The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  However, Konstantin’s postwar circle of friends, his connections, and his apartment spoke of a different level of marauding. Yet he could not have skipped over the rungs of the Soviet hierarchy.

  Kirill solved the puzzle.

  There was one man with whom Konstantin was servile and submissive.

  As a child Kirill had often visited his grandfather, lived at his house on holidays, and when important guests visited, Konstantin invited him to join the table, carefully building his grandson’s future, introducing him into his circle from early on.

  But once in a while his grandfather asked him not to come into the living room and go play in another room. He even let him touch the rare toy soldiers, prerevolutionary, made especially for a rich family’s son: they were once numerous enough to populate the entire Battle of Borodino. But during the Civil War—as if they had died in the wrong war—the Life Guards Chasseurs, the Pavlov Grenadiers, the Akhtyr Hussars, the French Old Guard, and the artillerymen and their cannons were lost. Some regiments and brigades were lost completely, others had only two or three tin figures left. Konstantin spent decades finding the soldiers with the recognizable maker’s stamp and spared no expense. That he would let Kirill play with the Borodino soldiers, a gesture far too extravagant, showed he was afraid of his guest and had lost his usual sense of proportion.

  Kirill peeked through the keyhole, for he was worried by this strange guest, who knew how to remain unseen; he always stood so that someone or something blocked Kirill’s view of him.

  His grandfather had other nondescript visitors: antiques dealers. But the special guest was not one of them: he was a dark shadow hanging over other people. One time Kirill saw his face, which seemed strangely familiar. He recognized the unknown guest—he had always been close, right in the house.

  An antique clock under an oval glass dome stood on Konstantin’s wide desk. The clock showed a crevasse; silver hunting dogs raced down the bronze slopes after golden, slender-legged deer; none of the dogs could catch a victim. But up on top, on the flat peak, stood a golden hunter in a kaftan and tricorn hat. In his lowered left hand he held a hunting horn and in his raised right hand, a dead silver bird.

  Grandfather Konstantin had bought the clock three years after Kirill had experienced the most profound fright of his life, watching the mad Sergeant killing geese. His grandfather showed him the clock proudly; at noon and at midnight the hunt began, the hand with the bird went down and the hunter raised the horn and blew into it.

  Kirill froze when he saw it, but his grandfather thought he was amazed by the marvels of the mechanism. He was afraid to approach the clock, he thought the hunter was watching him and knew what had happened at the dacha; when the strange guest showed his face once, Kirill recognized him: it was the face of the triumphant bronze hunter in the clock. He imagined it in every piece of glass in the house: the glass door of the buffet, pitchers, bottles, glasses. Sergeant, Guest, and Hunter were merged into a single figure, and Kirill was astonished that his grandfather did not understand, did not see, whom he had set upon his desk, who kept looking at him with a dead goose in his hand.

  Decades later, Kirill recognized his grandfather’s visitor a second time, when he found a photo of him in a history of the secret services of the USSR. A major and then lieutenant colonel of state security who had served in counterintelligence in the war, then colonel, major general, who survived all the purges and infighting; he left the system only after Serov, who was head of the KGB, was fired.

  That’s when Kirill figured out what had happened to Grandfather Konstantin in 1945 and how he had skipped all those rungs on the career ladder. Someone noticed his small group, and military counterintelligence arrested him. When he told them what we has doing, Konstantin was taken away from his previous patron and given more power, more men, and put to work for a new boss.

  That’s when he met Grandmother Karolina: she was assigned to the unit, interpreter Schwerdt, half-German, daughter of an enemy of the people, sister of a deserter; she owed her life to the security organs and therefore she would keep quiet. She had probably been hired explicitly for such work; otherwise Kirill could not explain how she ended up as a military interpreter with her background, even if she didn’t work at the frontlines.

  Kirill understood why Karolina had married Konstantin. By the standards of the day, she was an old maid, she had lost her entire family, and now she got a new name and escaped the curse of the Schwerdts. By why did Konstantin marry the daughter of a prisoner and sister of an executed man?

