The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  One of the earliest decrees of the Provisional Government repealed the repressive laws against citizens of German origin. Andreas could have taken a free breath.

  But the same government, deciding to fulfill its allied obligations and continue the war, picked up the war’s spymania. After the armed insurrection in July in Petrograd, detectives and investigators cast a wide net, trying to prove the connection between Bolsheviks and the German HQ; Aristarkh by then had quit the SR party and joined the Bolsheviks, and now Andreas’s money was going to the coffers of Lenin’s party.

  Kirill read all the volumes of the case against the Bolsheviks, outstanding in number and degree of legal acrobatics; in the background, in secondary statements, the names of Andreas’s companies flashed by. That meant he was back in the sights of counterintelligence, once again had made the wrong choice, and he must have expected to be arrested soon.

  Andreas could have fled, he wasn’t as stubborn as Gustav, but he was ill and he infected his wife, so to speak, who was emotionally dependent on him; she also began suffering migraines, was unable to get out of bed, and soon the most frequent visitors to the house were doctors. Some recommended neutral Switzerland for the waters, but all paths there went through warring countries and dangerous seas; others recommended the mineral waters and baths of Piatigorsk, but there was war in the Caucasus, too, Russian troops fighting yet again near Kars, and revolts exploding in the mountains.

  So Andreas was there for the October Revolution. Not far from the house, on Krasnaya Presnya, skirmishes raged, people shooting cannons and rifles made by Gustav and Andreas; during those days when the city did not yet belong to anyone, furious requisitions ensued: reserve soldiers, deserters from the front, and street thugs wearing red ribbons robbed the houses of the bourgeoisie.

  Andreas had paid a price not to be persecuted for his nationality—and he was robbed not as a German but as a rich pig, fully in accord with the doctrine he supported. For the first time the door of the mansion was broached by uninvited guests, for the first time he was defenseless in his own house. Desperately, Andreas met with Aristarkh, who held a post in the Moscow Cheka, and received a safe conduct pass from him: the note on Cheka stationery stated that the Schwerdt family actively helped the revolution and was under the protection of the agencies of revolutionary law and order.

  He tried to show the note to the next band of robbers who broke down the door and stormed into the study—and was killed. The note did not stop the bandits. He tried to defend himself with what was at hand, he grabbed one of the swords that until recently had hung on the wall—and was stabbed with it, killed by his own weapon: a savage, ludicrous death, to be stabbed by an ancient blade in revolutionary Moscow.

  ***

  Kirill knew the room where Andreas was killed. But generations of Soviet bureaucrats from the foreign ministry had not only taken over the walls and rooms, they had destroyed the very idea of former ownership of the building, made it part of a city suffering from amnesia. Even the death of his great-grandfather—in this house, on this street—was not subject to resurrection or emotional reconstruction, as if he had died in an unreal world that had no connections with today’s world. The connection—if there was any at all—was with Pushcha, the former estate given to Arseny for his wedding, the estate where he returned in early winter of 1917 after three years at war, missing his father, who had been killed in Moscow.

  By Kirill’s time, there was nothing left of the estate. The log house had been taken apart in the thirties, as Grandmother Karolina wrote, and moved to the nearest large village, to house the village council. After the war, the old council was razed, and then the land of the former estate was used for a dacha complex.

  But the site of the estate had been so cleverly chosen—on the incline of a steep ravine holding a fast-flowing brook headed toward the Oka River—the landscape, as if it presupposed the presence of a house, caught the searching eye and was easily recognized from Grandmother’s descriptions and the old photograph that Great-Grandfather Arseny made in the winter of 1917–1918. He had a Kodak, some glass plates remained, and he hurried to use them up, photographing the house and surroundings, as if he knew they would all be gone soon.

  There must have been more photoplates, but Karolina saved only six: the house, the ravine, the birch grove, a horse by a haystack, the road that Arseny with wife and daughter took to come home in November 1917, and a photo of the three of them in front of the house.

