The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  She was given the room closer to the stove. She lay in bed, surrounded by pillows, beneath an ancient eiderdown. Her body seemed enormous, like a giant mound; even death could not take her all at once. Candles burned hot before the icon of the Mother of God brought from Vladimir.

  Sophia’s mother had lost her mind. On the brink of death, after three years of war and all the sermons and prayers for victory over the German invader, she thought that Arseny was a foreigner, a German—not her daughter’s husband—and that the grandsons were Sophia’s children from her real husband, a lieutenant from Vladimir who died in 1914; Arseny had a real, German name, he was a demon come to seduce Sophia. Lina was his servant, not his daughter, she could turn into a black raven, steal, spy, and cast spells.

  Life at the estate now revolved around the deathbed.

  When Arseny learned of his father’s death and left for Moscow, armed with a pistol, the old woman begged her daughter to bring a real doctor, since the one who called himself Arseny was not a doctor but a poisoner. She had heard from old, wise people, church men, that German doctors were spreading the black death in provinces, poisoning wells, sickening cattle, infesting the area with poisonous flies, and that is why people, when they caught the flies, beat them to death and threw their bodies into the ravine for dogs to eat. The bread was bitter, the yeast was not as strong, the salt was weaker, the emperor was drugged with herbs and made to abdicate—all the fault of the Germans.

  When Arseny returned after burying Andreas and leaving the mansion in the care of servants, he had to pretend he was not in the house, that Sophia had chased him out and was waiting for her true love to come back from war. That was when Lina stopped being suspicious of her father, her mental fever came to an end, because the old woman didn’t want to see the black raven, either, so she had to disappear, flying out the window. Her brothers were younger, and they treated the old woman’s fantasies as a grim game. Lina, who was not only older but had spent three years in wartime hospitals, in the midst of the delirium of the wounded, Lina was cured, as if she had been ill and developed an immunity to madness, which would save her in the future.

  Even the murder of Andreas did not give Arseny the determination to act. Now it was totally unclear where there was danger, where there was none, who was protected, who would be punished. The thought that it was dangerous everywhere and no one was protected was too terrible to contemplate then.

  Arseny hid behind his father’s death, fencing himself off from his silently demanding wife who was prepared to stay with her mother if he would only take the children—as far away as possible. He eliminated that option, however, by lending a large sum of cash, which he found in Andreas’s safe, to an old army friend who planned to make money supplying medicine from neutral countries. After a conversation with Andreas’s trusted bailiff, Arseny learned that his father had given money “for the revolution,” learned about Aristarkh and the safe conduct letter for the Schwerdt family; the letter had not saved Andreas, but Arseny found it among his papers and brought it with him to Pushcha—to calm Sophia down a bit.

  The arrival of the new year, 1918, was missing from every text that Kirill had located. Apparently, Sophia had asked him to bring their daughters from Petrograd and their son from Tsaritsyn, but Arseny expected his mother-in-law to have less than two months to live (without telling his wife) and waited for the inevitable end that would allow him to leave.

  Arseny went to Moscow to get the loan back, returning in disappointment: his friend said the money had been seized during a search. Arseny did not know if this was true or not; more than by the loss of money, he was shaken by the possibility of suspecting a friend known for his impeccable reputation, by the changes in people who turned out to be Januses.

  He also brought the news that there would soon be a change in the calendar: the Bolsheviks were preparing a decree on switching to the Gregorian calendar.

  Kirill, who could never remember to add or subtract days when converting from Old Style to New, at first thought that Lenin had given Great-Grandfather Arseny two weeks that did not exist in nature to extend his Fabian delay. Then he checked and saw that the change had tossed Arseny from January 31 right into February 14.

  Knowing his great-grandfather’s entire history, Kirill sensed that those lost days, the two weeks crossed out of the calendar by the Council of People’s Commissars (there was an idea of bringing the calendars closer together by a day a year, but Lenin insisted on the leap), were fateful, key. Arseny would be short those two weeks in the future to complete his plans; they—and soon it would be expressed in space as well—were an expression in time of the geometry of the family fate.

