Sasha had been surprised at his father’s approval of David’s choice, for it was well known that Baron Horace despised his brother Yuri. In his superficiality, he did not think that perhaps Horace was smiling at David’s total passion for his dark-haired, blue-eyed cousin and remembering another youth who had fallen under the spells of a sapphire-eyed beauty with hair of ebony—Horace’s own Anna. Horace had watched the young couple, David and his niece, and agreed that Mathilde was a true lady of breeding, a “woman of character.” For few knew her well enough to peer beneath her cool facade. But he had been disturbed by the lackadaisical manner with which she demonstrated her affection for her husband. His Anna had behaved quite differently, her face blooming with shy love and total admiration. And in seeing his father, Sasha was clever enough to gauge just where his disappointment was rooted.
If most had known of these matters, they would have been less surprised by Sasha’s choice of a bride. He was terribly handsome, terribly rich, and though his intelligence was limited by a blunt narrow-mindedness, he was clever and no fool. He might have chosen any girl. He chose Rosa Warburg with utmost care and planning. She adored him, devouring him with her coal-black eyes and eager hands. To his own surprise, he found that she was shrewd, had good taste, and enjoyed the pleasures of bed with remarkable virtuosity. Best of all, she had produced Tatiana. But Sasha had planned wrong in that direction. For to Sasha’s dismay, his father seemed to prefer that pale gray-eyed thing, Sonia, to his own exquisite daughter. Sasha was green at the thought. Was it not sufficient injury that David was independent, that his father had chosen him for the Jewish cause, whereas Sasha worked for him, almost as a boy, taking direction at the bank?
Not a religious man by choice, Sasha nevertheless attempted to please Baron Horace by having Rosa put out Sabbath meals as his mother Anna had. The old man came. That was a point in favor of the Sashas. Once Rosa, in her birdlike zeal, had cried, “Oh, Papa Horace, is it not a shame that our dear Mathilde does not take as much pleasure as I do in the Sabbath supper?” Sasha had seen his father’s face darken. Baron Horace had replied to Rosa’s gushings with his customary peremptory curtness, but his eyes had grown thoughtful. If Sasha judged right, Baron Horace would discuss the matter with David.
But when David, knowing that he would have to employ a great deal of tact, approached his wife to bring up the conversation he had had with his father, he did not know that another discussion had taken place that very day between Mathilde and Johanna de Mey. The governess had come to Mathilde while the children were resting after the noon meal.
“When our lessons begin, at nine in the morning, I have frequently noticed how tired the children are,” Johanna began. “Particularly Sonia. It has worried me, for the sake of their health, let alone the progress they should be making in their learning.”
Mathilde’s languid eyes had seemed troubled. “They do not sleep well?” she had asked.
“It isn’t that. They sleep well. But it is embarrassing for me to give you the reason. You may, dear Mathilde, think me presumptuous again.”
Mathilde had risen rapidly. “I never feel you are out of bounds, Johanna. Do not harbor such fears. Tell me what is on your mind.”
“It is the Baron. He expects those babes to be in his study by seven thirty, alert and ready, for their Hebrew lesson. Hebrew is a most complex language. Could it not wait until they have a firmer grasp of French grammar, and Russian? In their teens, perhaps, their brains would be better disciplined. But then, I am not a Jewess. The Dutch Protestant faith is quite another story, and as a child I learned only its basics. I was fully able to comprehend them, because they were so simple.”
She saw she had struck a nerve. Mathilde had digested this information with wrinkled brow, her hands nervously folding and refolding the edge of her sash. Then the clear, dark blue eyes rested on the fine profile of the governess. “What you say deserves consideration, surely.” Mathilde fingered her cameo brooch abstractedly. “But my husband places great emphasis on conducting the children’s religious upbringing. That aspect of their lives has never been within my control.”
“Then you cannot speak to him? Not even of their exhaustion?”
Mathilde’s eyes met Johanna’s, and slowly, painfully, she shook her head. It was a gesture of total resignation.
Johanna placed her long, graceful hand upon Mathilde’s sleeve, and said softly, “My dear. I am so sorry.” Her expression became almost one of condolence. Then, briskly, it changed. She smiled brightly. “Well, then, the Baron must have his way. Let us make bedtime earlier, and solve the problem thus! Now why did I bother you about it, when I might have thought of this solution? So obvious!”
