by Peter Martin
I didn’t know what I heard. A sudden flow of cold high whispering on the other side of the black air, where the door should have been. It took a few seconds until I realized the two things. The door was open and someone was with Glueck, the room dark, the shutters closed. But who . . . ?
Nobody; just Glueck talking to himself in the middle of the night, like me.
I stepped in and with my second step recognized her voice, Tatiana Arkipovna’s, coming from in or near the bed. I sunk to the floor, to the carpet, out of possible sight.
Instinct helped me. I remained motionless.
Her voice held itself cool and certain with a confident fencer’s poise, the thrusts small and almost merciful. “You must reconcile,” she was saying. “I know your suffering. Long ago I loved hopelessly. I remember every hair on his head but see, I have reconciled. Ernst, had Anya loved as you believed, no words of Madame could have made her send that letter to you.”
“Tatiana Arkipovna, please. . . .”
I wanted to run out. Some people can listen while their ears are
being cut off — thieves, storytellers, race-track specialists, and real- estate men — but not a kid where he didn’t belong, in the middle of the night, his own pressing mission derailed by an incomprehensible circumstance — nor could I treat myself to bystander’s sweetmeats or attempt to siphon out what might be good or bad for me. It was a dangerous mishmash and I trembled that I might learn what it was all about and that I might not.
I didn’t move, just gave in to it like a bee swooping up from its inside nest against the screen at the window, its feet and wings seeking the crack through which it had entered. I began to follow without trying.
“Ernst, for your own sake do not go to Novgorod.”
“Anything else, Tatiana Arkipovna — ”
“Say ‘Tatya.’”
“Tatya . . . but I must face Anya.”
“Ernst. . . ”
By the rustles of her dress here and the soft lower scrapings, I judged she was on her knees at his bedside. “What you refuse yourself, do for me. Stay for my sake, spare my seeing your ghost when you return from Novgorod.”
“You are right! I am a fool, but I must go.”
“Forget her, reconcile, stay with us, with me. You shall miss nothing, you will be happy.”
“The kindest soul in the world speaks, you wish to save me. But I wish to save myself.”
“You refuse me?”
“I cannot refuse myself.”
“Yes, you do refuse me.”
She raised herself to her feet in a great rustle, jumping in with him, and her steel rang; she lunged for her one killing chance. “I beg no more, I command. Must I say it?”
“Tatiana Arkipovna,” came his horrified gasp —
“No, it is you who are blind.” She gave it to him without cajolery, on strength and will alone. “I sent Madame to Novgorod, I wrote
damning letters to your Anya, I, I, I . . . my wish from the start, Ernst, to have her away from you! See, I am honest.”
“Oh, lady dear,” Glueck whispered from his innermost cosmos, “think what you are doing, you are not well tonight.”
“I am well, well, well, excellently well!”
“No,” he wrenched from himself, “you are overcome, you are telling little stories, it is only your motherly sympathy.”
“You can’t go. She’ll take you back. I counted on your pride, on your need to be comforted!”
“Lady, please,” sliding into hysteria as she clutched him to her, “don’t urge yourself, you do not mean this! Forgive me,” he blurted, “but isn’t there the doctor?”
“Yes,” she said in a lower tone, her words fighting up from her throat, her body moving for him, the bed rumbling, “Yes, I’ve beaten Kolya at last but I’m a mother! Lilli is lost, the nunnery waits for her. But Leta can be saved — and what’s the doctor if she isn’t?”
Sobs from her; and from Glueck, wrenching tears of fright. “You are so terribly ill tonight, lady . . . come, let us take a walk somewhere, calm ourselves. . . .”
“Ernst, you cannot go away.”
Said as a fact, it calmed him. “Very well,” he soothed with cunning suddenness. “It is settled. Do you hear? I stay. Now let us compose ourselves,” he sing-songed as to a child, “and in the morning — ”
“You will stay?”
“I promise. It is over. I cannot demolish you, Tatiana Arki- povna. . . .”
She pulled him to cover her; in the dark I heard his gasp. “See what’s yours, I’ll send Alexei away, by God! You have me in a double love, Ernst. You will see. Whatever Leta fails you in, 7 provide!”
