“They bring this to us,” said the museum curator. “When the veterans die. We find such interesting things! Recently the grandson of a general brought us an entire landing boat, German. He found it in his grandfather’s garage. The generals were given individual parcels of land in the city, some of the houses are still standing.”
“May I look at these things?” Kirill asked. He probably would not have been interested in the stolen inheritance of a dead soldier. But the handle of the dagger with a straight cross guard, cast hilt in the shape of a snarling wolf head, and dark faceted drops of garnets on the tips of the cross suddenly reminded him of Iron Gustav’s collection of weapons, his sun burst of swords. Kirill could easily explain that the unknown colonel brought back a trophy camera, even the candlestick, as symbols of bourgeois plenty, but the medieval dagger did not fit the standard portrait, required additional personality traits that may have surprised the man himself and had not yet been figured out by Kirill.
“Well, these aren’t official exhibits yet,” the curator replied. “Look. I’ll turn on the light.”
A chain of bulbs flashed on the ceiling.
“Colonel Vladilen Ivanov,” said the curator, glancing at the paper label glued to the box. “Fought in the Battle of Stalingrad.”
But Kirill was not listening.
He was looking at the painting in the gold frame. The formal portrait of the colonel in the uniform that now lay before Kirill, with the same medals; it must have been done by a local artist, master of the genre, well-practiced on portraits of generals but deigning to work with lower ranks, who knew how to capture a face and give it the appropriate spirit of untiring valor. The face did not require retouching; it was the face of his great-grandfather Arseny Schwerdt, with a recognizable mixture of Balthasar, Andreas, and Iron Gustav: the high balding forehead, the short thick mustache, the combination of features that appeared in the photos of Gleb and Boris.
“A very interesting biography,” the curator continued. “He lost his family in the Civil War, he was the son of the regiment. I knew him. He lived not far from here.”
Trying to conceal his excitement, Kirill asked, “Could I learn more about this man? His face is so typical, a real soldier’s face. A Russian face,” he added, checking to see if he was the only one to know the secret.
“Russian, that’s for sure,” she replied, leaning over the painting. “A local Stalingrader,” she repeated, strangely. “Vladilen Petrovich. Well, you know, Vladilen is a contraction of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Our journalists wrote about him several times. And he left an autobiography, too. His grandchildren were moving, sold the apartment, and donated all the things to us.”
“What about the biography?” Kirill asked.
“We have that, too,” she replied importantly. “You may make a copy, the paper is in good condition.”
The paper was in excellent condition. Vladilen must have bought the most expensive kind in order to perform the solemn act of relating his own life—what a contrast with the yellowed, crumbling, torn, and decayed papers of the family archive.
Kirill was surprised by the handwriting—steady and even, learned at school: the penmanship of the eternal top student. It should be used for writing declarations and award certificates: not the slightest inaccuracy that would make you confuse letters, no haste, no curlicues in the wrong direction or clumsy connections between letters or even an extra dash; nothing vulnerably individual, human, nothing superfluous. Kirill felt the malevolent meaning of those words.
In fact, there was nothing superfluous in the biography of Vladilen, a man without family or past. Even the grammatical errors were appropriate, even necessary, to stress his healthy peasant or proletarian background, proving that we were dealing with a real, correct Soviet man of that era.
That night Kirill read the manuscript.
Little Mikhail in Tsaritsyn was left in the care of a Kalmyk wet nurse; Colonel Vladilen Ivanov wrote in his autobiography that he was adopted by a commander of the Red forces that defended Tsaritsyn; Naikha must have met someone she could persuade to save the boy’s life.
Naikha was killed or died later, Mikhail/Vladilen wrote that he tried to find her in vain. Why didn’t she reveal his real name, his parents, where to find them? He wrote that his real parents were “of the working class and died defending Tsaritsyn from the White Guards.” Did Naikha come up with that salvation story or did he make it up himself, since he could create any past he wanted?
