The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  Flying metaphors peppered her speech, and the nanny, deeply sensitive to such things, said that Sophia was preparing to leave. The nanny insisted that Karolina go away on vacation since the inexorable force with which the daughter wrestled with illness had frightened her weakened mother. Karolina allowed herself to be persuaded and found a temporary job as a counselor in a Pioneer camp.

  On the eve of her departure, her mother had her open the secret drawer in the chest and take out the emerald necklace, the last treasure, the source of squabbling among the sisters. Obeying her mother, Karolina put it on; her mother watched as if she were getting ready for her first ball, and then turned away and quietly went to sleep. Karolina thought she could see her mother’s dream, eternally present in the treacherous green stones: the restless waves of the Sea of Japan, the Emerald tossed onto the rocks, the train traveling through Siberia—the entire chain of memory crystals. She removed the necklace and put it back in the drawer, frightened by her vision, her view into the forbidden.

  Sophia died in the first days of the war. The nanny buried her, ordering them to put her maiden name on the gravestone—Uksusnikova—so that the gravediggers did not think they were burying a German woman named Schwerdt.

  ***

  Kirill was brought up in the historical tradition that consideredrne war the beginning of a new era, “June twenty-second at exactly four o’clock.” But Grandmother Karolina left no reminiscences of that day. At first he thought that she was simply shocked by the event. But then he figured that she remembered June 22 perfectly well, but she wanted to forget, because with the first shots at the border she lost all her relatives: she never saw any of them again, and there were no graves.

  Captain Gleb Schwerdt would certainly have been recalled from the front like most of the soldiers and officers of German ancestry when Soviet Germans were declared traitors in August 1941, when the Republic of Volga Germans was abolished and all its residents, like Germans from other areas, were deported.

  He would have been recalled, but not in time, for the artillery unit in which he served destroyed its weapons as it retreated so they would not fall into enemy hands, and it was re-formed and sent to defend the Kiev fortified district. By late August, the Germans had crossed the Dnieper above and below Kiev, attacking from the rear—an encirclement many did not survive, including Captain Schwerdt.

  Major Boris Morozov fought in the Finnish War, since he served in the Leningrad Military Okrug, and he fought successfully, he laid a frozen causeway on the lake ice where tanks were not expected to pass and came out behind the fortified Finnish position that could not be taken head on; he received a decoration and promotion and was sent to train on new KV breakthrough tanks, manufactured at the Kirov Factory in Leningrad.

  He was lucky, but the fear associated with that luck was growing. Unconsciously he expected life or God to punish him for denying his father—but nothing happened, as if he were under a spell. He was also tormented by the fact that his brother Gleb had not been thrown out of the army but was never promoted in rank; perhaps he needn’t have even denounced his father at all. He talked about this with his sister Antonina; she continued to stay in touch with him secretly because she loved him.

  As far as Kirill could judge, Antonina acted first. Intelligent, dynamic, but in a certain sense blind, devoid of instinct about fate, she decided she would not allow the family to be separated again as it had been during the Civil War. The last time, she reasoned, the brothers and sisters were scattered, separated from their parents, and the family suffered through years of wandering; now, having learned their lesson, they had to act differently.

  Tonya, using her husband’s influence, tried to gather everyone who was not going to go to war. Her sisters Ulyana and Karolina, Boris’s wife, Marina, and his two daughters. She managed to do it, in the midst of the chaos and panic of the early months of the war; Karolina was the only one she missed.

  At the end of May, Karolina had gone to work at a Pioneer camp near Minsk, and she was evacuated with the camp; the mysteries of administrative planning sent the train carrying the children to Smolensk, then aimed it toward Rostov, and then to Yaroslavl.

  No one was prepared to take in an evacuated Pioneer camp, no one could explain why the children were there, yet someone’s will pushed the train farther, changing engines and crews, using up coal and water and food. Some of the Pioneers must have been children of commanders and Party bigwigs and now—even at a distance—the powerful parental hand tried to move the train as far as possible from the front.

  In the meantime Antonina had gotten everyone together and found them a space to live and a bit of bread. Kirill tried to imagine what resources were needed to do that; he guessed that her husband must have been more than a chemistry professor and had worked on some special state project controlled by the NKVD; what happened later confirmed his hypothesis.

  Antonina was certain that they would not give up Leningrad. Her husband, who was better informed than most, explained the same thing to her: defense plants, the naval base, the communications center; it would be hard but better to be together in a big city where there is food and medicine, paychecks, connections, and special rations; the husband could not have been thrilled to have a pack of relatives land on him, but he did not berate Tonya.

  Even when the blockade circle closed in early September, Tonya still had hopes of finding Karolina, certain that Russia would break through the circle quickly, and get her to come to Leningrad.

  There was talk that people should flee the city, but her husband’s institute was working away, handing out special rations, and they stockpiled food for later; however, Boris’s wife and Ulyana were mobilized to dig trenches, they came home late at night, numb with exhaustion, and all they got during work was bread and hot water.

  Kirill knew that many enterprises were moved before the blockade. He wondered whether the secret institute was not evacuated due to an oversight, or simply because it was not a priority?

