She went up in the dark to her parents’ rooms (it used to be all theirs; now the alien world began outside the bedroom door), and in the dark, as she passed through the new sounds and exhalations of unfamiliar lives, she sensed the old phantom odors that awoke when the new ones fell asleep: the faint scent of the oak parquet, the icy marble steps, whatever remained of the silk drapes, which had been refashioned into underwear by the new residents many years ago.
Her father was out, which was usual, an emergency operation or meeting at the hospital. Her mother offered tea and complained. That something must be wrong with her eyesight, she can’t thread a needle. Karolina said she would do it, but couldn’t, either her hands were trembling or the thread was jinxed. That incongruity with the needle confused mother and daughter, as if they had done something embarrassing that would have to be reported to Arseny.
He came home around three, driven in the hospital car, for he had declined a personal car and driver. Suddenly Karolina felt such a reluctance to be there, a toxic, corrosive dreariness assailed her at the family home, the sight of her father in a Red Army greatcoat within the rooms where he used to wear different clothes and insignia, that she asked the driver to take her home, she had the galleys of an important book there. It was hasty, awkward, Arseny was always against such services for his family, her mother couldn’t understand why she needed to rush off, while she, following a strange impulse to flee, hurried down the stairs. The sweet ghosts of childhood seemed like evil blackmailers, there to remind her that she was as much a centaur as her father; she remembered the balls in this mansion, her little girl’s ball gown, her birthday toasts that began, “To the honorable Karolina Schwerdt.”
The car sped off; the driver must have been in a hurry to get home or he wanted to give the chief doctor’s daughter an exciting ride. The road ran toward them with the infrequent headlights of oncoming cars that seemed like animals, with yellow and red eyes, radiator grills bared in a snarl. Among the cars was the Black Maria that took her father, whom she never saw again.
She was back in her parents’ house the next day; the search was over and her mother called her at work.
For many years now she had visited her parents as a guest—in any case, she didn’t look in places that only the family could access: closets and hutches, trunks, suitcases, storerooms, desk drawers, cupboards, kitchen shelves. Only her father’s library remained open to her: she read a lot and always borrowed Arseny’s books, it was their inexhaustible connection, a secret expression of love.
The library had changed its face; some books, the most valuable ones, had gone to dealers in the hungry years of the Civil War, and the remaining old books in German—hundreds of them—that had stood in separate cases were now relegated to the back rows, behind books in Russian; Arseny had not only refused to use German at home and at work, but he had also sacrificed some of his favorite things of German manufacture: his cigarette case, his watch. Karolina did not consider that strange, but with the library she felt that there had been a betrayal; she purposely asked for books in German, to force her father to unlock their prison cell at least temporarily and let one or two out into the light.
By cursory observation, it seemed the old things in the house had been left behind in the olden time. Clothing changed, the old furniture vanished, probably given to resale shops, and the everyday trifles like sugar bowl, curling iron, shoe brush, umbrella, rugs, and purses also disappeared one after the other, replaced with new items in the new fashion.
Then the olden time itself ran out: the ancient cuckoo clock broke. Arseny went to a famous clockmaker who had serviced all the Schwerdt timepieces for the last fifty years—Iron Gustav’s priceless chronograph, ladies’ watches, the grandfather clock with a pendulum in Gustav’s study—but he did not find the craftsman nor his shop. Torgsin, the state hard-currency store, had taken over the space. They took him for one of the former aristocrats trying to sell his clock and told him that he should bring only gold, precious stones, or paintings.
This misunderstanding was not as upsetting as the disappearance of the clockmaker, the master of time, as solid as Moscow, for people would wear watches under any regime; some vanished along with the man who had set the family clocks accurately to the second; ever since he was gone, none of the Schwerdt clocks showed the same time.
So Karolina thought that there was almost nothing left of the old things, conquered by the invasion of a horde of trivial monstrosities, pushy and self-demeaning, like beggars.