“Tatya, my God. . . .”
“Ernst,” she half-groaned, “marry her, marry her — what she cannot, I will!”
“No,” he shouted, her purpose hitting its hardest into him; and there began between them half a fight and half a rape. He twisted, gulped.
her hands at his neck; he freed himself, shouted; she kicked and shouted back. As the noises rose I crawled outside. I saw a low glow on the staircase, heard steps; from my room I watched it come brighter in the hall. The sounds next door leapt into tragedy; Glueck screamed, then she; and then the Squire and Kremenko appeared at the head of the stairs, each holding a candlestick.
In the moment after the two entered Glueck r s room, the bedlam augmented itself. The Squire screamed something at Glueck, and he back, and then Tatiana Arkipovna, the three all at once in a jumble of hatred spewing out just partly in words; and like some crazy kind of whipped cream on top of it all, the fluttering wavy laughter of the spectator, Kremenko.
I shut my door against it. Was this what people grew up for? How did I get into it and how was I ever going to get out?
The wall between the rooms did not hold them away from me. The Squire screamed something. I heard a flat sound like a stone hitting the wall. Her scream followed and the louder thump of a person dropping like a heap, Kremenko’s amused chiding tones coming in a skippy and muted obligato.
I opened my door to run I knew not where. Light rose again from below. Others were climbing the stairs. I drew back inside, leaving a crack in the door. It was Leta stumbling up, followed by Arkip Apollonovitch making slow progress with cane and candle. Leta flew into the room to be greeted by her father. “Ahhh,” he whined, bitterly satisfied, “now you see your rival! She wants him, Leta — your Mama!’"
A paralyzed silence, and from Leta a noise not animal and not loud. Her feet pattered, she jumped toward someone with a wail, and Glueck moaned. “Yes, good!” the Squire spat. “Strike Mama — ”
A subdued scuffle for a moment, and then Tatiana Arkipovna’s broken sobbing as Arkip Apollonovitch walked into it. “What have we here, Kremenko?”
“Tatiana Arkipovna has reverted,” he announced in bulletin style.
Imitating, the Squire said, “She hopes to marry her lover to her daughter in the French fashion.”
“You lie,” Tatiana Arkipovna replied. “It is Alexander Voyinevitch.”
By then I had inched myself toward Glueck’s door; from her announcement I expected new explosions. Yet they continued quietly, grossly intent. I peeked in; a lamp had been lit. I saw them arranged like actors at about five minutes to eleven — father and mother facing each other across the middle space, the daughter with her head against her father’s chest, his arm about her, his back straight as though posing for a grand portrait, Glueck sitting in the bed between them, his glasses off, his eyes shifting from one to the other, Arkip Apollono- vitch smiling publicly and sneering at them inside; and Kremenko off in a corner, his pinky diamond throwing tiny sparkles as he fiddled with a cigarette, the two candlesticks on Glueck’s writing-table nearby spilling something stupidly religious into the tableau — a play of the old school, exactly one of those dull logical dramas massacred by students in extemporaneous classroom translation and no longer performed any more. Only it was a matter of lives being changed, theirs as well as mine, all of them
in gowns and night-robes and all so intimate and heartless.
“The biggest ball of twine unwinds,” said Arkip Apollonovitch, leaning upon his cane. “Still lovers upon lovers, Tatya? I cannot blame you entirely,” he added, sniffing amusedly to himself. “It was a poor life to begin with . . . though our young professor might be asked what he hoped to gain.”
Glueck returned his bricklike glance with a hopeless shake of his head. “It is a sickness, sir, a sickness!”
“Perhaps we ought not to take her to Paris,” said the Squire to the old man in a bravely man-to-man way. “It might be healthier for her to stay in Minsk again, meanwhile.”
“Paris,” said Tatiana Arkipovna, scornfully.
“I thought you’d agree, Tatya.” The Squire shrugged, Leta’s head against him moving a bit. “I am willing to provide you with Alexei, if he is so good for your health.”
“No,” she replied. “I can’t leave you that, Kolya.”
