The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  The train started, the driver was in a hurry to move the train. With that, time seemed to start again, too, and the moment of the present returned. It was only then that Arseny realized he was seeing Mamontov’s long-anticipated cavalry, the flying Cossack formation—rather, marauders, rapists, and killers into which the units he had once known had turned, who even in the past had no qualms about robbery or pogroms but had still obeyed their commanders.

  The train picked up speed. The Cossacks shot at the receding train and then vanished in the dusk on their worn-out horses. So Arseny ended up in Red Borisoglebsk, commanding a hospital again. Tsaritsyn remained White and there was no way to reach it.

  It might have been possible to try to join the Whites, there were guides who knew the hidden paths in the steppe, the dry creeks, the secret fords, the roundabout roads—but the Borisoglebsk horror, not so much fear for himself and his family as a swoon from the unexpected nearness of that terrible, underground Russia, where his grandfather Balthasar had come, without knowing it, the Russia of choleric revolts and the mad Prince Uryatinsky, frightened Arseny for good and deprived him of willpower; they needed to flee, but he could no longer run, the Borisoglebsk horror pursued him on ghost horses.

  So his great-grandfather remained a Red: the uniform and cap grew into his body. He led the hospital diligently, accepted the loss of the estate, and seemed to forget his previous life completely. The family accepted it, too, except for the middle son, Gleb, who tried to run away from home, traveling with the peasants on a cart; the cart was stopped at a checkpoint in the outskirts, and one of the soldiers recognized the doctor’s kid trying to pass as an orphan.

  Gleb told his father that he wanted to get to the front to fight the Whites, but Grandmother Karolina, a perceptive sister, always believed that Gleb had lied to his father: he did want to go to the front, but to join the Whites, not the Reds.

  The older brother, Boris—Gleb’s rival—played war with him, pretending to be a Red cavalryman galloping on a broom, wearing a budyonovka hat while his father wasn’t watching; that left the role of the White to Gleb, who was jealous of Boris, their father’s favorite. He decided to join the Whites. That was a strange preface to what would happen twenty years later, during the next great—greater—war.

  ***

  Kirill often thought about the 1917–1919 period in his great-grandfather’s biography: afterward it was just empty time with no possibility—for Arseny—to change his fate.

  Using Arseny as an example, he tried to understand the strategy of behavior in History writ large. He tried thinking and feeling not as a scholar but as a victim of history without strength and time to think, but forced to act—without those two weeks in reserve, panting for breath. His thoughts were scattered, abbreviated, and not forming a whole picture.

  In the current of life, flowing among habitual circumstances, you don’t feel that something is holding you back, that you are stuck. But the moment comes when you must act. You send your children to various cities. You think it’ll be a few months, it turns out to be many years. You’ve rewritten their destinies in some details that you yourself do not know, the most intimate ones. As if different spells were cast over their cribs and now cannot be recalled. If they had not been dispersed, would they have been saved later?

  Your mother-in-law is dying. Hidden conflict. You never liked her but you are a physician. You can’t abandon her, your conscience won’t let you.

  You lent money to a friend, and it was seized during a search. Not fatal, but bad; the money could have solved something, but not anymore, it’s in a soldier’s pocket—or your friend’s.

  The estate had been a dream but it’s become a burden. You lived with the burden, took care of it, but now you can’t sell it and the village soviet is threatening to take it away, and you don’t want to abandon it.

  Reading, thinking, Kirill didn’t need look at the details in order to see—like a psychic—the energy flow of history. He didn’t have the needed metaphorical language to describe what he saw and felt, but he did formulate a few points for himself.

  A great historical event creates a force field that shifts reality, bends the lines of destiny, tests life decisions and actions that in the ordinary course of things could work even if they were imprecise. All the hidden tension bursts onto the surface, all the mines and traps placed earlier, through carelessness or mindlessness, are set off. In some destinies these changes are imperceptible, in others they are enough to cause something unforeseen and destructive, or as the engineer Andreas would put it, the construction reaches its fatigue limit.

