by Mark Mazower
The scenario I find most plausible is that several months after the birth of Natalia in Liège, with Sofia under the stress of trying to care for her baby daughter, and with no obvious means of support, either Sofia’s mother brought André to London for Max to care for or Max collected André himself on his way back from one of his business trips to Russia. At this point, it seems hard to believe he did not think the boy was his and that André needed him. Konstantin evidently raised no objection, and neither did Sofia. Perhaps she was ill, after giving birth, and her mother felt it was best for Sofia to focus on herself and her daughter. The fact that Olga had made the long journey from Russia to Belgium suggests to me that she thought her daughter was in danger of being overwhelmed. Perhaps they all felt André would have been in the way in the new setup back in St. Petersburg. By 1914, at the very latest, when Sofia married Konstantin, Max would have definitively realized that she had made other choices. The simple story that Dad knew, the family version as it were—that Sofia had gone mad and died before the First World War—perhaps thus embodied symbolically the emotional core of the truth of the situation as it seemed to Max. When the war broke out that summer, André was in England and after that it was too late for second thoughts.7
Is it possible that, despite recognizing André officially, Max harbored doubts about his paternity? André once explained why he had stormed out into the garden in Oakeshott Avenue and chopped down that chestnut tree. He said that it was because he had been overwhelmed by the impact of the news when Max, ailing and feeling he was near death, had confided to him that he was not really his father. It is a powerful and dramatic image, a moment of revelation and clarity—an assertion of separation, a symbol of deliberate emasculation, a literal uprooting. And it would seem to strengthen the idea that Max had let André know he was not his father after all. The tree was chopped down; that is sure: Dad remembered the episode too. But as for the reason, it would be a lot easier to be confident it all actually happened as André said if we did not have that other example of his hyperactive imagination where his genealogy is concerned, the story of the bogus military officer, von Hörnigk, casting its shadow. Because that felled tree too clears the way for André to join the ranks of the aristocracy and to escape the shadow of his Jewish forebears.
It is hard to know for sure what and whom to believe: Those who knew the truth are long dead and we shall never be able to dispel the silence that enshrouded Sofia and enveloped André his entire life. If Sofia knew who his father was, she seems to have taken her secrets to the grave. A broken childhood and an uncertain parentage left what he once described as “a formidable void … an uncomfortable emptiness” that nothing ever quite filled, neither Cambridge, nor the myths of nobility that came and went, and certainly not the charged ruminations on world historical conspiracy that posited a logic where none exists.
In The Red Thread, André sheltered behind his mother’s name. Yet his mother had spent her entire life on the fringe of the revolutionary Left and what united them was certainly not politics. By 1922, she was so far to the left of Lenin that she saw Bolshevism itself as an instrument of capitalism; her son in contrast espoused the most extreme form of anti-Semitic Catholicism, settled in Franco’s Spain, and ended up intellectually on the far right. What they shared was a propensity for ideological extremism, an attraction to secrecy and the conspiratorial worldview, and perhaps too the combination of self-pity, stubbornness, and self-romanticization that often accompanied them. For both, the seeming polarization of the struggle for world power between communism and capitalism was an illusion; both believed that it fell to a penetrating and courageous few to see through the conventional hypocrisies of bourgeois life to the horrible underlying realities. Clutching at these esoteric certainties perhaps became for André a way of dealing with the sense he had of being unmoored by the storms of history, his form of reaction to living the aftermath of revolution. In an autobiographical essay, written a couple of years before his death, he described himself as “a piece of flotsam from the remote shipwreck of imperial Russia.” He died, aged ninety-five, in 2005 and lies today in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna. But his uneasy, ambivalent relationship to Max is preserved in his writings: the typescript of The Red Thread includes among its dedicatees “my Jewish foster-father, M.M.,” and as I feel I still have only the very haziest sense of André’s character, I find it impossible to tell whether he intended this to be a genuine tribute or a last grim joke of revenge—or most likely something of both.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Frouma
It is a summer morning. The bedroom doors are open to the garden but the curtains are partially drawn and the room seems dark. I have stepped inside—outside it is warm and sunny—and I come to the large, high bed with its pale coverlet and open my cupped hands to free a red admiral that I have caught, and it flutters around looking for plants. This is my treat for Frouma, and because she is old and lying in bed, I probably thought she was ill and felt sorry that she could not enjoy the glorious weather, and I remember she laughed and clapped her hands. I am five or six years old and this is my sole memory of Dad’s mother.