Great-Grandfather Arseny looked for his son among the nomad Kalmyks, but by that time the officer who had adopted Mikhail was sent to the Higher Military Academy in Moscow. For three years father and son lived in the same city; perhaps military doctor Schwerdt had even met the officer. Then the certified company commander went off to the Central Asian military district, where he died in battle on the border of Tajikistan.
Mikhail, by then Vladilen Ivanov, his adopted name, was officially listed as a son of the regiment and graduated from military school in Tashkent. He related with special pride that the school had a theater club, very much in the spirit of the times, and the students wrote the plays, and he, twice orphaned, performed in a play about the Revolution (which he always capitalized) called The New Times; dressed in crimson as Red October, he used his bayonet to chase away the Old Alphabet, portrayed as the silly Church Slavonic letter yat, since discarded, the Old Calendar, drawn on a poster, Capitalism in tailcoat and top hat, Religion, a fat-bellied priest with a chamber pot for a censer, and Old Time, dressed in a monarch’s mantle.
Arseny’s two missing weeks, the cruel war of times and calendars that divided Russia, and now his son, unknowing, chased his father with a bayonet.
Vladilen became a lieutenant, served in Asia, fought in skirmishes with the Basmachi. In 1941 he asked to be sent to the front, but he was kept at the school; that is probably why he survived, by being stuck there during the time of retreats and sieges, the time when armies and fronts perished. It was only when the Germans were approaching Stalingrad that he was transferred to a recently formed unit. The Stavka, the High Command, was moving troops, new tanks, artillery systems, and pack camels to the city on the Volga; in the Far North the Nenets people slaughtered reindeer for meat for the soldiers, in the South the nomads slaughtered sheep for coats and mittens; all this moved along ancient river and caravan paths, much older than Russia, toward Stalingrad.
Vladilen knew Tsaritsyn from childhood and that must have helped him survive the battle; he began as company commander and ended as battalion commander. He crossed the Dnieper and the Oder, he fought in Berlin, he retired as a colonel in 1956. He was the only one to live a life without blots, he didn’t lose any family, he married after the war, had two children, became a deputy to the local soviet and then the city soviet and a member of the council of veterans; they almost named a small street after him, but decided on another person; he was given a four-room apartment in the center of town; he did not turn in his party card in 1991 and attended Communist rallies, died in Putin’s time, outliving his wife by a year; the children erected a clumsy memorial stone at the cemetery and began fighting over the inheritance, the apartment on Lenin Prospect that now cost many millions.
Kirill read his great-uncle’s text and could not understand whom exactly he was hoping to find. The text existed, but not the man: a derivative of time.
Priest, Invalid Soldier, Officer—his strange trio of fellow passengers, two living and one dead—came to mind.
He thought that Mikhail/Vladilen, whose life story was built on fighting Germans, was a man with only one facet; he needed someone else to give his image dimension.
Of the three, Vladilen was clearly the Officer; but just as chessmen on the board need one another, the Officer needed the Priest and the Invalid Soldier; they would frame, illuminate, and set the right point of view on his fate for its providential meaning to be clear.
At first Kirill thought he would find the other two figures there in Volgograd.
He looked for the Priest in Sarepta, in the church of the former German colony that survived in 1942 with the acquiescence of the god of war. But he found only the fraternal grave of Red Army soldiers—during the Battle of Stalingrad the Soviet hospital was located in the colony—three thousand people under a granite obelisk, while around it in a square were the German church, apothecary, warehouse, store, houses, studios, barns “where the flour in the barrel never ran out and the butter pot was never empty”: a horrible piece of shared history, a place frozen in the convulsion of an insoluble contradiction, not killed but unable to revive.