  Love? He didn’t love her. Sometimes Kirill thought that as an antiquarian, he took her, a formerly upper class woman who was like an object from the past, into his collection of antiques, the most valuable piece in his assemblage; her presence in the house, her role as hostess brought the antiques to life.

  Candelabra and silver tray, inkwell and pen, fan and Chinese box, marble paperweight and coffee pot, grandfather clock and painting by a lesser Dutch artist—having been born among them, she connected them all into a microcosm of a home, into a hierarchy of places and functions; she turned a dead collection into an inhabited world. Her manners, speech, and style set the basic tone of the things and did not allow them to degrade or forget their provenance. And Konstantin, who had risen in social strata, a city dweller only in the third generation—his great-grandfather had been a fisherman on Lake Chudskoye who sent his son to Moscow to sell fish—had been taught by an old professor and before the revolution as a gymnasium student had seen literary salons and the mansions where members of high society consorted, their doors closed to him—and he received daily lessons in aristocratic domesticity from his wife.

  Kirill thought, but there were so many previously upper class people in the Soviet Union. Konstantin could have even found a baroness, duchess, or princess, who had nothing left but their noble family name. In 1945, Grandfather Konstantin did not yet have a house filled with antiques; he married Karolina—who became from that point Lina Vesnyanskaya—in September, the marriage registered by the military commander of Jena, in Germany.

  Konstantin must have sensed something in Karolina. His patrons must have seemed like gods to him, comparable to the cruel gods of Egypt or Mesopotamia, with heads of eagles, jackals, crocodiles, lions, dogs, and cats, guards of the dead and eaters of souls. Grandfather Konstantin selected the correct offerings among the German trophies to earn the infernal favor of the gods; but like medieval miners who took canaries into the shafts, he needed someone who would sense danger sooner than he would. That is why he chose Karolina.

  ***

  The grandparents left Germany in early 1946; the German government was back on its feet and marauders were more likely to be caught. Kirill asked himself, which Germany had they been in? A world of severed ties and displaced persons. Among ruins where “bombs destroyed not just a city but something fundamentally more important, that which kept things and their mission together,” as Kirill read in a marvelous novel about postwar Berlin.

  That is why Karolina, even if she had wanted to, would not have been able to find the German Schwerdts, who had corresponded with her great-aunts. The country was inhabited by refugees and ghosts of city dwellers, hiding in the ruins.

  Grandfather Konstantin told him how one day, when there was still shooting in various parts of Berlin, in the parks and the U-Bahn, they were sent to examine some statues to see if they were worth requisitioning. They left on a foggy, rainy morning. He did not know Berlin or its monuments; the fog hid everything, their experienced driver drove through burned barricades and the gunners armed with submachine guns smoked plundered cigarettes in silence, hungover, and scornful of the civilian officer and his interpreter.

  They reached the edge of a park, seared by fire, with nothing left but craters and shattered trees; the sergeant drove on. Suddenly they saw a vague figure; the gunners shot a long round into the fog, out of which came a response, either a shot or a ricochet; the commander ordered them to go around, and no
w the submachine guns were firing from the side, but the figure, all in sparks, did not fall.

  The first ray of sunlight cut through the fog and they saw that they were shooting at a statue, a marble composer with a pile of music in his hands; Haydn was dead—four bullets in his belly, two in the right lung, one in the collarbone, one in the shoulder.

  The sun dissolved the curtain of fog, and the Reichstag appeared nearby. It was in the center of Berlin, in the Tiergarten. The sergeant poked his finger in the statue’s wounds, nodded at the gunners, good shooting, lads, and looked indifferently at Grandfather Konstantin in expectation of orders.

  Thanks to that story, the Tiergarten was a kind of gateway into Kirill’s Germany. When he first arrived in Berlin, he didn’t know anything except the bullet holes in the marble coat made by the nameless soldier.

  He headed straight for the Tiergarten and Haydn; it was late spring, the automatic sprinklers chirped, people sunbathed on lawns, and tourists took photos of themselves with costumed Allied soldiers at the Brandenburg Gate.

