by Ben Pastor
The room beyond the parlour, where he was received this time, was nothing short of a reliquary, a gleaming box where three walls were covered with icons: brightly coloured, gilded, encased in copper and silvery metal, studded with paste jewels, an icon corner – beautiful corner, the Russians called it – gone mad; Bora had seen Orthodox chapels with less than one tenth of the icons Larisa kept in her bedroom.
Reclining in a wicker chaise longue, she liberally rained sugar over the cardboard vat of butter. “You kept your word,” she said. The sleeveless vest she wore was unmerciful on the loose flesh of her upper arms and neck. Bora did not stare, letting his eyes wander instead over the biblical carousel around her cumbersome person. Our Lady of Kazan, Our Lady of Oseryan, Our Lady of Vladimir – those Bora recognized. The three angels visiting Abraham, the Dormition of the Virgin, all the soldier–saints of the Eastern Church, George, Dmitri, Hadrian… down to the Archangel Michael. With an electric lamp on, or by candlelight, the gilding and silver-wash of their revetments must shoot reflections back and forth, a mute lightning storm.
On the fourth wall, over the bed, oil portraits and photographs of his own father formed an altar of their own. He’d imagined something of the sort; still, he was taken aback. Not even at Trakhenen, where his parents had made the house into a memorial to the defunct Friedrich von Bora, did one see such a proliferation of likenesses. The trimmed beard, the thoughtful dark eyes some Boras had got from the Salm-Nogendorf line (and presumably what had fascinated his seventeen-year-old mother, along with the conductor’s world fame), stared back at him with the same elegant unconcern he might have exhibited looking at Moscow devotees in the luxury theatre boxes costing fifteen old roubles, or at the zealous waiters of the famed Strelnia restaurant.
Larisa drove a tablespoon into the fat, detaching ivory-coloured lumps which she brought to her mouth and took in whole. The gluttonous half-sucking, half-chewing motion was impossible to ignore. Standing at the edge of a threadbare kilim, Bora glanced her way and then had to look elsewhere. Well, Friedrich, he told himself, thank God you’re long dead, and see none of this. That ancient cow a former seductress? My father kissed her, lay with her for seven years. Like Homer’s heroes, he was in her thrall. He’d have given a son by her the name he gave me. Standing here mortified him, but he hadn’t been asked to leave while she ate, and had come with work to do. Please let her have enough for now; it sickens me to think of what she was, and what she is now. Bora forgot about his fit, decent grandfather, his soberly elegant grandmother, his energetic stepfather. If this is what it’s like, I don’t want to grow old.
When he looked again, the spoon had carved a well in the butter. With her mouth full, the old woman stared at the glass top of her tea table with the fixed, unthinking gaze of a ruminant that savours her feed. Grease lined her lips, turning pink with the rouge she’d hastily layered on them upon his arrival. Only when she was satisfied with her snack did she dab her chin with a crumpled handkerchief. Other than that her teeth were still slick with fat when she smiled and invited him to sit across from her, she had regained a bearable – and even coquettish – appearance.
Bora saw there was only an ottoman available, or her bed, so he chose to remain standing.
“Gospozha, I do need the rest of the information I came for. As you see, I’m upfront about it.”
Without answering him, Larisa ogled the butter. Fortunately she did not reach for it again. Bora risked losing his patience when she wagged a finger at him, reminiscing. “The voice of Felia Litvinne in the body of Ganna Walska. Talent and beauty. Do you know who said it of me?”
“No, Larisa Vasilievna, I do not.”
“Khan Tibyetsky. It was the year after I lost Frunzik, whom I’d last seen in the spring of ’24. After I lost Frunzik I wanted to die. Which is less than what happened when your father abandoned me: then, I wanted to do worse than dying – I wanted to die to the world and keep living as a nun. I would have, had the war and the revolution not distracted me. Khan came to visit on Frunzik’s suggestion, and continued even after his mentor’s death. We made merry, and though we were only friends, I loved every minute of his visits. I even put up with Gleb ‘The Contrary’ Platonov.”