  Later, in Kirill’s lifetime, the photos were transferred to paper and printed in large format. Grandmother spent hours in the evenings looking at them with a loupe, bringing up part of the photograph like the surface of the moon, covered in craters, canyons, and shadows, and Kirill used to think that she was studying the mysterious layer of silver, which captured, like coffee grounds, signs of the future, and trying to guess if the future of the house and its owners had already been preordained back then.

  Kirill visited the former estate many times. In spring, the murky brook rushed down the ravine, and children came to build rafts; in summer, the old and untended apple trees of the garden, lost among the weed trees, showed themselves with red fruit; in fall and winter, when the branches were bare, the birch grove became transparent and the view opened all the way to the Oka. It created the false but pleasant sensation that you were in a safe spot, a place of peace, a sensation that slowed you down, invited mindfulness, the wisdom of expectation; every time he left, Kirill felt that he wanted to stay, to look in the distance, enjoy the tranquility of the valley—and understood even better the fateful winter of Great-Grandfather Arseny.

  For three years Arseny’s hospital moved along the front, following the advancing and retreating Russian armies. Of his six children, he brought only Karolina, the eldest; Gustav had chosen her name, and it was German; the following children had only Russian names.

  His wife, Sophia, went with him as a nurse; she returned to the estate several times—most frequently in summer, during harvest, to oversee the work—and then went back to join her husband in the army.

  The other children were sent off to relatives. The brothers Gleb and Boris to Vladimir, to the wife’s family; the sisters Antonina and Ulyana to St. Petersburg, to the family of Gustav’s cousin; the youngest, Mikhail, born in 1915, after the war had begun, was sent to Tsaritsyn. Distant relatives of the Schmidts lived there; they were descendants of German colonists who sold salt and horses and dealt with the Kalmyk tribes; the youngest child had stomach problems and the family pediatrician had prescribed treatment of koumiss, mare’s milk.

  For three years Arseny ran the frontline hospital. Kirill knew almost nothing about those years. The hospital documents were lost during the Civil War; Arseny’s letters were probably destroyed later, out of fear that zealous NKVD investigators would find evidence against the former tsarist officer.

  Only postcards—again, postcards—sent to the children on holidays, and their responses. But of course there wasn’t a word about war: cupids and puppies, baskets of flowers and ribbons—only the postmarks allowed him to follow the hospital’s journey, juxtapose it to geography and the chronology of battles.

  A few of Sophia’s letters survived; she wrote the bailiff managing the estate. The house was getting old, the outbuilding needed repairs, he had to buy a water-hauling carriage, the greenhouses lost windows in hail storms. The local men were at war, bringing in the harvest was difficult, but they were sent two prisoners of war, former soldiers of the Austrian army, Serbs by nationality: they worked hard, but the bailiff still considered them enemy agents and suspected them of evil intentions.

  The bailiff, a distant relative of Sophia’s hired at the request of family, had once been dutiful and obedient. Now—his health kept him out of the army—he felt he was the master of the place and handled money freely.

  Arseny’s notes at the front consisted of medical instructions and books. Even though he did not fight but healed, the war exhausted him. He saw the futility o
f treatment: soldiers were brought back wounded a second and third time. He did not see a way out: just movement toward the abyss; he was crushed by the horrible meaninglessness of any effort, the disappearance of all passion that could give meaning to today’s suffering, find justification or at least explanation in the future.

  Even his previous socialist fervor was gone. What was left was the certainty that things could not get worse. The only meaning in the field of meaninglessness was to end it—stop time, block the flying bullets in midair, withdraw the crossed swords.

  Therefore, thought Kirill, Arseny heard the Bolshevik call for “peace without annexation and contribution” not as a tactical political move but a voice outside the political context, the voice of reason in the midst of unbridled madness.

  Mentally exhausted, Arseny became slow in his actions; he no longer believed in man’s ability to decide anything in his life and waited for instructions, suggestions, impulses from fate—an outside will that would spare him acting of his own volition.