She left Mathilde still fingering her brooch, remembering Hashchévato.
Now, when David said to his wife, “Papa would be so pleased if we would make a more solemn occasion of the Sabbath,” he saw her lovely calm face suddenly cloud. He was taken aback. “My sweetest love, Papa is so fond of you. You must not take this as a criticism of your efforts, but more as… an old man’s whim?” He made his pale, gentle eyes sparkle with understanding.
She drew away from him, and began to pace their bedroom. Her features were distorted; her hair, ready to be brushed for bed, streamed down her back. All at once she whirled to face him. “You!” she cried out. “With your rituals and your dedication, with your accursed duties! Why do you not place your own children first, instead of your obsessions? Hebrew lessons when they are tired! And now this! What has brought this on, David? Has Rosa been making a case against me to your father? If I am such a heathen, then why does he love our children, the offspring of a heathen, more than that spoiled brat that Rosa brought into the world? Why, David, why?”
Mutely he stared at her, his tranquil goddess, and his own eyes shone with pleading and with misery. Then, all at once, they hardened. He saw the connection. He balled his hands into two fists, and said, “Why what, Mathilde? You are my wife. I saw fit to make a simple request on the part of a man I love, my own father. I thought you loved him too. And yes, I am a shtadlan, and proud to be one. Ossip and the baby, Gino, will follow in my footsteps. And as for their exhaustion, do you not think I would have brought that to your notice at once, if indeed it had existed? It wouldn’t hurt you to come into the study once in a while, to watch your children learning their Hebrew. You would marvel at their aptitude, and at their quickness. They have never seemed too tired to me.”
But his strong words only made the din in her head greater. She placed her hands over her ears, seeing her father yelling at the cook, hearing him roar at her mother. No, no. I have escaped all that, I am surrounded by peace, she repeated in her own head. But she felt only chaos and confusion. He rose quickly and came to her, and took firm hold of both her wrists. “This has to stop,” he said calmly. “I love you, and it tears me apart to have to use harsh words to you. But that woman will cease her interfering or I shall boot her all the way back to France. Immediately.”
Mathilde moaned, and backed away from him, hugging her sides. When he attempted to draw her to him she shook him off with uncharacteristic fierceness. Finally, he turned and left the room, slamming the door behind him. He went into his study and rang for Stepan, who, silently, presented him with a glass of Napoleon cognac. He downed it in a single swallow.
The commotion had been heard by more than the maître d’hôtel. Within minutes Célestine Varon, in her old slippers, clutching her shapeless bathrobe to her bony body, was opening the door to her mistress’s bedroom. She found Mathilde, her hair disheveled, as she had found Anna after the dismissal of Maria Sabatievna. In her simple peasant’s mind it was of no importance what had caused this disagreement between the kind Baron and his wife. It mattered only that her Mathilde, her little girl, whom she had reared from infancy, was in need of comfort. She kneeled on the floor and placed her sinewy arms around the soft body, and began to murmur an old Breton lullaby. Mathilde surrendered to the familiar sound so rooted in her chi
ldhood, and allowed warm tears to stream from her eyes. Later, when the tears had dried, Titine put the Baroness to bed. Then she returned to Gino in the nursery where she slept.
Several weeks later, in a daze of bewilderment, Célestine Varon found herself on her way to Brittany, with a nice pension to last her the remainder of her life. Mathilde had told her such strange things: that Gino was too big, that he was making her tired, that after all, she was not as young as she had once been, that surely no more children were to come. Yet if Mathilde had believed these words, why had she seemed so pained, and why had the children all cried, and why, especially, had the Baron angrily missed his breakfast and instead driven the coach himself to take her to the train station? Célestine Varon shook her gray head and thought with misgivings of the young Russian girl who had come from the steppes to take her place. “I may be old, but at least I have experience, and I know what is best for both babies and older Gunzburgs. That girl is a child, and will be useless,” she said out loud.
Her sudden departure surprised all save one.