  The icy path tossed Arseny into the middle of February. On the eve of spring and sowing, representatives of the village council, recent deserters, appeared and demanded that the fields and barn, where the wounded Aristarkh had once hid, be turned over to common property and that the family move out of the manor house into an outbuilding; the library and grand piano would become property of the village club, which they would allegedly open at the estate.

  Other families might have been kicked out onto the street. But the old fame of the good doctor and Arseny’s own medical service still provided a thin shield of protection to the family. But the village was swiftly turning Red, while Arseny was a gold-epaulette officer, and the people he had treated yesterday could come tomorrow to divide up his fields in accordance with the land decree and with their own understanding of what was fair.

  However, Aristarkh’s note slightly cooled the zeal of the expropriators and gave Arseny an understanding of how to proceed: color the family and adopt the victorious red, symbolically or practically. Arseny went to Moscow to see Aristarkh and returned a Red Army doctor with the right to preserve the house for his family—not the land, not the library, but at least there was a roof over their heads.

  The new, Red Arseny became the man that Kirill had known since his adolescence, albeit spectrally—Grandmother Karolina had a photograph of him in her room, wearing an old-style Red Army cap with a red star on the band. In order to bring the children into the new reality, in a collapsing country that was losing its sense, you needed to have status, a magical artifact that opened doors and controlled chaos; that artifact was the uniform of the Red Army, recut from the imperial cloth.

  Arseny received a lacuna of time. The Red Army as such did not yet exist, there was no unit where he was supposed to report, but the uniform existed, he had papers, and using them he brought his daughters from Petrograd and made sure that the fields of a Red Army family were plowed. Even the German surname, which sounded dangerous in the old country, seemed to have lost that effect in the new: Comrade Schwerdt meant something different than mister or excellency.

  Kirill tried to figure out how sincere Arseny’s metamorphosis was, how far he planned to travel on the Red path. As an adolescent, Kirill saw only the Red side, as if his great-grandfather had been born to exist only in 1918, with a red-starred cap on his head; now his vision had shifted to prerevolutionary times, and Kirill could not combine the two identities.

  The red wave he had planned to ride by signing up for the army rose high. The Civil War, which began with skirmishes around Petrograd, engulfed more regions. The spring warmth allowed combat to spread, the Cossacks arose in the south, Germans invaded from Ukraine, the volunteer army of the Whites and Cossacks jointly attacked Tsaritsyn, which was soon besieged.

  The cursed two missing weeks worked for the first time: Arseny had almost reached the city where Mikhail, their youngest son, was, but he was traveling on his own, without orders; the Whites surrounded Tsaritsyn, cutting off the roads, and he was forced to turn back.

  He asked to join the troops defending Tsaritsyn, but reinforcements were being sent from other directions; but when they studied his papers, he was sent to run the hospital in the rear.

  There was constant fighting around Tsaritsyn, the ring of Whites narrowed then expanded; communications were not
working and it was impossible to find out if the relatives were alive, if his son was alive, inside the city. July, August, September, October, November, December, January—three long sieges, river battles on the Volga—the city turned, as did Leningrad later, into the next world that is reached by water, by river, along the narrow road of life, where not many are allowed to pass.

  At the estate, under Sophia’s watch, her mother faded. Arseny, in his hospital, located in a small provincial town, watched the new regime, which had ceded the best wheat-growing regions to the Whites, strengthen the requisition system it had inherited from the empire, introduce a monopoly on bread, and declare that anyone hiding grain and flour was an enemy of the people. A Food Requisition Detachment arose in order to squeeze supplies out of the villages; Arseny saw murdered requisition agents, peasants shot by the Reds in retaliation, and he must have understood whom he had decided to serve, what the red star meant on his cap. Former coworkers found ways of making their way south, to join the Whites and fight the Bolsheviks, but he had a family, his son was trapped in Tsaritsyn, and his dying mother-in-law could not be moved. He waited, he stopped keeping a journal, and lost himself in medicine; there was only one scene he recorded, which Grandmother Karolina found later and retold in a letter.