  Thus a new, additional eventfulness that reproduces itself appears, acting as a catalyst.

  The “mechanism” of events acquires new elements that can function either as sand or as lubricant. The timing of events, previously generally even, separates, flowing at different speeds; one thing happens faster and easily, another more slowly and with great difficulty.

  This additional eventfulness, reactively expanding, turns into an avalanche.

  That’s why a catastrophe cannot be explained rationally. You can see its basic dramatic lines, the main details, but not the whole, because the whole is subject to the tiniest of shifts, the loosening of seams, the weakening of all connecting elements.

  The catastrophe does not destroy something solid, strong, congealed. People would already be forced to take unusual steps, to creep out from their usual holes and dens, for the stability of the structure has already been dangerously exhausted.

  Otherwise it would be like the British formations at Waterloo—the order will withstand attack.

  The uncertainty of the future, the daily tasks of survival force people to behave egotistically, focused on their inner circle, decreasing the general resource of solidarity and thereby opening the way for passionate minorities.

  It is only at that moment that the minorities can provoke and develop events, sucking the disorganized masses into the narrow funnel of the future—of conflicting futures.

  In that sense the division into Whites and Reds was provisional. They did not yet exist in 1917. But there were radically oriented groups who set events into motion, forcing everyone else to choose, to take sides.

  Kirill returned to his thoughts about the generations of the family and their interrelationships.

  How Balthasar had unwittingly created, like a demiurge, a world consisting of fractional people, of German and Russian halves, quarters, eighths. Superfluous, transitional, additional, not fully part of the protective context of tradition. The price of misfires, accidents, bad coincidences was very high in that world; in it, a ridiculous suspicion, a nasty rumor, a mean gaze had great power to control reality—because fractional people are more vulnerable than whole ones, it is much easier to present them as demons in the current political bestiary.

  Grandmother Karolina and her brothers and sisters tried to break out of Balthasar’s world, to use the chance offered by the early Soviet era, which had seemingly abolished the old imperial prejudices, proclaimed the coming International, created a new history in which, thanks to Aristarkh’s letter, the Schwerdt family could find a place, as if on a train.

  But no one succeeded in escaping; even Grandmother Karolina, who had survived, had paid such a price that it could hardly be called a salvation. Only one person avoided the common fate, but only because the capricious Schwerdt family fate played a joke on him: it took away his name, memory, and family, turning him into a true child of the era, protected by the absolute absence of a biography.

  ***

  Great-Grandfather Arseny traveled to Tsaritysn, which became Stalingrad in 1925, three or four more times. He learned that back in 1918 the Cheka had executed the family that had taken in Mikhail. It was rumored that they were killed not for their counterrevolutionary activity but for their valuables. Their big house in the suburbs was on the line of defense of first the Reds and then the Whites; only ashes and rubble remained of the street.

  There
was no hope of finding neighbors; some died during skirmishes, some were hanged by the Reds for being fat cats and class enemies, some by the Whites for feeding Bolshevik soldiers; people scattered, moved away, sailed away, the men taken into the Red and White armies.

  Arseny found only one physician colleague who had treated the head of the vanished family. The doctor told him that the boy had a wet nurse, a baptized Kalmyk woman, strong, born in the steppes, good on a horse: perhaps she managed to take the boy out of the city or hide him there?

  At that time, the steppe was still in turmoil. The remains of the vanquished White armies and all kinds of gangs borne by the war were hiding out there; the Red Kalmyks killed White ones and vice versa; it was madness to poke your nose into the steppe without an armed platoon. Arseny started his search another way: he sent word with the commander of the Red Kalmyk squadron, who came into town for weapons, ammunition, and uniforms, that he was looking for a woman named Naikha, who had fed his son.