“You may come also, if you insist.”
“Tell him, Father,” she said, “there is no Paris.”
“Ah, Tatya,” the Squire parried easily, “you are too demanding, even for an only daughter. . . .”
“Say it, Father ... I don’t care,” she ranted suddenly, “I don’t care!”
“Sh,” cautioned Arkip Apollonovitch. “I leave for Moscow tomorrow; we’ll say nothing about Paris now”
“Well, Father? Are you? Are you taking him to Paris?”
“Tatya,” he smiled, “don’t be a bad girl. . . .”
“But you are not,” she said. She pointed to the Squire, shaking her head. Arkip Apollonovitch lifted his cane in the direction of Kre- menko, then moved it toward his daughter in a commanding arc. “Let us keep our heads,” he told Tatiana Arkipovna as Kremenko moved behind her and attempted to escort her out. “It is late, we’ll review everything in the morning. . . .”
She threw Kremenko aside with a shake of her body and a fierce thrust of her arm, her face as hard as marble now, drained of its fluidity, her large features regularized and made even beautiful in a chilling way by the murder of her last inner doubts.
She had been forced to choose to win. “Let him know Paris is a fraud,” she said with a great sob of pity for herself, “that there is no opera singer to be wooed with a Yiddish fiddle — ”
“Stop it, Tatya!” from the Squire.
“ — that you got your loan last month, Father! — ”
“Stop your ravings!”
“ — that you had her sent to Dresden, Papa, and while she was away you persuaded your friend about the loan! Tell him all you told me!”
The Squire pushed Leta away and stepped closer to his wife. “Ah, Tatya,” he said, close to tears, “I can only forgive you. You are miserable, ill ... I agree with Papa, it is not your fault entirely. . . .”
“Save your tears! You can do nothing but wait for Papa to die.”
She said it quietly, and after she said it the words stood in the air as though written. She looked about her, began sobbing not quite for herself alone, and ran out, passing me quickly in the darkened hall to fumble her way down the stairs, her sobs diminuendo and out.
In the room the Squire said, but as a question, “She is out of her mind, Papa. . .
“It is bad,” the old man said. “What, Kremenko, makes the least thing so difficult these days?”
“At night,” answered the lackey drily, “what is easy?”
“No, Papa,” the Squire urged, unsatisfied, “she spoke madly, of course? You didn’t . . . ?”
He could not push himself to finish the question. I did not see Leta in a corner, but I had a view of Arkip Apollonovitch’s face, something monumental in it, grave and decided, a face fixing itself down upon the Squire with a dignity to be admired had Arkip Apollonovitch been facing his executioner. But it was the other way around and though an overdue and guilty love for his daughter might have moved him to press the button anyway that shot the current, it was nevertheless his button and his current. He had done it so many times that one more hardly counted; and besides, he disliked the Squire personally. “You must not be Paris-minded, Kolya. You have affairs to regulate without seeking distant engagements. The loan was made and that’s the end of it.”
“The loan was made . . .?”
“Yes.”
“When?” said the Squire, turning to Kremenko, hoping distantly. Perhaps from another, a truer answer. . . . But Kremenko said, “Last month, Konstantin Andreyevitch.”
The Squire said nothing, breathing deeply, then drawing himself to his full height of some five feet. He attempted at this last to leave the field with some remnant of Staff dignity but near the door he stopped, tried not to stumble and fell anyway, lying in a steady shake of trembles, stricken.
Often I tried to imagine what he thought as he lay there but it was useless, unnecessary.
The house became both a cemetery and a depot of departures.
The servants were roused, lights broke the night, and sounds;
Vassily carrying the Squire to his bed, Rodion hustling on horseback to fetch Ostrov, Natalya and Lubenka meanwhile sitting with Tatiana Arkipovna on Kremenko’s orders until the doctor came.
Leta remained in Glueck’s room, preventing me from begging to be taken if not to Novgorod then at least as far as Minsk; the fiddling was over and with the Squire and Tatiana Arkipovna so ill Vassily would surely return me to Kuizma Oblanski who would dutifully carry me back to Pukop and they’d have me for good.