Chapter 4
Baron David, the scholar, was inwardly much pleased by the presence of his older daughter, Anna, inside the sanctum of his study. He knew that the girl, now fifteen years of age this 1900, did not share his zest for learning, and was often impatient with her studies. Johanna de Mey did not tire of informing him of this state of events, knowing the distress it caused him, as though Anna’s indifference were a rejection of David himself. Yet his heart would also ache for Anna, for he knew that she lived an isolated life, inspired only by her gift for painting and her tremendous interest in political affairs.
She sat on the hassock by the fireplace, the red flames reflected in her eyes. “We are going to have a war, aren’t we, Papa?” she asked suddenly, breaking the pleasant silence imposed by his quiet study of the legal papers on his desk. Her hair, bright red, gleamed around her pale solemn face. Suddenly, David thought it was no longer the face of a child.
He laughed, gently. “I thought the size of this year’s ruffles would be more to your concern.”
But her eyes, intense, did not smile back. “You know that I have no use for Paris fashions,” she replied, the hurt coming through and seeming, all at once, like the hurt of a very small girl. “I am thinking of our peasants. We have helped quell the Boxer Rebellion, and things are not as they should be with the East. I heard you speaking to Uncle Sasha last night, Papa.”
“Were you listening at the door? Men—gentlemen— discuss politics after supper, when they retire from the ladies to the library. It is not like you to sneak, Anna.” David, in spite of the vision of his wife instructing her daughters that good breeding entailed a healthy lack of knowledge of contemporary affairs of state, was mildly intrigued. He thought wryly that Johanna de Mey would find Anna’s interest reprehensible, and would upbraid her in front of Mathilde at the first opportunity. He set aside his papers and regarded his daughter with renewed attention. “You were not sneaking, were you, love?” he questioned lightly.
Her eyes had filled with tears. “Of course not. I was on my way to bed. I—I could not—could not bear to remain with Aunt Rosa and Mama. You know I do not care what Worth and Lanvin are planning for their spring collections. Aunt Rosa does not like me, Papa. I wanted to come in and say good night to you. I had forgotten what you said, about the gentlemen retiring. And then, as I was coming toward the door, Stepan came out of your study—and I was taken aback. I heard you speak, for Stepan had opened the door—and when I realized what you were saying, I was disturbed, and I needed to think. I went to my room and— thought.”
David said, “Are you still reading those pamphlets not destined for young ladies?” His tone was teasing, but his eyes rested upon Anna with compassion. He was not thinking of the problems with the East, which were peccadilloes at this point, despite what the doomsayers predicted. His mind was obsessed with the idea of his daughter hesitating on the threshold of his study, feeling unwanted. “Your mother would have liked for you to stay with her,” he remarked.
Suddenly tears spilled from Anna’s eyes. She brushed them savagely aside. “But—I could not, Papa. And Mama did not force me to.” Then she said: “All this does not matter. Our peasants are slaving in the outlands, and the government does not care. It merely seeks to assert its imperialistic power. Japan is becoming modern, stretching to emulate Britain where a real Parliament exists and the people have their say. But we in Russia are stagnating, Papa, in feudalism. In your own way, you perpetuate this feudalism by working for the Ministries, which do not care about anyone outside the aristocracy and the wealthiest of the haute bourgeoisie. You are a scholar—but what does your scholarship bring to the illiterate peasants of Latvia or the Ukraine?”
“You invest the Russian peasants with a romance which they do not possess,” her father remarked mildly. “Are you not being melodramatic, Annushka?”
“That is not so!” she cried. “I am not playing. I—I have read, and if there is a war, it is the peasants, who do not understand imperialism, and who care only about putting more bread into their mouths, who will be sent to fight. The Tzar is the last autocrat of Europe. While his peasants fight for him, he will delay resolving their problems. True problems, Papa. How can you not care, you who plead daily for the Jews?”
“I plead for the Jews because in some small measure I may be able to help them,” he said. “Many men oppose me. Pobedonòstsev, who was Tzar Nicholas’s tutor, is head of the Holy Synod, and he would like to bury the Jews once and for all. And there is a senator of the highest nobility, Count Tagantsev—he is like the Hydra, for if I succeed in modifying one law in favor of a group of Jews, he is certain to enact two new laws to countermand me. Yet I must continue, for even if the good I accomplish is slight, it is still something. I do not romanticize the plight of the Jews. No one is worse off than they in all of Russia.”