This little scene must have taken place in 1963 or 1964 in the apartment in West Hill Court that was her home for the last decade of her life. Gardens with their well-watered lawns smelling of mown grass descended to shady flower beds at the bottom of the property where it abutted the Heath; sedums and buddleia flowered below her windows and the warm flagstones attracted the butterflies. Hidden away round the side were secret paths and abandoned tennis courts behind the garages that had survived the disappearance of the old mansion that once stood on the site. It was always very quiet outside, as if no one else was around, although voices carried across the ponds from the Heath on the other side.
There is no question that Frouma was the one who turned 20 Oakeshott Avenue into a home, and the warmth she generated around her lasted long after her death. An old Bundist, a former comrade of Max’s, wrote to Dad later that she was “the most gentle and affectionate person we met in our wanderings.” My cousin Patrick remembered her as une vieille dame adorable, deeply intuitive and understanding, one of the two key figures in his life—une femme de tête (which is an untranslatable expression conveying independence, wisdom, and strength of mind all in one). And one spring afternoon just a year or so ago, my friend Paul, with whom I was sitting outside Le Monde on Broadway and 112th, introduced me to Anna Kisselgoff, a redoubtable elderly Upper West Side lady who passed by our table and whose eyes lit up when she heard my name because, it turned out, Frouma had let her stay on her couch on a brief teenage visit to London in the spring of 1955. That was sixty years in the past, but a smile spread across Anna’s face as she recalled Frouma’s hospitality and charm. She could still faintly remember the house, the staircase in the hall, the simple small dark living room, not lavish but comfortable and welcoming. Later we met again to trace the surprisingly durable web of émigré solidarities dating back decades that helped us understand how she had ended up there, a web linking Bundists and Mensheviks across borders and time that had connected her family and mine since before the revolution. Max was not a cold man, but he was bowed down by misfortune and illness and dashed hopes, and given increasingly to depression and melancholy. It was Frouma whose vitality invigorated the home of the Mazowers and whose energy kept the family together and passed on a lesson about the importance of this that Dad never forgot.
Frouma Toumarkine was one of eight siblings, five girls and three boys, members of a close-knit clan of moderately prosperous Russian Jews. Her parents both lived long lives—long enough to see the total transformation of their country. Moise Toumarkine, her father, had been born in the year the Crimean War broke out in an empire where the fields were still tilled by serfs; he died in Moscow in 1941, months before the German invasion. Her mother, Maria Berlinraut, who died at nearly eighty, came from a merchant family in Minsk that did well enough to obtain the coveted right to reside in Moscow. Thei
r children were born from the mid-1880s on, and Frouma, who arrived in 1892, was the fourth of them, and the eldest of the three who eventually made their homes in the West. They were a physically impressive and attractive bunch: Visiting her brother Tsalya in Brezhnev’s Moscow in the mid-1970s when he must have been around eighty years old, I still remember how the old Kremlin pediatrician stood out from the drabness of the apartment like an eagle, with his stern handsome face, piercing eyes, and aquiline nose.
Moise was a timber merchant who purchased concessions to tracts of the vast pine forests that covered much of western Russia, one of the few ways of making money that was open to enterprising Jews in the empire who did not wish to remain confined inside the life of the shtetl. He took leases on forests around Smolensk, and he would then build a temporary sawmill and arrange for the timber to be shipped downriver between April and November, the months in which the ice on the Dnieper thawed and traffic was possible. According to John Croumbie Brown’s 1885 Forests and Forestry in Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, and the Baltic Provinces of Russia, the Smolensk forests were the least accessible of all those around the Dnieper and the real expense came in getting the logs from the woods to the riverside. Tough and resourceful outdoorsmen like Moise played an important role in the Russian economy in clearing lands onto which farmers could move.
