The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  In the letter to her vanished beloved, Grandmother Karolina described what she never told her father or grandson.

  Kirill had never forgotten the summer storm of his childhood that smashed the apple trees, and his grandmother shutting all the windows in the house, checking the hinges and latches, and then freezing before the blurred and rainbow-like reflection of the candle in the sweaty window, fainting, and then whispering as the smelling salts brought her back: “Enough, don’t, Father.” Now Kirill knew the source of her fear and why it was so strong.

  Lina stood in the room, feeling the storm gathering in the charged autumn air, filled with the warmth and damp of the last sunny days—half-hearted, straining, unable to let loose with thunder and lightning.

  A light flickered in the yard—one of the household with a lantern, thought Lina, but remembered that they were running low on kerosene and the lantern was put away. What was it then? She drew close to the window and saw floating toward her an orangey yellow sphere with violet crackling veins, full of a beautiful and furious fire.

  The ball delighted her—and terrified her; she couldn’t move, her feet, her fingers, her tongue would not obey. She saw that it had come for her, that ball, and would kill her, because she, because, because, because—Lina feverishly went through all her sins, which had become manifold and towering, like night shadows in candlelight, but still not significant enough to explain the appearance of the golden burning ball.

  The ball hesitated outside, and then, as if endowed with will and reason, flew in through the open pane and headed inside the house; it swayed, stopped, trembling, two meters above the floor, like a gigantic cyclopean eye searching for someone in a dark cave.

  Lina guessed whose eye it was: God was looking at her, God who knew she did not believe in him enough, that she had been bored when her parents took her to church to pray for their escape from danger and for the speedy return of her brothers and sisters.

  It was cold in church, she wanted to go home, where her little bed stood behind a screen in her parents’ bedroom and which she had outgrown over the last three years, but into which she tried to fit, squeezing in and pulling up her elbows and knees, to fall asleep there and wake up back in the past, which she barely remembered, only the gold-painted shells of the walnuts that had decorated the last prewar Christmas tree.

  God, whose presence Lina had not felt in church during the boring service, was now looking at her, who had dared not to remember Him. She fainted, fell to the floor, and awakened to the smell of ammonia; God’s eye had vanished, there was a strange draft carrying a cool heavenly freshness; the fiery sphere glowed before her, as if it had been branded on her eyes.

  The ball lightning was a collective symbol of all the terrifying mirages of that autumn, a kiss from the future, a sign of who would survive, thought Kirill. If she had not lost the ability to speak, Lina would have told her father about the appearance of God: the flaming bush, the sphere of flowing fire that she saw on icons. But her power of speech was blessedly taken away, and the mystery remained unspoken.

  Later, when it returned, she kept God to herself. God as a terrible miracle that gave her the knowledge that there are no safe days and places, no quiet harbors, that something wild and all-powerful is always near and ready to fall upon you with all its strength.

  Of course, in her letter Grandmother Karolina talked about the ball lightning, a material phenomenon, and wrote the word God with a lowercase G. She was trying to persuade her beloved that any catastrophe could be faced, that there was no need to despair—but she contradicted herself, since she admitted that she seemed to have died in that room and that was why she now had the “powers” to live now, in 1937; she put powers in quotation marks, not indicating irony but otherworldliness.

  Karolina’s muteness and subsequent resurrection seemed to explain Arseny’s inaction: he did not gather his children scattered in various cities. As part of the family history, the fact did not attract Kirill’s attention at first; but then he, himself not yet a father, suddenly wondered how it was possible to have not seen your children for three years, and still to put things off.

  Kirill imagined his great-grandfather: in the early weeks he restored order to the estate, treated the peasants, arranged deliveries of provisions for the moment and for the future. Arseny must not have understood for sure where to gather the children, at Pushcha or in the Moscow house, or maybe in St. Petersburg, where Antonina and Ulyana were living, closer to neutral Sweden, reachable by train via Finland, where they could all go ... But there was shooting on the street almost every day in Petrograd. In Vladimir, with his wife’s family, out in the provinces with its strong traditions, where no revolution could reach? But how would the relatives react, and then what? In Tsaritsyn, where Mikhail was, at the Volga crossroads, where roads lead to Siberia or Asia or the Caucasus?