Bora was impressed. Bad eating habits aside, she recalled precisely when they’d left off. She spoke about 1926, five years after the events of the civil war in Ukraine. He had to listen to more supplementary details about vigorous guerrilla commanders entering bit by bit into the Soviet political system, building careers. Khan was constantly on the move while in the Kharkov area, Platonov kept his nose to the office grindstone…
Taras Tarasov had implied the same. Bora, too, continued with the question he’d left unanswered the first time. “And did one or the other bring along or travel with someone else, Larisa Vasilievna?”
She wet her forefinger with her tongue. Gathering grains of sugar fallen on the surface of the tea table, she crossed her swollen ankles and spread her toes. “If I gave a soiree where I sang or played the violin, Khan would bring engineers, businessmen, capitalists from Europe and America. I never saw someone so capable of making friends. Generous: he brought gifts. We’d drink until the men fell under the table. Khan became too good for words then. Ih, the stories he told, the yarns, the jokes… He talked too much. His guests listened. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them went right to Platonov and added fuel to the fire of their cockfight. In fact, it was Platonov who came one year with some of them – without Khan.”
“Who were these men, do you know?”
She spoke with her finger in her mouth, staring at him. She’d been a dark beauty, with glittering, light blue eyes that now contrasted with the fleshiness and decay of her face. Madame Blavatsky came to mind, with her frog-like magnetic glance. “Foreign carpetbaggers, all of them. They didn’t come for the music but for the caviar and drink. And the salmon koulibiak, which Khan had an army courier bring on horseback all the way from Tschuguyev. Men who represented – you name it: buyers interested in the FED camera factory, managers of the Economic Office you called Wirtschaftskontor, of the German–Russian Transport Partnership, of American mining concerns… I don’t recall their names, none of which were good Russian names. And with Platonov the Sombre, Platonov the Honest, the Contrary, there wasn’t even drink, much less koulibiak or caviar. I see you’re married, Martyn Friderikovich. Are you a faithful husband?”
“Why, yes.”
“You shouldn’t tell her if you’re not.”
“But I am, gospozha.”
Whether she disbelieved it or dismissed his loyalty, Larisa shrugged. “Some things you only tell lovers, you know. Anyhow. Then, after Ukraine was no longer independent, the Hunger Time came. Kiev replaced Kharkov as the capital city. No more salmon pie. No butter, no sugar, no bread. People dropped dead in the street, Martyn Friderikovich. None of the visitors stopped by any more. That was the last of it.”
“This is just incidental, Larisa Vasilievna, but does the expression Narodnaya Slava have a meaning that you know of, regarding Khan or Platonov?”
“No. There were too many slogans and bywords those days to remember them all.”
“Did Khan or Platonov ever mention what the ‘funds for the revolution’ consisted of that were taken from Makhno, and what it was that brought about the accusation of ‘thief’s thief’?”
She shook her head. “Women who don’t ask questions meet more favour with men than those who do. The same goes for men, you know.”
As if I cared to meet her favour. “Sorry if I have to ask so many questions, gospozha.”
Nyusha had poured the sugar into a shell-shaped porcelain bowl. “Before I answer anything else,” Larisa said, sticking her forefinger in the bowl, “I’ll give you a sample of the things you only tell lovers. In the late 1870s, when your father was a cadet in Dresden and a pupil of Friedrich Wieck’s, things happened that changed his life.”
Bora was aware of the facts. Clara Schumann’s father, enthused by the
young man’s talent, praised him to the great von Bülow, who shortly thereafter, while Hofkapellmeister at Meiningen, spoke to Johannes Brahms. “Yes, gospozha, but my mother knows this.”
“Wait. Brahms met your father, was impressed. He remembered that a year earlier, while he had conducted the German Requiem for the tenth victory anniversary of the war against the French, your general-rank grandfather was present. He was so moved, he asked Brahms how he could return such a precious homage to the veterans.”
“It was a famous performance, Larisa Vasilievna.”