But after the search turned the house inside out, bringing out all its secrets, she saw that in fact her childhood, which was contained in things, had been preserved. Karolina could not even imagine how so many objects had fit in the closets and storeroom, hidden, tied up, squeezed, compressed, and now the pressure had exploded and thrown everything into disarray, painful as well in the violation of household rules of compatibility, a mocking mixing of everything with everything.
Underwear and letters, shoes, books, coats, dishes, fabrics and threads, documents, writing instruments, photographs, forks and knives, hats—everything lay on the floor, sprinkled with the stale and crumpled down from slashed pillows and duvets, as if a large bird, a fat goose, had been slaughtered and plucked there.
All those things, her father’s tsarist army insignia, her mother’s old German dream book, the gilded porcelain cupids, the German primer that Karolina studied as a child, the tin candy boxes with German labels filled with miscellaneous trifles; the letters in German, books in German, German engravings, German surgery textbooks—all those things clearly told the investigators who lived here, as if the name Schwerdt were not enough for them to expose, charge, and sentence.
Kirill held his great-grandfather’s file; he was not allowed to see the file on Aristarkh Zheleznov, an agent of the security organs, it was still top secret, and neither his connections nor offers of bribes helped.
Under interrogation, Aristarkh admitted that he met with Arseny Schwerdt and received espionage information from him, that both were agents of the Germans even before the revolution and that was why he had given Schwerdt a safe conduct letter from the Cheka.
Kirill opened the pages of the statements. He watched the change in Arseny’s signature from date to date—he must have been beaten; six weeks in the interrogation cells and he signed everything.
Kirill knew he would have broken, too, and probably much sooner. He saw the duration of hopeless resistance and the fact that Arseny held out for days and weeks as a heroic deed, and it didn’t matter that he gave in at the end. The time until he gave up, measured by the pages of the case file, was a message to Kirill: not to hope, but to endure.
The family was informed that Arseny had been given ten years without the right to correspondence; in fact he was shot in the fall of the same year, and his body burned in the Donskoy crematorium.
The brothers Gleb and Boris, both Red commanders, received urgent telegrams about the arrest of their father on the same day. Gleb was a captain in the artillery, serving near Kiev, while Boris was a major in the tank division, and his unit was near Leningrad.
Gleb was quiet and removed from the family. It seemed that he could never forgive his parents for the three-year separation, the exile in Vladimir with his grandfather the priest: the master of the home, the domestic dogmatist where the children of his daughter who became a Schwerdt were almost like foundlings.
The priest had consented to the marriage figuring that his new wealthy relatives would not leave him and his family to their own devices. Andreas did a lot for them, hired them to work in the factories, helped the young get into universities; but once the war started, the stock of those married to a German went down, the priests were obliged to denounce the demonic attacks of Wilhelm the Antichrist, and the old clergyman launched into the work with zeal, picturing the foreign emperor as Iron Gustav, rich pig and alien believer.
Gleb and Boris looked like each other, but the priest could tell them apart; he claimed B
oris for their own and cast Gleb as corrupted. They decided that Boris was Russian and Gleb—German.
And so Boris’s life in Vladimir was very different from Gleb’s. However, it was not due only to the random assignment of scapegoat or who was older.
Boris had a buoyant and fluid personality, and he knew how to make adults like him, accepting their power and finding a way of getting praise and rewards through obedience, even though he enjoyed the occasional mischief; he was practical and not given to dreaming. Gleb had inherited some traits from Balthasar the apostle, primarily independence and a capacity for solitude.
Character separated the brothers, but without destroying their fraternal feelings. Boris took from his three-year term in Vladimir a liking for his second family and scorn and alienation with regard to his German roots. The grandfather priest did not manage to plant the seed of Orthodoxy in his soul, although Boris gladly attended services; the boy left his Orthodoxy back in Vladimir, like clothing that had done its duty, and subsequently was the first to refuse to pray, take communion, or wear a cross.
