metal.

  Gustav and Andreas knew they should flee—but they were unable to abandon their profits. And where would they run? In Germany and Austro-Hungary, they were Russians; in the Triple Entente countries, they were Germans. Should they go to neutral Sweden or America? They carefully felt out the possibility of selling their enterprises. But they were offered ridiculous, insulting prices; they decide to hold.

  December. Soon there would be Christmas balls and masquerades. Two-thirds fewer invitations than last year. The family was upset, but Gustav and Andreas were happy. Their life in the last month was like a vicious masquerade: almost no one openly revealed hostility, some were sympathetic, some were compassionate, still others offered help, vaguely hinting at interceding with the emperor, still others wanted to join the business, but it was all a game of masks and they could believe no one.

  And suddenly, the masks came off: The Society of 1914 was established in Petrograd; patriotic bankers and industrialists united to lobby for the interests of national capital. Gustav and Andreas were not invited. However, they think it will be easier now: there was a tangible foe, acting with understandable methods, and they will be able to handle him.