  The children in different cities were like lighthouses promising different pictures of the future. Arseny, who after seeing the collapse of the army, the thousands of deserters and the hundreds of murdered officers, was unsure of how to proceed.

  He could have gathered the children at the estate and decided later—but he wanted to avoid unnecessary trips on railroads held by soldiers fleeing from the front, and looked for the simplest routes.

  The estate was not far from the city—in the olden days the mailman brought newspapers and telegrams—but now the news that reached them had aged along the way, creating an ephemeral world of echoing events that nevertheless still had real qualities here.

  Kirill subconsciously expected the Bolshevik coup to affect all of Russia instantly, in one second, like a jolt of electricity; but rather vague news reached Pushcha only a week later.

  However, and this was the most interesting thing for Kirill, the profound dramaturgy, like a drawing of great events, developed in the life of the family independently of the news they received or did not receive in their backwater.

  Kirill discovered a stratum of great images that defined life, images in which people can see history—and they were not demonstrations, battles, the cannons of the Aurora aimed at the Winter Palace, but the quiet mysteries of daily life, crystals through which you can see the essence of events.

  One day Arseny took his daughter with him to see a patient in a distant village. He did not want her to lose any nursing skills and he wanted the locals to remember her as a helper. On the way back, in deep twilight, they traveled along the floodplain of the Oka, past oxbow lakes rich in fish.

  The river had not yet frozen, it was slush, the lakes were covered by the first ice, smooth, transparent as mica. In the evening dusk they saw lights ahead, illuminating the treetops, reflected in the ice, warm yellow fog penetrating the ice. Light snow was falling, a silvery rope tightening the space; smoky torches burned, their flames mixing with the thick steam of breath; and dark male figures slowly moved along the ice, some with wooden mallets, others with spears. Both father and daughter knew what they were seeing, but the figures were so strange, so like a dark procession of pagan Slavic gods, so unexpected was the fire in the night, so fresh were the rumors of robberies and arson, so malevolent were the spears and hammers that they stopped their horse; it seemed as if the countryside, exhausted by soldiering, had risen up against city and church.

  Night ice fishing: the oxbow lake was famous for its burbot, a predatory fish that does not sleep in the winter. The burbot swims toward the light, the fisherman strikes the ice with a hammer, deafening the fish, and then breaks the ice with the gaff and pulls out the catch.

  Finally recognizing the men from the nearest village, they rode over to the shore; Arseny probably expected them to offer him some fish as a sign of respect.

  A thin ice had spread over the freezing water, October water. Above it, it was November, and the fishermen walked with spears and hammers scattering fans of predatory light; the chilled sheets of silence creaked, beards steamed, and they could hear quiet conversation, resounding sharply in the hunting night. Ba
m! The wooden hammer struck, the ice bent in a branching star, filled with the wild white milk of the blow, the gaff plunged down into the ringing slush—and the crazed burbot lay with its curved yellow belly on the ice, sprinkled with snow like sugar.

  Splash! The gaff from November plunged down into October, the quiet of unmoving water, clear of silt, and the fish was instantly on the ice, thrown into the future, pierced by the spear’s jagged teeth.

  In the 1930s, Grandmother Karolina wrote about what she had seen and remembered during World War I, the Civil War, and later. But the fishermen on the thin ice, the winter flames beneath the icy skies, the blows of hammers, the splashes of spears, the death dances of the repulsively resilient fish, the bloody water spreading on the ice, the greedy jaws of the ice holes—this seemed to always stand before her eyes like a prophesy.

  “Dear friend, even in this quiet house fever strikes me.” Grandmother Karolina mentioned that when she read Alexander Blok’s poem in the 1920s, she immediately thought of the fall of 1917 at the estate—as if Blok were writing about her and her feelings.

