by Ben Pastor
He turned on his heel to face her where she sat. It was a challenge looking her in the eye and keeping his mind off the oily smears on her face. “Very well, Larisa Vasilievna, but I’m up to something very small. I read in articles about your relocation to Kharkov during the Great War, about your work with Lysenko and the Ukrainian People’s Opera. You led the music scene. So I was wondering whether you recall ever meeting a celebrated revolutionary officer who went by the name of Khan Tibyetsky. During the 1920s he frequented Kharkov’s brightest and most artistic. He might alternatively have used the name —”
Larisa interrupted him. “I met everybody who was anybody, back then.”
Yes, and Redundant Lives is the title of the memoir she wrote in 1915, so scandalous that only the French would publish it. After the Revolution she must have eaten humble pie to be forgiven for it, and all that remains is this parlour crawling with souvenirs. I don’t see my father’s portraits, but if I know her type, she has a shrine to him somewhere in this house.
“Khan, you said?” Seated like a barbarian queen among her trophies, she visibly searched her memory. “Khan Tibyetsky… Khan Tibyetsky. Khan! My red-headed sybarite!” Pulling another cushion from behind her back, she tossed it without looking, knocked a metal ewer from a fragile stand and sent both clattering on to the floor. In the time it took Bora to retrieve the ewer and return the stand to its feet, an alarmed Nyusha showed up from the garden, asking if gospozha Larisa needed anything.
“No, dear, thank you. I don’t need anything.” Larisa waved the girl away. To Bora, she added, “Nyusha lost her husband in the war. She is devoted to me, takes care of things. I will leave her all I have, even though she’s a peasant, a peasant through and through. Poor dove, droplet of my heart’s blood, she won’t know what to do with what I leave her. But to you I’ll give nothing; not even things that belonged to your father, if that’s what you came for.”
“I’m not here for that reason, Larisa Vasilievna.”
“We’ll see. Well, you asked about Khan Tibyetsky. Why; what about him? He lived large. It felt delicious after the difficult years of the civil war and the months following Frunzik’s death to have champagne and butter. There were buckets of butter in the pantry, back then.”
In the sultriness of the cluttered parlour, Bora stood stock-still, conveying an image of comfort that did not remotely correspond to the way he felt. The concept he had of his father – formal, free of affection – was bruised by the sight of slovenliness mixed with remnants of vanity. Where I stand, in the uniform in which I stand, I am empowered to do as I will. I could order this house to be torched with her inside it. I could. I live in a world where a son can with impunity destroy his father’s lover. But when she charged him, “Why do you want to know? Why are you asking me these questions? You Boras always have an ulterior motive,” instead of anger he felt a near excess of pity.
“Esteemed Larisa Vasilievna, gospozha, I will bring you all the butter I can find if you talk to me about Khan Tibyetsky.”
“And sugar.”
“And sugar.”
Aware as she must be that he wouldn’t sit down until invited, Larisa let him stand. “It was in Makhno’s days, when his Black Army stole from rich estates, convents, barracks, farms. I know: I used to spend time in Kharkov even before the Revolution bought me a town house on Kusnetschnaya Street. Kulaks and other landowners entrusted valuables to their former servants, but Makhno hunted for and found the stuff in their huts. Makhno was like a sieve winnowing grain. The good things remained in the sieve. Only the chaff was scattered.”
“But that’s Makhno, not Tibyetsky.”
“Well, what do you know about Tibyetsky’s business? He took over where Makhno left off. We made merry when he came. We had buckets of butter and buckets of champagne.”
“I don’t understand, Larisa Vasilievna: he took over how?”
“The valuables, funds for the Revolution. It all flowed through Kharkov, the year Frunzik died.”
1925. Yes. Tarasov had told him how throughout the 1920s Khan had often visited the Komintern tractor factory in Kharkov, but perhaps that was not his sole interest in the region.
“When you made merry, gospozha, was there a man called Platonov, too?”
The lacy hand indicated for him to sit, and Bora pulled out the piano stool to do so.