  There was a distillery near the town. The mash was poured off into the pond at the edge of the town. The distillery attracted armed deserters, wandering soldiers, who took over empty houses; they bought or took alcohol, and drank, drank, drank, and drank ... Pigs and other animals started frequenting the pond; they got drunk, too, and sprawled in the mud; once for a joke, someone tossed a worn overcoat on an intoxicated pig, which then ran around the streets, urged on by shots fired in the air.

  The requisitions brought the distillery to a halt, there was no more grain or potatoes. The deserters remembered the pond with the mash, the murky substance that could be forced to yield a little more alcohol. So men and animals gathered at the stinking, foul puddle, deserters with pails stepped into the muck, sinking, while pigs slurped the mushy waters and ate intoxicating mud. A shot intended to chase the pigs from the pond winged a hog, the pigs panicked and ran into the deepest part of the pond, trampling two drunkards; another shot, another miss—the bullet struck a mash collector’s shoulder; an answering shot—and now men and animals were embroiled, struggling in the sucking mud, passing out from the fumes; no way to tell the men from the animals.

  Arseny, as a Red commander, could have thought that the Bolshevik regime existed to establish order and restrain dark passions. But he saw demons being driven out of swine and entering people, contrary to the biblical story; and he was no Red commander, anyway, his coloring was a pretense; the pendulum of his sympathies—if he paid any attention to sympathies—swung to the Whites.

  Did he understand that while the White Army was winning victories, the victories of Bolsheviks were ripening in the future? Moreover, the current serious but not decisive victories of the Whites were the surety for the coming victories of the Reds who sat on military supplies from tsarist Russia, concentrated in the middle of the country, exchanging time and space for the opportunity to discipline and train its motley army.

  Kirill assumed that this great-grandfather did not see that far, that he was convinced by the military success and massive attack of the White armies and the aid from allies in the Entente. After all, he knew some of the leaders of the White movement personally, had served under them in Galicia.

  Also—and this idea, this image stunned Kirill when he realized—White Russia lived according to the old Julian calendar. When the Whites took a city, the newly appointed commandant immediately issued a decree turning back time.

  Turning back time!

  It was the first point of the leaflets pasted on fences: not bread, arms, order, establishments, trade, private property, agitation, system of government—all that came later, below—but time per se. And therefore when the Bolsheviks took the same city by storm, their first decree was the unfolding of time, replacing the Julian calendar with the Gregorian, throwing the residents two weeks into the future. There was a rigid, inexorable metaphysical quality, more terrible than extrajudicial executions, torture, and starvation, in the struggle of two calendars and two times, the White past and the Red future; this military, revolutionary power over time, habitually accessed by any Red regiment commander and any White staff captain made city commandant, cast the Civil War battles, modest in comparison to the recent World War, in the light of the War of the Titans, reducing people to grains of sand and permitting every sort of ruthlessness.

  Arseny, having experienced that eerie leap from late January to mid-February, might have considered switching to the side of the Whites in order to return to the past, to get back the time that was unjustly taken from him.

  Here a plot began that Grandmother Karolina never wrote about, she simply didn’t know even though she took part in it; for her these were just work transfers for her father, new appointments, the topography of life. But Kirill juxtaposed all the circumstances and became convinced that Arseny was planning an escape, and a very elegant one: an escape without moving from the spot.

  In January 1919, Sophia’s mother died. The Whites still had Tsaritsyn under siege, and in accordance with the campaigns of the previous year, a new advance of White armies from the south could be expected in the spring or early summer.