  Tied to the hospital, to the wounded, Arseny spent the spring and summer of 1917 without thinking. Russian money was still worth something, the borders were open to neutral countries, but Arseny did not undertake anything that Kirill’s backward glance prescribed.

  Kirill finally understood why not. Arseny had missed the moment when he could have safely sent his wife and daughter home. It was growing more dangerous for them to remain at the front, the soldiers, especially in the nearby rear, had stopped being an army—but it was even more dangerous to embark on the long voyage alone. Had Arseny been a different man, he would have come up with a fake illness or begged for an unscheduled leave—but he was simple-mindedly honest, and the honesty was fed by the passivity of his nature.

  In late August, during Kornilov’s advance, a lieutenant colonel bayonetted by soldiers raging against Kornilovism was brought in to the hospital. He was still alive, but died after a few hours of suffering. The notation about the officer torn apart by subordinates who had, as the regimental party committee, actually elected him as their commander, was the first diary entry in all the time he had been at war: Arseny had apparently separated himself from the army and felt himself to be an individual, a civilian.

  Typhus broke out in one of the units. Arseny was ordered to take the patients far to the hinterland, into quarantine. He risked infecting his family, but the risk paid off: marauders did not attack the typhus train, it was not stopped by various authorities and committees, self-appointed soldiers and sailors barricades. Protected by the deadly illness, Arseny was able to get his daughter and wife away from the collapsing, dispersing front.

  ***

  They arrived at the estate in early October. Kirill wondered why Arseny had not stopped in Moscow at his father’s, in the big house, why did he go to the country? At first Kirill assumed that Arseny had put his family in quarantine to be sure they were not infected. The incubation period is about two weeks, and the onset of the disease is sudden—Kirill checked the medical encyclopedia; if Arseny were infected he could bring the disease into his father’s house inadvertently.

  But then Kirill realized that Arseny must have used that excuse because he wanted to hide from his father, the big city, the epoch, the world, and stay in the country where his trade as a doctor protected him better than any gun and where he could wait until the politicians decided who would be in charge.

  An old servant woman and the two Serb prisoners of war lived at the estate; the bailiff ran away with the money from the harvest. This loss was insignificant for the family; Andreas was still wealthy and could give his son money. But the theft and flight were evil omens.

  Not far from the estate in a clearing was a house with outbuildings, and the place was called Katya’s Farm. It stood in an abandoned garden, inhabited by an old woman, a priest’s widow, and her companion. Her sons had been wanting to move her to nearby Serpukhov, but she refused, saying she wanted to die where she had lived with her husband. She was a stingy old woman; when she was still strong enough she chased the village youths from her garden. Arseny remembered that they used to say she had a gold cross and money her husband had saved hidden in her cellar. They joked about it, just to harass the old woman, and the youths tried to climb in her windows to see if she ever accidentally indicated where the secret door was that led to the treasure.

  The old woman and her companion were killed the day before Arseny arrived. He was called in to look at the body. The women had been tortured, their hands burned in an effort to get them to reveal the location of the treasure.

  People had lived nearby for years, everyone knew the old woman was poor and had no golden crosses, they just gossiped out of malice. But now that the time of troubles was upon them, one of yesterday’s kids tortured the old woman to death; either he came to believe the old stories or he was showing off.

  Arseny was armed and did not need to fear an attack. But his fear was of something else: he sensed it was a time of tricks of mind and visions, phantasmagoric transformations, evil mirages through which the future near and distant could be glimpsed. What happened later merely confirmed Arseny’s premonition.

  ***

  Kirill put his grandmother’s letter on top of his great-grandfather’s diary; he was stunned by the realization that he was the only one who could read both texts; he was the third, he was the all-seeing.

  She had written the letter in 1937, in the fall. She was in love, while all around people were being arrested, and the arrests moved closer. For some reason she had not sent the letter—most likely because the recipient had been arrested, removed from the world of the living. No address, no surname, only his name—Arkady; the ink was blurred by tears.