  The steppe responded, the steppe as a whole, more ancient than the squabbles of the new age: along distant paths and caravan routes from the foothills of the Caucasus to the Volga, from the Caspian Sea to the desert, from the Volga delta where pirates, heirs of Stenka Razin, ruled among the thousands of islands, to the Cossack villages, where skeletons from the infamous Civil War battle known as the Ice March still lay in ravines and washes, the word traveled, passed from mouth to mouth, crossing borders of hospitality, and returned: the woman called Naikha who had worked in Tsaritsyn for the German colonists, was not among the living, she did not return from the city, and her remains were there and not in the steppe.

  Arseny searched in orphanages for a boy who remembered the meaning of Mutter or Vater—they had spoken German at the colonists’ house. He also had a photograph sent to him in late 1916, Misha in a shirt and sailor hat, but how do you recognize a two-year-old in a seven-year-old boy?

  The orphanages had hundreds of children who had forgotten their names, who had gone through sieges on the frontlines, wounded, concussed. Even more children were homeless.

  Mikhail was not found.

  Later, after World War II, Grandmother Karolina had stopped thinking of Mikhail as being alive—his draft age put an end to that.

  But Kirill still felt that Mikhail could be found. What Arseny failed to do in his time, he would manage decades later.

  No one in the family except Karolina had survived World War II. It was not the war per se that killed them, but their German ancestry, an echo of the past in their destiny.

  That was why Mikhail was important to Kirill, as a laboratory specimen showing how a man who does not know his fateful ancestry lives his life—and how fate treats one who does not know. Different from the ones who do know?

  And also—although Kirill would not admit this out loud—he sensed that Mikhail had not starved to death as a child, did not perish during the sieges of Tsaritsyn, and had survived the war.

  One day Kirill took the photo of Mikhail as a child and stared at it in steady candlelight with the drapes closed. Freeing his mind of extraneous thoughts, he thought about what had happened to the boy.

  Essentially, Kirill was inventing his great-uncle. It was his favorite method of searching in places where the chains of information were torn and evidence destroyed; the accuracy of his artistic conjurings had often led him to true facts.

  Could Arseny not have recognized his son at an orphanage? Kirill felt that the answer had to be no. That meant they had not met. Was Mikhail a homeless child? Yes, no? No. Had he been adopted? Likely. But by whom? Who could want to take on a child in a destroyed country? Who could afford to support him?

  A military man. Kirill imagined the figure of a soldier.

  An adoptive father.

  Mikhail followed in his footsteps.

  He graduated from officer school just before the war: aviation, artillery, tanks—no, infantry, ordinary infantry, a commander of a small platoon. Kirill was also certain that Mikhail, who had lost his first life in the siege of Tsaritsyn and found a new life in Stalingrad, obtaining a new identity in the city renamed in 1925, had participated in the Battle of Stalingrad, in the second siege, and there, in the fire, the personality and fate became totally his own.

  Kirill traveled to Volgograd—the city had formerly been called Stalingrad—in the winter.

  Of the three seasons of the battle, he could have chosen the stifling heat of August, when the Soviet troops in the territory between the Don and the Volga were rolling back toward Stalingrad, despite the command “Not a step back,” and the first German bombers were getting through to the city neighborhoods, and the residents were digging ravines and trenches for external defense, which would help no one.

  He could have picked the cold fogs of autumn, with the chilling wind from the Volga, the harvest of grapes and apples: the time when the Germans pushed the defenders of the city to the very banks of the river.

  But he chose icy January with its blizzards blowing in from the Asiatic steppes, the January of being surrounded, dying, the rime-covered cellar walls, rats, cats, and ravens eaten by starving citizens, the January of gangrene, gingivitis, and the last planes to the south, in the direction of Millerovo—the final January of the Sixth Army.

  The flight was delayed for two hours at first, then until evening, even though other Volga region airports were open. But Kirill knew that in the winter Gumrak Airport, coincidentally, the last airport surrounded by Paulus, turns into the Bermuda Triangle—as if the battle had left its mark in time and climate; as if every winter sees a repeat of the mystery of being surrounded, cold death, and freezing fogs and fierce blizzards shut down the runways.