It was grueling work, and Toumarkine père, a short athletic man with great physical energy and a love for the forests, did not come by his money easily. One estate alone could take a week to ride around to survey, and once work began, the first thing he needed to do was to construct a small settlement for the workers to live in, surrounded by a stockade. Each time they moved, another timber house had to be built for his family and their servants. For small children it was an exciting, transient, and remote life that brought them into contact with nature at its wildest. It must have been from the Toumarkines, and from his grandfather in particular—the grandfather that he never met nor even I think ever spoke with—that Dad inherited a love of the countryside that was one of his greatest pleasures, and the love of gardening too. Moise did not write much to his daughter after she settled in London—that he left to his wife—but when he did, it was about the vegetables in the dacha where they spent the summers, and the importance of exercise, and the unhealthiness of urban life.
Forestry had its dangers: Houses sometimes caught fire, not always by accident, and on at least one occasion, robbers came and they had to hand over the silverware knowing that there were no police for miles. Moise was not easily cowed—at various points in his long life he stared down anti-Semitic officials and Bolshevik commissars—but for child-rearing the town had obvious advantages, and Frouma and her siblings were sent off to the nearest city, Smolensk, where their father rented an apartment, and maids and a Swiss governess looked after them.
There Frouma received a middle-class Russian education to complement the domestic skills in sewing, dressmaking, and household management that her immensely competent and affectionate mother passed on. The children went to the local gymnasium rather than to one of the Jewish private schools that had sprung up to cater to new immigrants and this gave Frouma a formal education of the kind Max never enjoyed. Smolensk was different from Grodno or Vilna. It lay outside the Pale of Settlement and had a fairly small Jewish population. Russian was the main language of the town and the language of Frouma’s education, and in this she was typical of her generation and class of Russian Jews, those born outside the Pale with some money, who generally grew up more shaped by Russian traditions than their parents. She entered Kiev University shortly before the war and marriage interrupted her studies, and unlike her mother’s writing style, hers was that of an educated woman. The family was Leftist in its sympathies: Her brother Lev was a Bolshevik known to the police, and so were her older sisters Fenya and Ida. Her mother initially greeted the fall of the Romanovs with rejoicing. During the First World War, her siblings left the Bolsheviks and joined the Mensheviks, and later on the Soviet authorities regarded them all with mistrust for that reason.
In 1914, at twenty-two, Frouma signed up as an auxiliary nurse to help the war effort, and thus met her first husband. Alexander Baltermants, a much older man, was a medical officer in the Tsarist army. He had seen the world—he had formerly been posted in Cairo—and he too had Jewish origins. But his family was wealthier than hers—his father was a prominent banker from Vilna—and unlike hers it downplayed its faith and played up its money. Baltermants liked to gamble—the characteristic vice of the Russian upper classes and a means for him of emulating them perhaps. If one is to judge from the little leather album in which Frouma kept her most precious pictures, she does not appear to have remembered him with affection for he does not appear in it at all, and the first page, marked “1920,” starts off with photos of Max as a young man. There is, however, a studio portrait of Baltermants that she must have kept for their daughter, Ira, and it is enough to convey his spirit and dash in happier times. It shows him as a still youthful army officer in 1894 in Kharkov, handsome in his uniform, the embodiment of an ambitious young man of means, bearing, and social polish rising through the ranks of the Russian ancien régime despite his Jewish origins. Not even his daughter tried to disguise his self-centeredness, his suspect charm, and his complete lack of dependability. “My father was the second of four brothers,” wrote Ira, “all rather alike; cold-eyed, blond, handsome, with something feline about the high cheekbones and slanted eyes; undeniably attractive, but not faces to meet with comfort in a dark alley or to turn to in trouble.”