If only Glueck would do it, if only as far as Minsk! I’d pawn my fiddle and go straight to a synagogue where they’d surely help me to one of the illegal wagons going over the border; in Minsk I’d tell them about Shim and they’d tell me how I might find Yeersel in America and sooner or later I’d see Shim again. How queer to be thinking this when he might be just across the road yet impossible to get to; perhaps he had drifted away long ago and was in America, waiting for me. I promised myself I would try to make sure about Shim. With such a spinning in my head I dressed myself, anxious to stride to the beginning that waited, fearful of never getting to it but determined to unbury myself from this debris.
I heard Ostrov’s angry voice cutting over Kremenko’s purring tones on the landing below, and Leta finally left Glueck to hurry downstairs to the doctor.
Glueck had a damp towel about his head and was closing his trunk as I entered. With a wild annoyed look he asked why I was dressed, as though it constituted an obstacle to his plans. I almost saw my words bouncing from his emergency turban.
“It is childish,” he dismissed my idea. “I’ll be riding to the Minsk station with the old man and Kremenko, and if I decided to ride alone, later, Rodion would never take you anyway. You’re a good lad,” he said, seeing me already part of the past, “here, take your music, keep it as a treasure, work at the Beethoven.”
I told him they wouldn’t let me play in jail and it made me cry. He wrote his address in Petersburg, promised he’d see “what could be done officially” about placing me in the Conservatory. I couldn’t stop
crying. He said he’d talk to Ostrov who would “protect” me until he could “enlist the influential Jews” around the Conservatory. That didn’t help either. Finally he gave me a five-ruble note and made me promise to “behave properly, if you make yourself a fugitive no one can help you.” During this he dressed himself. “We’ll say good-by later. I’ll go down now, Lev, to speak to the doctor. Ugh, what hor-
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rors!
All very nice and German; nothing for me to do but sit in jail practicing Beethoven until he got back from Novgorod and waited in lobbies to talk about a nobody of some small town. It took a month to find out whether the government knew you had been born; how long would it take to fish me out of the Minsk district, even granting they wanted to? By then I’d be shoveling snow or mud or rocks, old enough for the army while in ten minutes Vassily could throw me to Oblanski and before the day was out they’d have me locked up in
Pukop. Nothing doing. My greatest friend was distance. I would put distance between me and my enemies. The worst that could happen was getting caught by distant police and maybe with my fiddle case and fine clothes I could give them stories, say I was lost. In this way I kept my courage up.
The thing to do was to get out while it was dark, and down the hill without being seen. Once down I could cross and stay in an empty hut until I saw a light going on; I’d make sure where Shim was and if still there I’d get him to make the try for Minsk with me. Or perhaps I would not wait for a light to show, but wake them up; the quicker the better and then away, with or without him, down the highroad until dawn. And after it got light, through the woods then alongside the road, circling around Pukop when I got near it. I’d wait in the woods until dark and take a chance on getting to Rabbi Sussya’s synagogue while they were still at evening prayers. One of them might help me to Minsk and I had Glueck’s five rubles; and in Minsk the fiddle could be pawned for wagon passage.
Going alone would be safer. In one way I did not want Shim with me but in a stronger way I did.
The first time I thought it all over it seemed simple and good, the second time not so simple or good, the third impossible. To begin with, just getting out of the house ... I almost gave up.
I remembered one of my father’s sayings, “Take the scissors to the goods, not the goods to the scissors”; cut for a purpose, not just to cut. I never accepted it as much of a saying and my father said it every time my mother complained, which was not often but not seldom either. My father was never much of a fighter, a doer, a maker; he did not express leading ideas and he distrusted daring; but in the face of danger he held. Danger was a customer to be out-waited and out- haggled and so was my mother’s complaining. My father would fix a sad eye upon her, knowing my mother never complained unless something really hurt her, and his eye would be massive with contempt for the regime in which we were trapped. With patient stubbornness he held against this, confronted the Evil Eye with his own, achieving a loftiness, an untouchability of which he was unaware. Remembering his look as well as his saying, I took it was a sign of nothing being worse than sitting still while the Evil Eye was roving.