  Or did it all depend on more than orders from the center but also on the individual directors, which of them had greater power, who got along better with the big bosses, who could put pressure on Moscow; and the window of opportunity was small in terms of time and tonnage for everyone to squeeze in.

  Ration cards were introduced. The Badayev Warehouses burned down under German bombs. The daily ration of bread for dependents and children was cut to two hundred grams, but Tonya’s husband got food at the special distribution centers and they could continue stockpiling flour for later.

  One evening Tonya’s husband did not come home from work. She thought he had been arrested. But in the morning she learned at the institute that people came from the NKVD with orders to evacuate several particularly valuable experts; they were convoyed out of the building and taken to the airport and a waiting plane.

  Grandmother Karolina met with Tonya’s former husband after the war; he found her, traveled from Novosibirsk to see her. He already had a second family, years had passed, but still couldn’t look her in the eye and his hands shook.

  He told her they were forcibly taken. The guards warned them that an attempt to avoid evacuation would be commensurate to joining the enemy side. The six of them were flown in the bomb bay of an airplane, given boots and padded jackets to keep from freezing, then taken by train, also under guard, all in one compartment, East, beyond the Volga, beyond the Urals, to Central Asia.

  The head of the convoy promised that their families would come out on the next flight, and if there were delays, they would receive their husbands’ rations. But all six men knew there would be no flight, no food parcels; but they still hoped that wherever they were going, that secret somewhere, they would find the levers to bring out their families, they would find the right people to ask, write a letter to the people’s commissar, call the deputy minister...

  They did call and write, they tried to get more information, help; in December one of the six men hanged himself; he never even received a f
orm letter telling him his inquiries had been received and his questions would be looked into.

  Grandmother did not tell Tonya’s ex-husband that the day after he was taken out of Leningrad, Tonya started keeping a diary. It survived: Tonya’s friend, the last person to have seen her alive, saved it.

  Kirill could not read it. He would open it, scan a few lines, a few paragraphs, and then hastily shut the worn oilcloth cover.

  Kirill could listen endlessly to Shostakovich’s powerful Seventh Symphony, conducted by Mravinsky. But one look at the handwriting of Tonya—who was suffering from starvation-induced edema—the degenerating letters growing larger, the crooked lines, written almost blind in the dark, drained him.

  Tonya was crushed by her husband’s disappearance. She had brought them all together under his protection.

  Hoping to instill faith in the others, she rushed to find a way to evacuate or to obtain parcels, work, hope. She called, wrote, ran, waited in doorways, tricked her way into meetings, begged, threatened—all for nothing.

  Kirill felt that this burst of activity had probably reduced Tonya’s already weak prospects for the future. People don’t like those who refuse to suffer in silence and who strive for salvation; afterward, in the hungry winter, when life and death depended on a calorie and a gram, Tonya was shortchanged a tiny portion, a crust, a particle of sugar, a dot of fat for she had shown her will to live too soon, had not hidden it.

  Of course, the embittered and starving people began recalling that Antonina was a German, that her sister Ulyana was German, and nobody remembered that they were only half-German. The German army surrounded Leningrad, German bombs fell on the city, shells exploded on the streets, and the enemy name Schwerdt could inflame sudden hatred in a queue or the crowd at a bus stop.

  Kirill did not know how to weigh all this, if it was provable, but he knew that if Tonya had been Russian, she would have survived, or at least had a better chance; being German was not a final sentence, but it pushed people toward death.

  The first to break was Marina. In the summer she had wanted to be in Leningrad, she liked the possibility of remaining there, digging in; now she made it sound as if Tonya had brought her to the city against her will.

  There was no communication with Boris. The summer letter with news went to his unit’s old address, to a town long held by Germans; the unit itself no longer existed. But Marina was sure that Boris was alive, and she imagined that he was sending letters and money orders to where they lived before; their old place was outside the blockade ring, on Soviet territory. In morbid detail she described the imagined parcels: how much grain there was, what canned goods, how hard was the sugar in the tongs. Tonya did not get into squabbles; she still believed that her husband would find a way to get them, and she was counting on the food she had stored away; she calculated it would last about six months.

  Tonya and Marina and the whole family were still living in a Soviet country, in a familiar city, albeit a besieged one. Tonya remembered the revolution in Petrograd, the hunger, the shootouts in the streets, the robberies; now it seemed that the Soviet regime was solidly in place. But there were people in the city who understood that the cold and hunger would attack every house, every source of heat, and the time would come, it was already approaching, when the regime would lose control of the streets.

  They came at night, four men in police uniform. Tonya was the only one who was sure they weren’t policemen, she didn’t want to open the door, she shouted to her neighbors—a military man lived across the hall, he had a gun—but no one interfered.

  Someone had told the “policemen” about them. Tonya had not said anything for a long time about storing food, that she had sugar, buckwheat groats, rice, and flour under the bed. But in late summer before the blockade she had generously told friends about her reserves and promised to help if things got bad.