“Ih! Gleb Platonov: how long since I have heard that name. ‘Honest Platonov’, ‘Platonov the Righteous’. Gleb the Contrary, I called him. Scarcely smiled, scarcely drank: a tedious comrade if ever there was one. You see, I have an excellent ear and an excellent memory, Martyn Friderikovich. Now, Platonov acted soberly, but I saw through him. He was like you Boras: ambitious, single-minded. It wasn’t wealth with him, it was success. He knew exactly how to secure it. My good-natured Khan was afraid of him.”
Hard to imagine Tibyetsky in fear. “Physically afraid?”
“I don’t know that! He was afraid, that’s all. Platonov knew things. He kept secrets.”
And how, Bora thought. “What sort of secrets, gospozha?”
“They wouldn’t be secrets if I knew. If I knew, it’d mean he didn’t know how to keep secrets. Secrets about Tibyetsky. Secrets about Frunze, even.”
“Khan was not Russian-born: could his past be one of the secrets?”
Where her armchair was, the corner of a frayed carpet drew a triangle on the wooden floor. She tapped her feet where rug and parquet met, a drumming of swollen toes. “Are you familiar with the Russian saying, ‘What’s good for a Russian kills the foreigner’? Do you know what shirokaya natura means? We have superabundance of spirit, Martyn Friderikovich. The way Khan lived in Kharkov tells me he was more Russian than I am, born in Moscow and raised by a father of the ninth administrative rank, an art collector who could honour a million roubles’ debt and outdrink a Cossack.”
“Please tell me more about Platonov.”
“Boring subject. Platonov made his career, surpassed Khan, stepped on Khan. And Khan had to keep on his good side. Khan’s legwork helped Platonov become a member of the Revolutionary Military Council. Of the two, saint and sinner, I’d take the sinner any day.”
It was what he’d heard from Tarasov, more or less in the same words. Bora smoothed a crease of the piano shawl near Frunze’s photograph. “But the ‘secrets’: could there have been goods involved? Property requisitioned during the Revolution, perhaps by Makhno, snatched from him and stashed away? Have you ever heard of a place called Krasny Yar?”
“No. I’ve never heard of the place. It must be a very small place if I’ve never heard of it. During those years Khan and Platonov argued like street dogs, but they never mentioned Krasny Yar.”
“You saw them arguing, gospozha? And why would a man with an ego like Khan Tibyetsky’s allow a seemingly less brilliant colleague to get ahead? Was it really, as you say, that Platonov knew secrets about him?”
“What else? Once when they had a fracas in my town house, he called Khan a ‘thief’s thief’, and only by throwing myself between them was I able to keep them from killing each other. They made up, as they always did. Khan was like embers under ash, though. After that time they never visited together any more.”
“And did one or the other, as far as you remember…”
Larisa sank in her armchair, nodding. “I remember everything, provided I want to. But not now. Now I’m tired. It tires me to look at you, you’re a Bora: five pud of manly arrogance. I know your blood. Go. Come back when you have plenty of butter. Sugar, too.”
She might be pretending; or not. It was unlikely that he’d get anything else out of her in either case. Bora watched her sit looking elsewhere (or nowhere) in the room, disregarding him, an old person’s technique for dismissing the young. He left the parlour and the house, and the overgrown garden, not feeling wholly himself until he reached his army vehicle and sat behind the wheel. It relieved him to see the nick on the windshield frame: a testimony that it was still the same day, and the same life
, in which he’d been shot at near the Diptany crossroads.
Tuesday 18 May, Merefa.
Good thing I remembered “The Bells of Novgorod”, “Tristan chord” and all. As a composer, my natural father had a predilection for the pentatonic scale and chromaticism. Weiss told me he had nothing more to teach me when I mastered that piece. I doubt it was true. But we were in 1934, and there was a new obligation for Leipzig residents to exhibit their racial papers. I’d just graduated with high honours from cavalry school at Hanover, and was about to enter the Dresden Army Infantry School. I was hardly home any more, whether or not I’d received enough piano lessons from a Jew.