  He could see the four bullet holes in the belly, two in the right lung, one in the collarbone, one in the shoulder from a distance—exactly as remembered by his grandfather, professionally attentive to detail and photographically recalling scratches and worn spots on antiques. Unwittingly, he repeated the sergeant’s gesture, touching the wound in the stone; it was real.

  He spent two days in the Tiergarten, wandering among the statues, studying the outline of long-ago battles.

  A soldier in the Kaiser’s army bidding farewell to his wife—bullets hit her dress and boots and broke off the right hand of the son, watching his father anxiously. An armless Hercules at the Reichstag, the body riddled with bullets. The gods of fertility, goddesses of crafts were to one side; only two or three bullets hit the pedestal, they were untouched. Two decapitated soldiers, a woman without a head and her chest torn open; there was an old man with a banner and next to him an officer in luxurious uniform killed by the sculptor’s imagination, falling down—his legs were shot, and a bullet hit his chin, killing the dead man. Goethe in a cape scarred by shards. Cupid with a hole in the hip. A mourning angel with a new marble face to replace the smashed one; a Muse with a pasted-on dead mouth and a marble prosthesis for a shoulder. Beethoven shot in the chest. A wounded bronze Amazon on a wounded horse. A fingerless harpist. Wagner and his executed griffin.

  Gods, corpses, maidens, heroes all bearing the mark of death, all dead twice.

  The marble wounds, scrapes, cracks, holes, voids, and caverns turned into Braille for Kirill; it was the language of the past here, speaking of the losses, and he studied the language so that he could ask his questions.

  Somewhere here in the Tiergarten in 1925 the former Minister of War Sukhomlinov, homeless, froze to death on a bench. After being fired and arrested following the Myasoedov case, tried by the Provisional Government and amnestied, he moved to Germany.

  Bronze stalkers trumpeted, and a dead hare dangled from a hunter’s belt; in his raised hand a killed fox bared its teeth, biting its tongue, and the hounds, obeying the call of the trumpet, ran, faster than their breath—just as in Konstantin’s clock, measuring the time of the hunt and death.

  Kirill entered the spectral gates and came out on the other side, into German history.

  ***

  It turned out that there was a book about Thomas, Balthasar’s father. His works and correspondence with his son were in the archives of medical departments. Kirill had not expected to find living German relatives; he thought that he was the only surviving piece of the family history. But the professor who wrote the book gave him his card, and the name on it was so familiar and yet unimaginable in the present time: Schwerdt.

  The relatives were suspicious of his telephone call and thought Kirill was an elaborate prankster. But Kirill stubbornly recited names and dates and finally the man asked him to hold on; when he returned some ten minutes later, his voice was friendly, as if he had checked an encyclopedia that confirmed the existence of what Kirill had said.

  Subsequently, Kirill saw what the man had used as a reference.

  A gigantic sheet of paper, taller than a man, with a genealogical tree drawn with ant-like scrupulousness: a real oak tree, roots going into the soil and branches penetrating the clouds, hiding a myriad of names and dates in the foliage. This was the Schwerdt cosmos, a universe of relations, deaths, and births.

  Balthasar’s line broke off on the tree; there was a note with the number of his children. He took a risk, headed East as an apostle, was lost and forgotten.

  The family was not taking revenge, no; there were too many christenings, birthdays, deaths, and marriages, and in the logic of genealogical bookkeeping, the hermit Balthasar was deemed unworthy of the right kind of remembrance, evidence of the practical benefit of family values and the subsequent need to stick together. Pharmacists, burgomasters, lawyers, doctors, officials, priests—they could have remembered Balthasar as a negative example, a lesson for children, but they did not remember him at all, not out of ill will but because the machinery of documentary memory, which seems impartial, also has a built-in mechanism of forgetting, with definite rules.

  In Germany, at the request of Thomas’s indomitable father, the renegade was forgotten; he became the legendary Grandfather Balthasar, the eccentric who went East a hundred years ago, or maybe two hundred, or maybe never existed at all.