Gleb, on the contrary, was drawn to the Orthodox mysteries, and his grandfather took him to church, seeing that as the only hope for saving his lost, poisoned soul. But churches, whether the ancient Cathedral of the Assumption or the small Church of the Purification, somehow did not let him fully in; either he got chickenpox from the communal chalice or he fainted in the stifling heat and candle smoke. Perhaps Gleb had mystical feelings upon entering a church, but his grandfather naturally saw signs indicating the true, sinful nature of the boy.
So Gleb came out of Vladimir with a carefully hidden resentment against his parents and a deep and perhaps not quite healthy desire to attach himself to Russia, to become more Russian than the Russians.
Gleb lived alone, even chastely; he was an eligible bachelor, an artillery captain with family in Moscow, and many women tried to snag him, but their intentions were usually as transparent as a tear, and the wise but unironic Gleb spent a lot of time disentangling himself from their nets.
Boris had recently married the daughter of the head of the tank testing ground, where his unit was trying out the BT-7 with a new turret. Another man might not have given away his daughter to a German, but he was born in the south, living side by side with German colonists in his childhood and youth, and he had no fear of Germans. The officer knew the testing work well, he liked tanks—in the Civil War he fought in trophy Renaults—but he was also no stranger to careerist intentions; on his recommendation, Boris joined the Party, and the father-in-law pictured Boris as a colonel and perhaps maybe even a general; the new bride was already pregnant.
Gleb asked for leave and went to Moscow.
Boris sent an express letter: I do not want to be the son of an enemy of the people, therefore I reject my father and take my wife’s surname—Morozov. The voices of his father-in-law and wife could be heard in that letter. His father-in-law was always afraid that he would be accused of sabotage, the engineers or factory directors could blame their mistakes on him; and naturally he passed along his fear to Boris.
Karolina did not forgive her brother; their mother wanted to reply and say, “You’ll have to live with God and your conscience,” but the daughter did not allow it.
Kirill could not understand the secret of that betrayal. He understood that there might be no mystery at all, and Boris had acted like hundreds, thousands of others who denied their relatives to save themselves.
But the cold betrayal did not jibe with Boris’s hot nature; later, during the war, he fought bravely. Then Kirill figured out that Boris’s courage did not come from his ideas of honor and dignity; it was a collective courage triggered by orders from above, in the heated unity of attack against a foreign enemy. When the enemies were his own people and they’d arrested his father, Boris could not find courage, for he did not have any.
Their sister Antonina worked in Leningrad at a secret installation, and she did not write or talk about it. She did not come, but she sent a check for a large amount, she must have hocked the last of her jewelry, diamond earrings left to her by Iron Gustav. Karolina knew that Tonya was with her and her father: the letter ended with “sending you my love,” which is how they closed letters in their childhood, when Karolina was with their father at the frontline hospital and Tonya in Petrograd.
Ulyana came, but she was nothing but a burden; Arseny called her a “comma girl” when she was little, and she remained a comma as an adult—someone had to determine the right place for her. Their father had chosen her profession, pharmaceuticals, and she worked in a lab in Saratov for one of Arseny’s former students.
But now her father was gone. Ulyana did not seem to understand what had happened; she wanted to go to Lubyanka and ask to be arrested in his place so that he could be released.
The sentence was pronounced: ten years without the right to correspondence. Sophia, stripped of her husband, was convinced that he was innocent. She was certain he’d been arrested for his surname. The letters S-C-H-W-E-R-D-T became an entity in her mind, like the fairy-tale embodiment of Disaster that could hide in a peasant’s bag, sneak into the house, attach itself to somebody, and see to his death.
Long ago when she was young, Sophia took sentimental delight in her new, romantic and unfamiliar name; she saw it as a symbol of parting with her former life, her provincial milieu.
Later, during World War I and the Civil War, Sophia felt she was a Schwerdt; the name took on a new significance, and Sophia preserved the family, protected it in the years of calamities.