Revolution and parenthood highlighted the mismatch. An army doctor’s wife in a small garrison town, Frouma was nine hundred kilometers from home when their daughter was born in September 1916 in the middle of the war. Although they called her Ira—Irina—which meant peace, the coming years brought everything but, and Ira was barely a year old when news of the revolution arrived and the troops mutinied. Baltermants was carried off, narrowly escaping being lynched by his own men. He reemerged in Moscow months later wearing the uniform of the Red Army—Frouma had taken Ira there for safety and to be near her relatives—and it quickly became clear that the chaos of the times suited him. He took over the grand apartment of a departing British diplomat for them, but his plans to resume his medical career were endlessly deferred for the gambling tables. Frouma’s family openly disapproved of his behavior and politics: His political views appear to have been more ambiguous than theirs and altogether less serious. In early 1919 he left again—to fight against the Whites in the Ukraine, he told them, until alarming hints came from official quarters that he had disappeared en route to the front along with a consignment of medical supplies. It was at this point that someone the family knew in the Kremlin obtained travel permits for Frouma and her younger sister Natalie—Nata, never a person to be trifled with, was later to become a colonel in the Red Army—for seats on one of the first trains to leave Moscow for the south. Their mother was already in the Crimea, but I think probably their departure was hastened by the rumors that Baltermants had joined the White side, rumors that could have made remaining in Moscow hazardous.
They left quickly, not knowing when or if they would return, carrying little more than Ira, her doll, and some hidden valuables. It was an extremely perilous time to travel, and as the three of them journeyed down across Russia and the Ukraine they passed through countryside that was in a state of complete anarchy, and they were held up at checkpoints by armed men whose loyalty was often obscure: Bolsheviks, Whites, anarchists, and others scrutinized the papers of those wealthy or well-connected enough to be traveling by train and shot spies, black marketeers, escaping aristocrats, or simply people whose political sympathies they mistrusted. Young women traveling without a male escort were especially vulnerable, and on one occasion, a woman Frouma and Nata were traveling with was taken out of the carriage and shot next to the tracks.
By the time they reached the Crimea it was no less hazardous, with the area changi
ng hands every few months amid the massacres and counter-massacres that marked the endgame of the Russian Civil War. They found their mother holed up in a seaside villa crowded with uprooted families in the spa town of Yevpatoria, a prewar resort. (Alisa Rosenbaum, better known later on as Ayn Rand, the high priestess of American anticommunism and the free market, remembered the experience of attending school there—she too had fled south with her family—as like “living on a battlefield.”) Before long, the region was taken over by General Anton Denikin’s desperate army of anti-Bolsheviks, making their last stand in southern Russia after a wildly fluctuating few months that had seen them push close to Moscow before being driven back by the Red Army. They were in a terrified, vengeful mood, looking to punish any Bolshevik sympathizers. Frouma had found work in the local council. Fortunately she was off sick on the day the Whites came in because when they entered the town hall, they lined up everyone working there and shot them.
And it was there that Baltermants turned up for the last time—the few family stories about him revolve around mysterious disappearances and reappearances—released from White Guard captivity on the point of death. His daughter, Ira, wrote many years later:
Nothing of that hot, endless afternoon remains in my conscious memory, but burned deep into the core of my mind is the picture of two men carrying in the stretcher, and the dying man lying on it covered with an army greatcoat, for all the heat of the day. They carry him past a woman who stands silent and a child who wails for the pink silk dress she has been promised to wear “when your father comes home” … He died that night. Of wounds and exhaustion, my grandmother gave out, of cholera, ran the horrified whisper round the villa. The two loyal orderlies who had brought him home to die through two embattled armies, stayed to help my mother bury him in the old Tartar cemetery outside the walls. But they would not even risk remaining at the villa for the rest of the night and she never learned their names.