She silenced him. “Brahms could be witty, at times. He replied, ‘Could I ask for anything?’ and your grandfather said, ‘Anything at all.’ So in 1882 Brahms reminded him of his promise, asking that he release his young son from an army career and let him follow his musical gift. ‘Germany may have in your son another brave officer, but the entire world would lose a unique musician.’ You never heard this story, did you?”
Bora had (it had been a scandal in Leipzig society, until it resulted in unprecedented fame and wealth), but politely said he hadn’t. His eyes lingered on a small icon of Mary the Melter of the Hard Hearts, encased in a gilded riza that let only her face and hands show through windows in the chased metal. Larisa’s father could have parted with these religious knick-knacks before committing suicide in Marienbad, he reasoned. Even his grandparents had made sacrifices at the expense of their vast collection during the great economic crisis, to keep the family publishing firm going despite the bad times: mostly to retain all the employees in the days when the jobless amounted to six million in Germany. But old man Malinovsky would have got little for the icons; besides, he might have been as excessive (shirokaya natura: superabundance of spirit) as his daughter, even, in his attachment to material objects.
Larisa gloated. “See? There are things I know about your father that your mother ignores. It was to me, not to her, that your father wrote from America, to tell me that he was dying. He kept it from The Little One, and his last letter was to me.”
Half true. Bora looked down from the icon. Under the pretence of an overseas tour, the Maestro had kept his terminal illness from Nina, but his deathbed note was addressed to Oberst Edwin Sickingen, recommending his young wife and son to him. Not that the colonel needed encouragement to pursue his first love, but he was married to Donna Maria Ascanio at the time. Even after his annulment, the widowed Nina had made him wait two more years before agreeing to wed him.
With unexpected energy, Larisa lifted her legs down from the chaise longue and fumbled around the floor with her stubby feet until she drove them into a pair of embroidered slippers. “Give me a hand to get up; we’ll go to the parlour. Before we return to boring subjects, we must make music. You on the piano, I on the violin. Your father’s music you know how to play. But do you play Mozart? Do you play Schumann?”
“I’d say so, gospozha.”
She led the way to the other room. Opening the violin case, she half-turned. “Narodnaya Slava – you asked about it. It’s an expression, as you say, a generic expression. To us who lived in Kharkov, though, in the old days it was a cinema off Voennaya, by the Horse Market. If it means anything else, I am not familiar with its significance. Where did you hear it?”
“It doesn’t matter, Larisa Vasilievna. I was hoping it would have a deeper meaning.”
20 May, 7.20 p.m., Merefa.
It was a blessing. I couldn’t have taken it if she had played badly. Instead, she is a consummate violinist. We did a Schumann “Kinderszene” and a fantasia from César Franck’s “Accursed Huntsman”, transcribed for piano and violin by my father (his manuscript was what I read from). The third work was the charming Mozart set of variations on Antonio Albanese’s “Hélas, j’ai perdu mon amant”. Larisa wept as she played: it is a moving, nostalgic piece; you needn’t have lost someone or be far from the one you love to feel it. Decayed physically as she is, there was a moment when she nearly looked as she must have appeared then. Somehow, the weight and sagging skin fell off her and she made my heart race with emotion. I briefly understood why Friedrich von Bora had loved her.
“We were gods” is the controversial chapter in her autobiography where she describes her relationship with him. If she sang as she plays, and if he conducted as we all know he did, the hubris of her words is less unforgivable. And so is her risqué account of their mutual passion, which so troubled me at seventeen when I first read about it, on the sly. A notorious acquaintance of the family, R. v. Ch., unmarried and beautiful, lent it to me from her private library, because we certainly did not keep a copy at home. What is it that Dante writes about the lovers seduced by the story of Tristan and Isolde? Precocious six-footer that I was, I gloried in my brazenness, proposing to the lady by the bookshelf when the intention had been there all along on R. v. Ch.’s part. Brief but intense, and no doubt more fun for me than for her. Luckily six years later she was still available, because it was Peter’s turn, and my parents (the general first, Nina second) made me understand that as the older brother I had to “think of it”. So I brought him along with a bouquet of roses and left him there with an excuse. Thank God she had a sense of humour!