  Kirill took down the blue volume of Blok’s works, the third volume of eight, and found the poem in the index. An aspen leaf that had lost its crimson color slipped out of the open pages—Grandmother had liked such random bookmarks.

  Dear friend, even in this quiet house

  Fever strikes me!

  I can’t find a place in this quiet house

  Near the peaceful fire!

  Voices sing, the blizzard calls,

  I fear this coziness ...

  Even behind your shoulders, my friend,

  Someone’s eyes are watching!

  Behind your quiet shoulders

  I hear the rustle of wings ...

  His glowing eyes strike at me

  The angel of the storm—Azrael!

  Kirill froze. The first time she read this poem, she could not have known how it would end. The angel of storms, Azrael, angel of death, conductor of souls, had looked at her with glowing eyes.

  The fierce eyes of God floating in the twilight, the flaming ball lightning in the white room, unconsciousness, muteness, doom, solitude—and then less than ten years later, as if in a mirror, encountering a similar experience in Blok’s work, as if the number of great images is limited, like the number of cards in a fortuneteller’s deck, and in similar situations the same ones always appear.

  Kirill recalled the gaze of the eye at the German Cemetery from a Masonic tombstone; he forbade himself to think along those lines, as if trying to avoid the rhymes of destinies.

  ***

  I fear this coziness ...

  They closed up the big room. They covered the grand piano with white cloth, as they once did for funerals. It had gone out of tune over three years. The tuner used to come from town, but now he was gone, and the piano was no longer played; the lovely evenings for which it had been bought were no more, as well. The glazier was gone, too, and he was supposed to repair the windows for winter; sensing disaster ahead, people were leaving. Before, they would have found another one, but now it seemed craftsmen existed only in single numbers of each kind, and the material world was rapidly becoming depleted: you couldn’t buy glass, kerosene, salt, soap, or nails, everything was being hoarded in case of need or in hope of profit.

  It seemed Great-Grandfather Arseny was frightened by the impoverishment. He was a firm man, but firm in secure times when the order of things was not disturbed. And now even things seemed to be affected by human activity, in the revolutionary changing of masks, features, sides; they had stopped being what they seemed: kerosene only smelled like kerosene but was water, soap didn’t lather, sugar had a chalky aftertaste, and forged banknotes appeared. Arseny spent more time on the second floor in the small room that had belonged to Balthasar. After his death it became a repository for unneeded or broken things; homeopathic flasks and ancient medical books still stood on the shelves, and the small copper-trimmed trunk that locked with a key held Balthasar’s papers—letters, notes, medical tracts.

  Lina would sneak up the creaky staircase; it was impossible to see in, so she listened to her father unlock the trunk, the papers rustling, the pen clinking against the inkwell. He sat there at the watershed of the year and era, like Balthasar in the Tower of Solitude, reading his grandfather’s documents, making his own notations, in a country that no longer existed and was about to fall into the abyss, a country in which he was born because his ancestor had believed in a chimera, and that chimera, when mixed with the fraught soil, gave birth to a line of damaged destinies.

  Her father never talked about what he did in the attic. Lina sensed that Sophia wanted to drag her husband out of his refuge and tie him to the present—but Arseny was inflexible.

  Kirill thought he had the same stubborn strength to resist flight, demanding that the past you are escaping from must first be sorted and packed, so to speak, otherwise the anxiety over something forgotten, misunderstood, unclarified will not let you set out or will lead you in circles; you won’t get through, you’ll be snagged, you’ll be stuck.

  Lina considered her father’s secret solitary work malevolent. At her age, she was more closely tied to her given name than to her German surname; she felt she was Lina rather than Karolina Schwerdt. Three years of war had taught her to see the enemy in Germans, and her German origins, which sometimes made her the butt of good-natured but unabashed jokes among the nurses and aides, had become the object of indignant rejection. She imagined that the surname Schwerdt meant nothing, it was just a collection of letters; Balthasar was as elusive as a ghost, and Iron Gustav and Andreas were Russians, because, illogically, she considered herself Russian, and she was their granddaughter and great-granddaughter.