He visited Lenin, the concrete idol standing on the spit between the Volga and the Volga-Don Canal, dug by German POWs, the biggest Lenin in the world. Mikhail Schwerdt had been renamed in his honor, perhaps something would be revealed there, on the riverbank, in the shadow of the monument? But it was empty and the day was silent. He traveled to the remote steppe beyond the Volga, where the military prisoner camps had been; there was nothing there but snow-swept emptiness, the kingdom of wind.
Kirill went to where Vladilen had lived. The fourth-floor windows of the now sold apartment opened on the rear courtyard, its walls once brilliant egg yellow in the sunlight. The paint had chipped, the plaster ornaments eaten by water dripping from the leaking drainpipes; the balconies leaned perilously, and the fallen cement revealed their armature skeletons. Maxim had told him that these neighborhoods were built in the first decade after the war, when the city was planned as a temple of Stalin—not the battle—which is why there were no military symbols on the walls: only plentiful wheat sheaves, grape clusters, fruit baskets—images of the postwar heaven for veterans, the embodiment of the dream. Kirill thought these houses were not crumbling in accordance with the laws of decomposition of materiality but with the laws of destruction of dreams, much faster. Vladilen was not here; here were only the many-faced images of the lost generation who had started the war as sergeants and lieutenants and became sacred figures, heroic ancestors whose blood paid for every breath and step of the young.
It was only on his last day that Kirill went to the Mamayev Kurgan, that height overlooking the city, where the statue of a woman wielding a sword, The Motherland Calls, towers over the city; he was wary of the place. He took the trolley, underground, which traveled in tunnels like a subway; he made a mistake and got on the trolley that went in the opposite direction, away from the burial mound.
It was a strange trolley line where left and right were reversed; Kirill thought that everything in the city was remagnetized by the immense tension of the battle, the poles switched, the trolley followed the rules of left-side traffic, and Mother Russia with her sword was placed as if she were commanding the Germans to attack.
This was the point where destinies and time were turned 180 degrees, the point where plus and minus, top and bottom, and all meanings were switched.
Kirill went up the long staircase past plaster and concrete soldiers—set into the handmade brick ruins, carrying a wounded comrade, slaying a dragon—through the hall of memory where a white hand, growing out from beneath the ground, held a burning torch, to the chilly area beneath the statue, with its floor, a paved zigzag path of sparkling blue labradorite slabs commemorating the greatest of all heroes, the best of the best, whose lives paved the road to victory. There, in the icy wind smelling of cinders, blowing from the north, where the factories were, where the line of defense once ran, Kirill stopped.
For them to win, someone else had to lose; for Vladilen to become another, someone else had to change; the one who lost and understood what is not known to the winner is necessary; a German priest, a German Invalid Soldier, and Vladilen’s alter ego, the Officer who became a military victor because someone else ceased to be victorious.
Kirill understood that the fate of the Priest and the Invalid Solider would come to him later and not here; from this height, where the war was turned around, where one side acquired a future and the other lost it, he could see the ones who did not live to this day. His thoughts moved from the surviving Vladilen Ivanov to all the perished Schwerdts.
***
Kirill was amazed by how few papers remained from the 1920s and early 1930s, when the family had reached the shore of the new era and settled in the new country.
Yes, Sophia’s father, a priest, was exiled to the Solovki prison camp, from which he did not return, but no one else was touched; the estate was confiscated, but they were able to keep two rooms in Gustav’s former mansion. The children went to school and then—after all, their father was a Red commander—went on to higher education.
You would think there was nothing to hide in that time, no reason to burn papers, but only two or three pages remained, less than from times later and more dangerous.
The estate house had been roomy enough for everyone, family and relatives. But the two small rooms partitioned out of one old room were too crowded for the family. Thus began the diffusion, separation, dispersal; the growing children moved into the corners of friends’ apartments or rented rooms. The family quickly fell apart.