Anyhow, as soon as Larisa and I finished playing, the short-lived enchantment dissolved entirely. I was glad to leave her house. I doubt I’ll ever go back. She followed up on her decision to give me none of the objects that were Friedrich’s and that she has managed to keep through these thirty-two terrible years. Not his conductor’s baton (the ebony one Brahms had made for Gaspare Spontini and then ensured his pupil would receive), not his musical scores, not the photograph where they are portrayed together at Tsarskoe Selo… But it is also true what I said: that I wanted none of those things. Friedrich von Bora is a musical legend to me as to everyone else. My father, really, is the rock-solid Generaloberst Edwin Sickingen. He made me what I am, and I am grateful to him.
When all was said and done, I came away from La Malinovskaya with the following considerations (which I have integrated with Tarasov’s testimony):
1.In 1920, Khan and Platonov conquered Krasny Yar and for a month set up a makeshift command there (remember the Great War wooden crate I saw in the hideout). They also took over what Makhno left behind, meant as “funds for the revolution”, and started arguing about the matter. At this point it could have been anything from bank drafts to jewels to gold ingots – not cash, because it would have lost its value. It could have been documents, if they had market value.
2.Beginning in 1926, when their respective revolutionary duties slackened and Lenin’s NEP opened up Russia to foreign investments, the two comrades – having apparently made up – returned to Kharkov; through their friendship with dashing Mikhail Frunze they started to frequent Larisa’s privileged townhouse. Officially they had errands in or around Kharkov. According to Tarasov, Khan visited the Yar, possibly because the goods were still hidden there. Fact is, Khan spent lavishly and Platonov reprehended him for it; their renewed disagreement went beyond his lifestyle (see the accusation of being a “thief’s thief”), so Khan might have helped himself to the entirety of those funds.
3.In the see-saw of their relationship, the two officers seemed tied by a mutually unbreakable bond: Khan because he was blackmailed, maybe, and Platonov due to his career ambition, which Khan helped fulfil.
4.Shortly before the Famine, when waters were becoming dangerous in no-longer-independent Ukraine, Khan was the first to cease visiting Larisa. Platonov came at least once on his own, according to Larisa, with generic “foreigners” and opportunists. At least one could be the man accompanied to Krasny Yar. Who was he? One of the Western (including American) engineers, managers and technicians, who in Tarasov’s words came to “grub for Russia’s natural resources, including ore from Krivoy Rog and coal from Lugansk”? If it makes a difference, Tarasov said neznakomets (stranger), which is not identical to inostranets (foreigner), the word Larisa used. A stranger may not necessarily be from outside Russia. Whatever: does this man
have anything to do with any of this? Did our honest Platonov relent and try to further his ambitions by buying off a foreign investor? Unlikely: I don’t see how. Did he plan to punish Khan, the “thief’s thief”, by making it impossible for him to keep using the funds? How so? I even thought the existence of a visitor might simply be dangled before his colleague’s eyes, so that Khan would be afraid of putting his fingers into the till again.
5.The Purge trials began in 1936. Suddenly, all games were up. The two comrades, bound hand and foot to each other, were sucked into the vortex that would kill over a million Russians. The show trials followed one another. Finally Khan saw his chance to break free, and either directly or indirectly brought about Platonov’s fall. The rest is history: by the time Platonov was rehabilitated, broken in body if not in soul, Khan had surpassed him in glory and fame, becoming the star he was when I saw him towering on the T-34 that so enthralled my colleague Scherer.
Questions: are the murders at Krasny Yar connected with the events listed above? What valuables (if any), what secrets, remain hidden there? If there’s one or more guardian (I use the term for lack of a better word) in the woods, his reach and ability must be limited, as some who venture into the Yar do so undisturbed: the priest, the men from the 241st, Nagel and myself…
I was never convinced that Khan’s death was a vendetta by the NKVD, or by the Ukrainians: they’re only exploiting a done deal. But who’s behind it, then? Only the RSHA and Abwehr were informed of Khan’s presence in Kharkov. Colonel Bentivegni, Gestapo Müller – do they know what this is all about and are keeping silent? Mantau and I could be nothing but pawns in a far larger game.