Arseny, who had chosen her for the talent to survive, the ability to save herself during a shipwreck, could not have imagined how hard she would take his decision to send the children to various cities and his inability to gather them together. She did not look older, but inside, old age was prepared to manifest itself mentally and physically at any moment.
The moment had come.
Even before the sentence was passed, Sophia was forced to move out of the rooms in the mansion. Karolina helped her mother pick up the things tossed around during the search, to glue what had been smashed, repair the torn and broken; but the wholeness of mind and body could not be returned. Before, Sophia had secretly believed that Arseny was under God’s protection, of which the emerald necklace was the covenant, the necklace made for her, his future bride, in the days when the Russian squadron sank in Tsushima. And now, Sophia, a priest’s daughter, could not understand why the covenant had been broken, why Arseny was taken away from her.
The necklace survived the search; they did not find the secret drawer in the old chest. But Sophia did not wish to see it anymore; the emeralds had come to symbolize vain dreams and hopes.
She faded in two weeks, so weak that she was transported to Karolina’s room on a stretcher. Her stricken mind, previously so sharp, grew dim and murky; its power was not lost, but she became gloomy and embittered. Sophia began to suspect that Karolina wanted to get rid of her, put her in a home for the aged.
Seeking to understand God’s will, Sophia thought back to her maiden days and the precepts her father gave her before the wedding; he told her to remain true to Orthodoxy and be careful, for the Germans had their own fate created by a false God, written by the Pope or Protestant bishops.
She recalled her first trip to the German Cemetery, to visit her husband’s ancestors: how chilly and unfamiliar it was amid the stone crosses, weeping marble maidens, how strange to pronounce the German names, and through them feel the dark universe of a foreign language her husband spoke easily and simply.
With growing stubbornness Sophia asserted that the name “Schwerdt” was cursed, and that Arseny was doomed not only for being born a German but also for being a Schwerdt.
The horrible irony was that Sophia was right.
It was the German surname, written in lovely script in the regimental papers and printed in Aristarkh’s safe conduct, that was the main evidence against Arseny.
Karolina took care of her
mother for over three years and was her final companion and aide.
Kirill knew what happens to time in such situations.
Time is subordinated to illness, reduced to the size of a tablet, a syringe needle, flowing slowly from an IV, flashing as an X-ray, turning into a physician’s indecipherable scribble, a waiting line at a famous doctor’s office, new streets and houses, where there will be yet another hospital. Illness shows you the city you did not know, demands more trips, anticipation, streets, buses, and streetlights; this city has no theaters, restaurants, bookstores, museums, dance halls, parks, or the apartments of friends—only drugstores, clinics, dispensaries, where every lamppost is covered with posters advertising patient care, where despair whispers about the benefits of badger fat, or an old healer woman, or a holy icon, where the miserable travel the same paths of grief.
Kirill understood now what had happened to the three and a half years missing from his grandmother’s life, why they alone of all of her years did not leave any documentary evidence.
Grandmother Karolina had no time to think about what was happening to the country, where she was in danger; even her arrested and vanished father was in a sense sacrificed to her mother’s illness.
In the spring of 1941, Karolina’s village nanny, her wet nurse, found her. The old woman had come to the city to arrange for a pension and wanted her help, but once she saw the situation, she stayed on and Karolina partitioned off a corner for her in her own room.
The sight and sound of the nanny who had shared her motherhood lulled Sophia; her attacks became less frequent and even the pain seemed to have lessened. Sophia imagined she was at the estate, in Pushcha; Arseny would soon return from Moscow, on a dirigible; in the early 1930s when the dirigible factory manufactured its fledglings and Umberto Nobile was at the height of his fame, Arseny was going to be a physician on one of the expeditions to the northern regions, and now Sophia, mixing up the past with the planned, the near with the far, thought that Arseny always commuted by dirigible.
The Goose Fritz Page 26