Letters were infrequent. Kirill pictured a common subject of silence, the elephant in the room everyone tries to ignore; it was life itself, in which they all found a path and their own measure of loyalty to the Soviet regime; and that most important thing was what no one discussed. Arseny must have been tormented by the fact that he did not get the family out in time and watched helplessly as the children grew away from him. He himself had gone far on the Soviet path, had been an army doctor, but it seemed that he had remained, inside, a hostage of the missing two weeks.
Arseny was arrested in 1937, in October.
Kirill went to the archives, held the investigation file in his hands. He had seen some that contained only six or seven pages—the resolution on opening a case, the transcript of the only interrogation with “confessional statements,” and the sentence—but his great-grandfather’s file had almost a hundred pages, an incredible amount for the fall of 1937, when people were executed according to quotas. Kirill expected to weep, but he had felt everything in anticipation and his eyes were troublingly dry.
In the 1930s Arseny and Sophia lived in Gustav’s old house, which had once been the property of the family. The children were in different cities again; only Karolina remained in Moscow, but she avoided the former residence and did not like visiting.
Arseny had a safe conduct letter from Aristarkh, with the seal of the VCheKa, which said that the Schwerdts “had helped the work of the revolution with all their strength.” The letter did not save Andreas, but then it showed its power during the arrests of the 1920s, when formerly bourgeois people were rounded up and charged with participation in invented conspiracies; this was not yet widely proclaimed in the newspapers and only a few trials were announced.
Aristarkh never did take back his real surname and remained Aristarkh Zheleznov (Iron), as Dzhugashvili remained Stalin (Steel) and Rozenfeld was still Kamenev (Stone). In time, before the October Revolution, Aristarkh moved from the Socialist Revolutionaries to the Bolsheviks. During the Civil War, he was not on the frontlines and did not figure in the reports from there. However, through indirect sources Kirill found out that Aristarkh and the other military experts who had switched to the Reds worked on Soviet intelligence, oriented to the East.
Along with the idea of spreading the revolutionary fire to the West, to Europe, which ended with the Polish expedition of the Red Army in 1920, some Bolsheviks had a semi-mystical dream about the East, an expectation that the new republics of the Land of Soviets would appear there. Apparently, Aristarkh subscribed to that dream; his work in the eastern sector of intelligence, which was not considered the most important, saved him from the first wave of purges.
Aristarkh was arrested in 1937; Kirill found that information in a biographical dictionary. He was accused of collaborating with Japanese intelligence; Germany and Japan were about to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the investigators started searching for Ger
man connections, so that they could charge Aristarkh for being a triple agent.
The connection, the only one, was Arseny Schwerdt, army doctor, former tsarist military physician, former nobleman, relative of influential German capitalists involved in the Myasoedov case, a former officer in the Russo-Japanese war, who had been imprisoned by the Japanese and accused by the regiment commander of treason (all the corresponding documents had been thoughtfully saved in the military archives).
For the investigator, this was not mere biographical detail but a gift, thought Kirill. Arseny put too much faith in the power of the safe conduct, like a cleric believes in the power of healing relics.
Aristarkh was interrogated for several months before they started arresting his circle, near and then distant; and then they used a fine-tooth comb in the course of a single night.
That night Karolina was held up at work; the anniversary of the revolution was coming, and she had to write a play for the amateur group. Karolina was known for her ability to write fast, whatever the text, no matter how much her heart and soul resisted; but this time everything went wrong, the typewriter broke, the words wouldn’t come, and all she could think of were ribald jokes about the first Soviet leader. She missed the last trolley home; she watched the trolley’s rear lights roll into the distance. She went to spend the night with her parents; she had a friend who lived near work, and she usually stayed there on occasions like this, but the friend was having a dalliance, and there was only one room.
The streetlights near the house were meager, one at the start of the lane, the other at the end; you couldn’t hear the traffic on the Garden Ring Road. It seemed at that moment, to Karolina, that time was transparent like water and just as malleable, and she could walk into the mansion of her youth to find Iron Gustav’s study, and not the housing office, on the second floor of the building.
The Goose Fritz Page 25