  Kirill brought a copy of the tree back to Russia; he had hopes of returning to the house near Munster, where the attic had trunks containing the family archive, similar to what Grandmother Karolina had left him: letters, tickets, newspaper clippings, certificates, including one for racial purity, photographs, postcards, school journals, medical reports—everything they had managed to take with them when they fled to the west from the approaching Soviet troops, to the Allied occupation zone.

  Then he got a call asking him to visit a home for the aged in Berlin. The news of his strange and amazing appearance, which was recounted at family meetings, adding spice to evening conversations, repeating all the twists and turns of relationships, all the sluices of love and hate, finally reached the one fate had intended it for.

  Now, Kirill could not believe that there was ever a time when he did not know this man. They saw each other briefly, but he, the Priest and Invalid Soldier in one, the alter ego of the Officer, Vladilen Ivanov, fit into Kirill’s concept like the clincher in a plot’s arc.

  His name was Dietrich. He was the great-grandson of the middle brother, Bertold, who had remained in Leipzig when Balthasar and young Andreas went to Russia. Dietrich’s grandfather, a physician for delicate female problems, had married well and moved to East Prussia, taking his wife’s rich dowry. She was the daughter of a merchant, but their children wanted to become Junkers and tried to be more Prussian than the Prussians; Dietrich’s father, Richard, became an army officer and his brother, Maximilian, served in the navy.

  The twins were the same age as Arseny Schwerdt, about whom they knew very little, as he did of them, nevertheless their paths crossed, as if by fate.

  Young Lieutenant Richard Schwerdt came to Africa, to Namibia, as part of Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha’s expeditionary corps; he fought the Herero and Nama and perhaps in late 1904 in the Angra Pequena harbor saw the battleship Prince Suvorov with the admiralty flag, where military doctor Arseny Schwerdt was serving; later the doomed Russian vessels were spotted by Maximilian, who was serving in Tsingtao where the German East Asian cruiser squadron was based.

  Their destinies diverged, as if the ships had sideswiped; ten years later the war began and the three Schwerdts were on opposite sides. Arseny survived to die in 1937 as a German spy. Maximilian served on the cruiser Leipzig, a small reminder of his recent Prussian origins, and sank with the ship in the Falklands battle, when the German ships were attacked by the British battle cruisers. Richard died in the early days of the war; in Prussia his mounted patrol—officers out for reconnaissance—ran into a
Cossack half squadron in the fog of morning.

  The widow got a letter from Richard’s friend in the same regiment, which described Richard’s bravery, how the cavalrymen who accompanied him were killed, and how the Cossacks threw wounded Richard onto the ground and finished him off with spears. The letter was a family relic, a certificate of martyrdom: a semblance of Arseny Schwerdt’s Borisoglebsk horror captured on paper.

  Kirill was skeptical of the letter. One detail—that the Cossack patrol allegedly on secret reconnaissance in a forested area took along impractical and unnecessary spears that would catch on branches however you carried them—made him think this was a war legend, something like the story of the crucified Canadian soldier that entered the annals of British military propaganda.

  Yes, Richard died in a skirmish with Cossacks who outnumbered their small patrol. But the image of riders with terrible spears piercing an unarmed man arose later, when the survivors told their tale, exaggerating the villainy of the foe in order to justify their flight. The officer friend who wrote to the widow—the Germans were retreating, losing battles—gave her this exaggerated, bloody version. He knew that Richard had a son and perhaps he intended this as a patriotic pedagogical lesson; the letter, preserved like a silvery hand of a martyr symbolically depicting the Lord’s pointing finger, determined Dietrich’s fate.

  Richard’s Prussian estate went to Poland along with the lands of the “Polish corridor”; mother and son had to stay with relatives, without money or a past. There began the path that first made Dietrich a priest, since his patron was a priest, and later Dietrich became a field chaplain of the Wehrmacht because, despite the spirit and letter of Christianity, he wanted to avenge his father, killed by the Russians.