  Karolina later recalled that strangely, the family almost never spoke of the German relatives, the children and grandchildren of Balthasar’s middle brother, Bertold, who had remained in Germany. One of Andreas’s sisters corresponded with him, even went to visit. But Andreas was not close to him, limiting their contact to holiday greetings and presents. Perhaps that had been Iron Gustav’s wish, to avoid having parasitic German relatives, but it’s more likely that Andreas continued to bear the cross of his father, who had considered himself guilty of the death of his younger brother, Andreas the Marinated Midshipman.

  But all that was before World War I. The war cut off all ties, and boundaries of love and hatred were very clearly delineated. And now Lina, who was not quite sure what the mysterious German trunk contained, watched her father very closely, watching that he was not transformed, like a werewolf, into a German, by reading German words.

  Arseny read Balthasar’s texts aloud, recalled his childhood, in this very attic, the medicine vials that made him a doctor, and tried to understand who Balthasar really was, having come to Russia to proselytize homeopathy, plunging his descendants into the indeterminate, brittle world on the border of countries and cultures, a world born of his apostolic illusions—and what he, Arseny, should do now.

  Lina only heard foreign speech, unfamiliar on her father’s lips, because the German lessons had stopped during war. She was afraid that by uttering enemy words, her father would stop being her father and become Herr Doktor, as he was called by the German prisoner of war from an uhlan unit, wounded by a lance in a skirmish between patrols and brought to the Russian hospital. Lina recalled with astonished horror that her father accepted that form of address as the most natural thing, as if he truly was a malevolent Herr Doktor and not a physician. For Lina the words Herr Doktor did not mean “mister doctor” in another language, but were a vicious name for a murderer with a scalpel, a secret collaborator with that arrogant uhlan who, they say, cut down three Russian cavalrymen before being thrown off his horse with a lance.

  So Lina kept watch by the door. Her father’s profession, the foreign Latin, his absolute power over patients in beds—the power to decide whose leg is kept, whose arm is amputated, who can get up, who has to stay in a cast; the right to pr
escribe medicine, white, yellow, round, oval pills with incomprehensible names, three times a day before food, once a day on an empty stomach, six times a day with water, medicine about which the patient knew nothing, with strange names, the composition unknown, the action undefined—all that taken together seemed very suspicious to her.

  When they dined together, father was father. But when he went off alone upstairs, Lina felt the stirrings of those suspicions that were not about her father specifically but about the white garb—alienating, repellent—of the physician, beneath which it is so easy to hide black intentions.

  Lina’s imagination might have wandered further if not for a belated message from Vladimir, where the brothers Gleb and Boris were living with Sophia’s parents. Sophia’s mother was gravely ill. The children had to be taken back, the mother had to be moved, too, because Sophia’s brothers were at the front and her elderly father, a priest, could not take care of his wife.

  Rumor had it that skirmishes continued in Moscow between the Junkers and the workers’ units. So Arseny took a roundabout route, via Ryazan and Murom, via the swampy Meshchyora Lowlands, on a sledge. He did not like Sophia’s mother, or any of the family in Vladimir, but he could not refuse.

  Three weeks later Arseny was back, bringing his sons and paralyzed mother-in-law, managing to travel through three cities where they were arresting officials of the Provisional Government, seizing banks and post offices, handing out guns to workers, releasing peasants jailed for taking over estate lands, and adding red ribbons to the coats of soldiers from the reserves; officers avoided appearing in uniform on the streets, and inns passed along reports of robbed and murdered travelers.

  Arseny knew that the illness was untreatable; the question was how long it would last. The important thing was that Sophia’s mother had almost died on the road, and it was impossible to take her even to Moscow; she would not survive another trip. So the family found itself locked up at the estate, tied to the life and death of the grandmother from Vladimir.