“You plead for the Jews, as a diplomat will plead. But it is different with me, Papa. I wish that I could be a peasant, that I could till the soil. I do not like society, and never shall. And because I would be one of them, I fear for the peasants, and I follow their struggles. It is my nature, and not merely a romantic pastime. I despise what they call ladies’ pastimes. Won’t you please understand, Papa?”
The fire flickered on the hearth, and David sighed. No, he did not truly understand. But he was an optimist, and so, kindly, he tried to reassure his older daughter about the conflicts in the East. He did not believe that war would come, this war which brought her so much apprehension. But that evening, he said to Mathilde, in the privacy of their bedroom: “I wish that Anna could be more proud of who she is. The Gunzburgs are an enviable family.” He did not mention the pamphlets he knew his daughter sometimes obtained, for he did not want Johanna de Mey ever to learn of their existence. This dissembling was the least he could do for this beloved daughter, who eluded him in spite of his honest efforts to reach her. For he could not comprehend Anna’s desire to exchange places with those worse off than she.
Anna was viewed as an oddity among the Gunzburg family. Mathilde knew that her friends criticized the girl, and felt no more comfortable in her presence than she did in theirs; and so gently, with a kind of tired languor, she no longer fought her elder daughter’s stubborn refusal to act as the young lady of the house on Mathilde’s receiving day, when fashionable ladies of St. Petersburg paid visits to her drawing room. At first Johanna would bully the girl into appearing. The sight of Anna, sitting rigidly on the edge of a hassock and answering her mother’s friends in terse phrases, brought a triumphant glow to her lovely aquamarine eyes. But soon the governess realized that her own interests would be better served by removing this painful source of embarrassment from Mathilde’s sight.
Her brothers and sisters loved her, though they did not understand her any better than her parents. She had few friends, and those were girls who shunned society as much as she. But she had acquired a kind of bloom during her adolescence. She wo
re her hair braided into a macaroon coiled behind her right ear, so that the eye was drawn away from the sagging side of her face. She refused to dress as her mother would have liked, and once again, with a tightening in her chest, and a sigh, Mathilde permitted her to wear the simple clothing in which she felt comfortable—brightly colored mujik blouses or sometimes thick, flowered skirts commonly donned by peasant women in the provinces of the Ukraine. And because she was a fine artist with a flair for color, people would grudgingly concede that though the girl was pitifully out of fashion, she appeared to have found a style of her own. She spent her free time painting, and David had sent for an instructor from the Academy, much to Johanna de Mey’s distress. The man praised the girl for her freedom of movement, for her landscapes as wild as her thoughts, for her magnificent shadings which went against all those precepts that a young lady was taught in the watercolor classes of the day, which emphasized pastels and prettiness. Anna’s canvases were crimson and frog green and mauve and orange, and her lines were bold. She also immersed herself in the writings of a new author, Maxim Gorky, whose humble origins had made him the poet of the Russian people, and who had just recently come to St. Petersburg and its newspapers. But she carefully hid his works from her governess, who had already upbraided her sufficiently for her low-bred tastes.
At the other extreme of age stood Gino, the five-year-old. Like Anna, he was isolated from the mainstream of family life, but that was because of his youth. He did not yet take lessons with the other three children, and their pastimes were not his. Barely out of the nursery, he was still considered the baby of the family, and pleasantly permitted his two sisters to mother him. Of all the Gunzburgs, he was the child least capable of irritating others, he whose entrance caused the most smiles.
He was a comely boy, though not beautiful, as Sonia and Ossip were, with their mother’s eyes and her jet-black hair and translucent complexion. Gino was a sturdy child with brown eyes like Anna’s and chestnut hair to match an olive skin. Of the Gunzburg offspring he was the least brilliant, for he did not possess Anna’s artistry nor Ossip’s ability to grasp learning at a glance, nor Sonia’s sensitivity which colored all her dealings with the world. But although his cousin Tania, who was eight, called him a dolt and a dullard, this was far from true.
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