  Arseny called his wife and children to join him at the hospital; he sent an orderly to protect them on the journey. Sophia did not want to abandon the estate, which would certainly be plundered by the peasants, or Andreas’s empty house in Moscow, in which they hoped to get a room or two from the new regime; but Arseny insisted, and she obeyed.

  Then Arseny asked to be transferred closer to the front, to the city of Borisoglebsk, two hundred kilometers from Tsaritsyn. This was the sector of the front that the mounted Whites would traverse in the summer.

  Grandmother Karolina was not surprised by her father’s request for a transfer, noting only that he wanted to be closer to his son Mikhail, lost in Tsaritsyn, and perhaps hoped there would be an opportunity to get into the besieged city. Kirill compared military charts with their red and blue arrows, wrote down key dates, and figured out Arseny’s secret plan: he had hoped that the Whites would take both Borisoglebsk and Tsaritsyn in the summer and the front would move in a solid line to the north; the family and the lost son would then be behind the White lines.

  Kirill studied yet again the places where his great-grandfather’s hospital had been stationed during World War I and calculated which units sent their wounded to the hospital, and it all came together: they were the infantry regiments and Cossack cavalry that later formed the foundation of the White Army.

  So he really could have counted on meeting people he knew, who owed their lives to him, among the White officers; he could have hoped that he would not be accused of treason for serving in the Red Army—at that time both armies were made up of turncoats, who went back and forth in platoons, squadrons, battalions, regiments.

  The idea almost worked; but again at the most crucial, most dangerous moment that curse of the two missing weeks went into effect. Because of arguments in the command, the White armies did not attack in concert; the right group headed for Tsaritsyn confused the Red battle order, while the left group of General Mamontov did not turn back to the front, broke through the defense lines, and went to storm the Red rear, bypassing the hotbeds of resistance and allowing the Reds to re-establish their positions.

  Even worse, Arseny and his family left later than planned because of hassles with the appointment and documents. If they had been just a little earlier, he would have been able to reach the bottleneck where Mamontov would break through, he would be where there was a moveable but useable corridor for a week or so to the White side. But he was too late. The locomotive was gasping on second-rate coal, the train traveled slightly faster than a pedestrian, and as a result it intersected with the route of Mamontov’s cavalry when it
was returning from a raid in the Red rear guard.

  Arseny must have thought he would make it to Borisoglebsk in time and then when the Whites took the city and set up a garrison, he would find some senior officers he knew. Kirill did not know if he planned to join the White Army or after finding Mikhail in Tsaritsyn, leave Russia, through the south, through Crimea. The world war was over and the sea routes to Europe previously closed by the Turkish fleet were now open.

  But the army train on the road to Borisoglebsk met only a distant cavalry unit, a half squadron or squadron, sent to cover the rear of Mamontov’s main column, retreating, going back—without senior officers, without firm command, just a hundred men on horseback.

  There Arseny experienced the feeling that Kirill came to call the Borisoglebsk horror.

  It was getting toward evening. The train stopped for minor repairs in the middle of the steppe. Suddenly a crowd of cavalrymen appeared from the dark side, from the east. Wearing shaggy hats and bearing spears, they seemed like visitors from the distant past when militant nomadic tribes followed this route to the West. The bright moon appeared from behind a cloud and he could see that the horsemen were dressed in stolen fur coats, men’s and women’s. Instead of horse blankets they had mud- and blood-spattered cuts of expensive cloth; gold and pearl icon covers, stolen from churches, sparkled in their saddlebags; the moonlight, the steam from the horses’ nostrils, the pale faceted tips of the spears—it was a demonic host from hell, Mongols come to take the wooden cities of old Rus.

  For one second Arseny, a physician, an officer, really believed that this wild mounted horde had been spewed from the steppe of the past. That was the moment of the Borisoglebsk horror, the infernal abyss, a hole in the spreading fabric of history through which the riders of the Russian Apocalypse came into this world.