As for La Malinovskaya, what did I expect? What was my impression? I believe it was Seneca who said, Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae, pointing to a link between genius and madness. Although we didn’t mention her much at home for obvious reasons, I was always curious about her life and career. Her art connoisseur father might have honoured his huge debt, as she says; but, gambler that he was, he shot himself in a Marienbad casino a few years later. This detail she passed over in silence, while blaming “those two upstart merchants Ostruchov and Tetryakov” for his downfall (as if I should know them; I didn’t ask, to avoid going off on another wild goose chase). Larisa’s offstage rows with Odessite Maria Kuznetsova, also very beautiful, made the headlines. Not to speak of her (reciprocated) jealousy of Salomea Kruszelnicka (if I am spelling her name right), at least until Salomea had to flee abroad for political reasons some 40 years ago. 1925 must have been a difficult time for Larisa, because, as well as Frunze, she also lost her young friend Jurjevskaya to a spectacular drowning suicide in a Swiss mountain stream. But much as she pined after faithless Friedrich von Bora and Mikhail Frunze, Larisa never even considered doing away with herself. Of course it would have been a loss to world music, as her remarkable coloratura was and is rare in large voices. In her generation, only Felia Litvinne comes to mind.
She has added a possibly significant square to the Tibyetsky puzzle thus far: namely that the open quarrelling between Khan and Platonov was about theft, or that stick-in-the-mud Platonov’s idea of theft. It begs the question as to whether Khan’s luxurious living in Kharkov (Larisa called him a sybarite!) was wholly derived from the Party’s gratitude to a hero, or had other sources as well (his audacious business deals with foreigners, for example). The expression she used, “a thief’s thief”, points to an appropriation of goods from someone who owned them illegally or unjustly in the first place. Makhno? The landed gentry themselves? I mean to go back to Pomorki as soon as possible and wheedle out of her all she remembers about those days. She’s right as far as I am concerned: I did visit her with an ulterior motive.
Note: not far from her house, on the grounds of the Biological Institute, totally abandoned, there are shafts leading to underground gas pipes. As I saw when I briefly stopped there on my way back – curiosity being my second name – I noticed that except for one, their iron lids are bolted shut. Rightly so, because otherwise they’d make a perfect hideout for undesirables. If the lidless one is a typical example, they’re 7 or 8 metres deep!
Another note: upon my return to the schoolhouse, Kostya was as moody as one like Kostya can be moody, surely on account of my burning Tarasov’s place. Well, what do these Russians want? Can’t they appreciate that one is sparing them worse trouble? Peasants through and through; Larisa was right.
8
WEDNESDAY 19 MAY, KALEKINA FARM, NEAR KRASNY YAR
At the edge of the woods, the red-stemmed dogwood they called deren in Ukraine was in full bloom. Pollen from other plants, shaken by the wind, fell across the sunbeams where the trees grew sparsely, although in other spots the shade was deep and blue-green. Along the dirt lane white poplars shed their down. It was like a snowstorm in places, bits of white fluff becoming caught in the unripe ears of wheat until the fields were covered with a layer that made their bristling, tender green look cottony. Bora and Nagel arrived on horseback. They stopped by the desolate farm marked on their maps as Kalekina; long collectivized under the name “Friendship of Peoples”, it was nothing now but a set of ramshackle buildings where hollyhock grew rank to the height of a man, and the fences had been burnt as firewood. The wheat meagrely sown before the last battle for Kharkov might not ripen before the next battle took place.
Nagel looked at the shabbiness of the farm. “They have the woods less than half a kilometre away,” he observed, “and they’ve pulled up pickets and gates. They are afraid of going into the Yar.”
“Can’t blame them, Nagel. They are afraid of that, and of us, and of everything else at this time. You’ve seen the women by the old man’s grave; they bowed deeply to us as they would have done when the tsar or landowner went by.”
The women at the grave were the ones who’d sent the Germans to the Kalekina farm. According to them, the beheaded corpse belonged to old man Kalekin, who had two adolescent grandsons and had ventured into Krasny Yar “only because of the boys, because the boys were the first to go missing during the spring thaw”. Missing where? In the Yar, of course. After his death, two sisters whose husbands had died at the front moved into the Kalekina farmhouse. The siblings were thought to know other details that Bora and Nagel were seeking before entering the woods.