  The men said they had orders to search all Germans and confiscate valuables; any resistance meant being shot on the spot. The bandits saw whose food they were taking: two girls and three women. Tonya and Marina begged them to leave a little, some flour, some grain, some salt; the robbers wiped them out, taking everything; you Germans, let your people feed you, they’re stationed not far from here.

  Kirill supposed that if they had been robbing Russians they might have left a small bit behind for women and children, but Germans were not supposed to get anything.

  When she was over the shock, Marina started screaming that it was all their fault, the Germans, damn them; her howling was crass, her accusation vile; but this offensive scandal was better than silence; it was at least a sign of life.

  A day after the robbery the rations were cut in half; the bandits must have known it was coming. Antonina went to her acquaintances but came back with very little; an old friend, Olga, daughter of a tsarist fortification officer, gave her some condensed milk, powdered eggs, and a promise of more; she was selling off her family valuables little by little to a receiver. If not for him, she would have been killed, and this way she got a little money. The emerald necklace could have saved the family, but it was in Moscow with Karolina. Tonya had sold her diamond earrings when their father was arrested.

  The first to die was Marina’s younger daughter. Tonya suspected that Marina intentionally gave bigger portions to the older girl, having decided which one would live and which would die.

  They could no longer bury the child; they left the body wrapped in an old sheet closer to the central streets where they were still picking up corpses. Tonya no longer had the strength to go to work to get ration cards.

  Ulyana died. They got their water from a burst pipe deep underground; layers of ice formed around the source, and Ulyana slipped, broke her leg, and froze trying to crawl home.

  Tonya remained with Marina and her older daughter. Tonya had the first attacks of starvation madness: she thought that Marina was not feeding but fattening up her daughter; they were finding bodies with sliced off flesh on the streets. Tonya used to think of Marina as younger, but realized they were peers; Marina had spent the Civil War not in the city like Antonina, but in the country, where the hunger was more horrible, where they dug up cattle graves, where they baked human flesh; Tonya thought that of the two of them, Marina would survive.

  Later, at New Year’s, Olga kept her promise. She brought Tonya a hefty chunk of pork fat back: unimaginable, not a delicacy, not food, but life itself—two or three weeks, maybe a month of life. Olga had traded a family icon ornamented with freshwater pearls for the salo. The old receiver now paid with the clay-filled bread from rations and drove a hard bargain; he would not have cared about the icon, taken it for a trifle, for a handful of burned sugar mixed with dirt from the Badayev Warehouses, but only Olga knew that the old man was not what he pretended to be. He was an officer who had served with Alexander Kolchak in counterintelligence, he robbed the interrogation victims and grew rich on their valuables. Her father had revealed the secret to her, after he’d recognized the man during the NEP years when he went to him to sell his old medals.

  The salo vanished. Tonya thought Marina had stolen and hidden it. In the icy house where hard snow fell in the neighboring apartments, because the walls and roof had been destroyed by a nearby bomb, the two women fought on the floor, Marina whispered that she had not taken it, Tonya choked the suspected thief, then Marina gained the upper hand and started choking Tonya. Neither could kill the other, they were too weak.

  Hidden in the cellar, far from her mother and aunt, Marina’s daughter ate the salo. She was dying of a bowel obstruction but kept eating.

  Her death took away even the hatred that had connected Antonina with Marina. Sometimes Marina looked at Tonya with a strange wordless affection, as if seeing herself in a mirror and wondering why she looked unfamiliar.

  Olga promised to drop in in early February. She was not as emaciated as Tonya, but lived far away, and getting from one end of the city to the other across the Neva was comparable to a North Pole expedition on f
oot. Tonya started counting the days in her diary until Olga’s visit. It was the only thing she wrote.

  Marina died on January 24. It seems Tonya no longer had the strength to drag her out of the room.

  When Olga came, Tonya was dead. She must have believed that Olga would come on the first day of February, and when the day was over, she died. Olga dragged both bodies downstairs, hoping to return and with someone’s help take them to the cemetery. She took the diary, but then was bed-ridden for she had nothing else to offer the buyer, and did not return to Tonya’s house until spring.

  The bodies were gone. Tonya’s apartment had been ransacked and emptied. By the end of the war, the building was gone, declared unsalvageable and demolished. No one knew whether Tonya and the others had been buried in a common grave, thrown into the Neva, sealed in the cellar, or had fallen under a knife or saw, their flesh stolen for the calories.

  Kirill could not remember what he had known as a child about the death of his grandmother’s sisters. Grandmother Karolina had tiny, stamp-sized photos of Tonya and Ulyana hanging on her wall. Their photo albums had been burned for heat in December in blockaded Leningrad, and Karolina had only these photos of them, which were easily overlooked among the bigger portraits.

  Kirill learned that among the dead there are those who get the lion’s share of remembrance and those who are remembered only secondarily.

  The sisters did not even have a line on the common headstone. Their disappearance without a trace gave Grandmother Karolina the terrible rights of an executor: how they were to be remembered. Had there been a monument, had the letters SCHWERDT been incised in stone, Karolina Schwerdt would not have been able to turn into Lina Vesnyanskaya.