  The passengers on the postponed flight moved to the café; only one man, thin and distant, remained at the counter. Kirill liked eavesdropping and listening in on dramatic moments in other people’s lives; he pretended to be having trouble with his bag and listened.

  The man was carrying a zinc-lined coffin with his father’s body—this information was withheld from the other passengers out of superstition. Now he was worried where the coffin would be kept for the duration of the delay and if the baggage handlers would be around to reload the body when they took off. Kirill was not afraid to travel with a corpse, but he did note that he was flying to find a missing dead man, and a different dead man was traveling on the flight with him, as if the mocking gods had sent him a guide.

  Kirill sat down at the café and had a beer, but the traveler in the zinc coffin did not leave his thoughts. The dead man had been in the military—the son was telling the airport personnel about some discount—and Kirill, feeling a playwright’s thrill, called him the Officer. Something jangled softly in the son’s bag, and Kirill realized they were medals that would be placed on velvet cushions carried behind the coffin.

  Suddenly Kirill heard German spoken; he looked up and saw an elderly German at the next table talking to a heavyset blond, clearly Slavic, while pouring warm Sovetskoe champagne into their glasses; he poured with one hand, the other was missing. His sleeve was pinned to his side, in the Russian manner.

  Kirill shuddered. As a child on May 8 he saw many elderly men with missing limbs, but this was the first time he ever saw a German invalid.

  Kirill learned that the German was married to the Russian woman and they were traveling to visit her mother. In terms of his age, the one-armed man could not have been a soldier of the Wehrmacht. But here and now, inside the play Kirill was writing, he was, and Kirill called him the Invalid Soldier.

  He needed a third dramatis persona.

  Beneath a palm tree crookedly growing in its pot sat a priest: black cassock, gray beard, powerful wrestler’s body. He seemed to have sat next to the sickly palm to be noticed, and Kirill happily wrote him down in his mental cast of characters: the Priest.

  Invalid Soldier, Priest, and Officer, and the last was unknown to the two live passengers, only Kirill could see him. Who were they, what connected them? Different people or ve
rsions of the same?

  Kirill knew that seeking an answer by staring at his fellow travelers would be pointless: they presented only a vague picture, the reflection of a reflection in a reflection, and only the future could decipher this puzzle and lay out the images in the right order. But he sensed that it would definitely be about Tsaritsyn/ Stalingrad/Volgograd, about Mikhail and perhaps someone else whom he did not see the way the two men could not see the corpse in the coffin.

  At nightfall the flight was delayed yet again and they were taken to a hotel; then after 1:00 a.m. they announced departure. The airline staff ran around to the rooms, shaking passengers out of bed, gathering everyone in the bar, where the hardiest were still drinking. The confusion of a hangover, the hoarse sick sky, the clouds as rumpled as bed sheets after an arrest, the orphaned streetlights, stinging rain, mounds of darkness—still waking up, Kirill imagined that it was the wrong hotel, the wrong airport, the wrong sky, and they were going to fly somewhere wrong, to some other Volgograd.

  They flew in thick clouds. There were occasional bumps, but nothing much. Irritated whispers broke out among the passengers: they should have set out earlier, what had the pilots waited for? Then the plane escaped the lower edges of the storm clouds, and Volgograd appeared beneath them: the red ribbon of lights along the dark Volga, which reflected nothing. Chains of streets, horizontal and vertical: the horizontal ones were the lines of the Soviet defense, the intersecting ones the lines of the German attack; Kirill knew the map by heart and it seemed to him now that the postwar planning of the city captured the simple geometry of mortal resistance.

  The plane taxied a long time to the airport terminal. The lights on the wings flashed rhythmically; the light seemed to dissipate fruitlessly on the steppe. Looking closer, Kirill saw the sastrugi, the sculptural image of the blizzard’s power. In the way that a lathe can cut grooves in metal, the fierce demons, the spirits of the air, somersaulting, flying up over the ground and falling down, twisting during the flight, had carved and chewed the mounds of snow along the runway.