Bora was never formal or predictable on these occasions, and that’s why he wanted Nagel with him, who knew him best and went along with him whatever the errand. He approached the main house from the side, where a small four-paned window, blue with the reflection of the sky from afar, turned darker and more transparent as he drew near. Bora discreetly rapped on the glass with his knuckles, in part because he didn’t want to alarm those inside (although Nagel kept a sub-machine gun at the ready), and in part because the fragile bubble-specked pane, beyond which shadows were perceivable in the glare from another small window opposite, divided the everyday world from a realm inside. Reflections and transitory images: if Bora moved his head slightly he could see the sergeant standing watch behind him; if he only tilted it, the interior of the house came into view with the liquid semi-darkness of a water tank. Enchantresses, witches, fairy women were as likely to live inside the Kalekina farm as peasant girls whose men had gone to die. It wasn’t Larisa Malinovskaya Bora was reminded of – she was mundane even in her solitude – but Remedios in Spain, whom he’d physically loved like no other (Martin-Heinz Bora… died and went to heaven, he’d written in his diary after meeting her for the first time), and whose essence he wondered about to this day. She was to him what she wasn’t to other men; other men saw her and tasted her in wholly different ways. What she’d given him she’d given no one else. Circe, Calypso, Melusina: she’d been the sorceress who is far from everyone and to whom men must go begging, or come stumbling to from foreign lands.
He rapped three times on the pane, a magic number, and the shadows within gave something like a shiver, less than a motion. A woman’s face floated within two steps of the window, looking out. Plain as it was to both of them that he could have smashed the window instead or barged in unbidden, she made a small gesture of her left hand that invited him to come around the corner and reach the doorstep.
They looked to be in their late thirties, homely and clean, so fair that the blonde hairline showing from under the white kerchiefs on their heads seemed white. One was tall and stocky, smelling of cheap drink, the other minute; both had eyes of that peculiar blue-grey, dark to the extent of simulating blackness. When Bora told them what he was here to do – find out details about those who hadn’t died, necessarily, but had gone missing in the Yar – they both looked suddenly grief-stricken, as if wilting under his question. He realized the boys lost were their own before they told him, and was briefly angry at the others, those by the grave, who hadn’t informed him of this. But the sisters did not weep. They’re like springs that have given all the water there was to give, he thought, and I stand here digging for wetness. He chose not to step indoors, speaking to them in full view by t
he threshold. Once he made it clear that he and his man hadn’t come looking for labourers or recruits (in case the boys had been found and were presently in hiding), they told him the story.
For perhaps half an hour the three of them spoke, in a storm of fluff raining from the poplars. The seed-bearing tufts, blinding in the warm sun, wafted and became caught on every surface, vertical or flat. They reminded Bora of the cinders hovering, impalpable, around the steel of Khan’s T-34: lightness over difficulty and peril, as now. Mankind complicates everything, and nature literally makes light of it, with twirling ashes and hairy seeds. Nagel kept watch and Bora tactfully questioned the women, nodding at their words, until the stocky one withdrew and he conversed with the small sister alone.
Kalekin had been their father-in-law. Their sons, aged thirteen and fourteen respectively, had never come back from a trip to the Udy River, on the other side of Krasny Yar. The old man had taken it even harder than the mothers; once his own sons had fallen at the front, the grandsons had become a reason for living: he doted on them, spoilt them all he could under the circumstances. They’d gone fishing in the Udy, and never come back. The Russian army was quartered at Papskaya Ternovka then, so Kalekin had trekked to enquire of their commander if by chance the boys had been recruited or hurt by a mine. The officer, who was a good fellow and also a local, told the old man the boys hadn’t been seen. Yes, they might have strayed into the woods; however, the comrades didn’t have time now to go looking for them – he could readily understand this, couldn’t he? Kalekin said he could, but it wasn’t true. He became ill with the loss, obsessed with searching for his grandsons despite the battles that were being fought everywhere around him, until he’d left the farm early on 1 May for the woods, and had died there.