  She was attempting to persuade her beloved to reciprocate, that she could protect him if their love was mutual. In order to prove her ability to be his amulet, she described an evening in the fall of 1917, when she was alone in an empty room of the estate.

  Kirill checked the calendar: it was the last autumn storm of 1917. A late storm, when the skies are empty and weak, and there is no trouble in the air. Kirill imagined how it had happened, comparing the notes of his great-grandfather and his grandmother’s letter.

  The storm was not too fierce: there was thunder beyond the woods, a flash in the distance, and then quiet. They were expecting rain, but not a drop fell. The evening light changed, lengthening the roads and widening the fields; then came twilight, which took on the stormy tension, diffuse, the power of electricity that had been unable to produce a lighting bolt. It was the kind of twilight that makes you think that someone would appear, walking from the field or driving down the main allée; you know that no one is expected but you watch standing on the veranda or resting your forehead on the window pane—will a stranger appear, will light flash from the lantern swinging in his hand?

  Grandmother Karolina—just Lina back then—must have stood that way in the big room; it had been closed for the winter, so as not to heat more rooms than necessary. No one would disturb her there. She stood and waited; she had returned from the war with her father, the miracle had already happened, but she had a supply of expectation, believed in the return of her brothers and sisters; she had to live through the expectation, return it to the emptiness of the fields, the pull of the waxing and waning of the moon, dissolved in nature.

  They found Lina by the window with an open pane. She was neither dead nor alive; the pulse was very weak, her eyes did not respond to light. She lay unconscious for three days, and then could not speak for another two weeks; she did not try, she did not make sounds or try to force her tongue to shape words; it was as if she were numb inside.

  They said that there was a mad dog in the area, someone’s escaped wolfhound, and that at night it approached houses, looking for people outside alone; it lived—allegedly—near Katya’s Farm: one evil begat another.

  Arseny wrote that when he found his daughter unconscious, his first thought was of the dog from Katya’s Farm, that it had
come to the window and frightened Lina; there was so much talk about the dog, it seemed so vicious, enormous, black, as it was described, a harbinger of catastrophe.

  The next morning Arseny saddled a horse, took a hunting rifle and pistol, and galloped to Katya’s Farm. It was muggy and gray, the rusty leaves rustled in the oaks. He was back from war, he had been in trenches during bayonet attacks, he had gone through artillery attacks; but he was afraid—he admitted in his notes—he kept imagining the mad eyes of the dog.

  The farmhouse was boarded up; there were no fresh tracks, human or animal. Arseny felt that the dog had outsmarted him, hidden somewhere nearby. His old horse was more accustomed to yoke than saddle and his old rifle often misfired; Arseny began to think that the dog had lured him into a trap. Cursing, he galloped away, superstitiously not taking the same road that had brought him there.

  At the edge of the field was a ditch where the villagers dumped dead cattle. Arseny rode past and saw a dog rummaging in the rotten carcasses. The dog that lived in Katya’s Farm, a small black mongrel. He realized with shame and anger that this was the “mad dog” terrorizing the area.

  He was so angry with himself that he dismounted, found a sturdy stick, got into the ditch, caught the dog, and beat it to death, burying it under a pile of leaves and rubbish.

  Arseny expected his daughter’s speech to return gradually, word by word. But the first snow fell, the whole yard was covered and the fields whitened—and Lina, as if awakening in another world, began to talk; Arseny noticed that she constructed her sentences differently, gone were her favorite childish words, her sentences were longer, the images clearer, as if she had grown up by several years. She did not remember what happened in that room. She went to the window and suddenly it was dark—that’s what she said.

  Arseny noticed that Lina went off on her own more, as if invisible chains connected her to someone or something; he wrote off the attack and illness as nervous exhaustion, explained them by the difficult trip from the front, everything that was not for children that Lina had seen.